End of year introspection part I

Sorry for spamming your friends page...it's just my babbling muse kicking me in the keyboard again :)

In HS, I was the quintessential Alex P. Keaton, Young Republican. Reagan was our shining president, the trickle-down economy was cooking along, and it was better to try to win the cold war outright than facing the possibility of a real, live, nuke-shooting one. Still, there were conservative issues that bugged me. Even in a mildly homophobic Catholic boys school, most of my peers and I knew that homosexuality, whatever the "cause", was a person's own fate and not anyone else's business. It wasn't any more sinful than what we were doing (or wished we were doing) with our own girlfriends. As Catholics, we were also in a weird position--we were Christian, yet the punching bags of both Protestants and non-Christians. It was already getting a little noticeable in Reagan's day that morality would be a legislative goal in a powerful, yet small, fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party.

In college I jumped political directions; I became a liberal. Outwardly, looking back, I might have been a little over-the-top with my bleached rat-tail, peace-sign army jacket, crystal-toting, vegetarian, bleached-blue jeans self. I rode the party line; anti-apartheid (how could corporate America, in good conscience, continue to invest in S. Africa?), anti-gun, and tax structures inspired by Robin Hood. Still, there were liberal ideas that I was just as concerned about. I was against the Gulf War at first (blood for oil!), yet there were enormous atrocities being committed by Iraq, and if the Islamic pretender Sadam Hussain had marched into Saudi Arabia and had captured Mecca and Medina with only token opposition, World War III would have hatched soon after Israel got invaded.

The endless quest to deny people their own individuality, also bugged the hell out of me -- you're part of a racial group, or a corporate-lackey, an economic minority, a gender, a religion. Government couldn't treat people as thinking individuals any more than corporations could...only the categorizations changed. Political Correctness, an entire dialect invented to remove individuals from the subjects of conversation, was starting to catch on. Would you rather I think the N-word, but call you African-American, or would you rather the opposite? Neither is acceptable in a civilized society, but man will never be fully civilized any more than cats will ever been truly domesticated. Is PC a new form of manners and politeness (and we could use all we can get), or is it a façade, censoring individual thought and chipping away the 1st Amendment with a padded mallet?

Today, I lean towards the Libertarian...in moderation -- a fully Libertarian government would be just as disastrous for America as a fully Republican or fully Democratic one. The responsibility of the government is not to level the playing field, nor to redistribute income, nor to make people feel better. The government exists solely to protect individual rights against would-be oppressors foreign and domestic. Human nature being what it is, that one statement can't handle all situations. It was my choice to go to college, to study, to get my degree, and to work for my money. It was a choice for classmates of mine to do the same, even though some came from mansions and others from projects. But, is the magnitude of the choice the same? Is it easier for a golden-boy to make the correct life-decisions than someone who has been kicked around their entire life? It's a tough scenario, and no political party has an answer--a group cannot form a workable solution for every individual any more than an individual can form a workable solution for every group.

(next...the situation that inspired this verbage)

End of year introspection part II (the final burst)

I'm conflicted.

This week, Tim McVeigh asked a judge that his appeals process be stopped. He could be executed 120 days after his final deadline on the 11th of January. I followed his trial in the same way people a generation before followed the Manson trials. Or the Lindbergh trials a generation before that. I read the transcripts online every day, I examined the photos of the evidence, and I looked up legal precedents that were mentioned in the case. I had an interest in this case that seemed almost obsessive, like I knew the guy. I didn't, but I probably knew people who did.

In a sense, if one might have given my brains a good stir with a paint-stick in college, I could have been McVeigh in the late-80s. He was my age, fighting a war I almost did (I came close to enlisting for the Gulf War, even with my misgivings...another story).

Waco. Now there's nothing calming about the idea of a bunch of brain-washed cultists toting military weapons, following the delusions of a child-molesting paranoid. But, truth be told, the government fucked up big time. The Davidians were obviously nutcases, so it made a good place for the new administration, inspired by too many bad Rambo movies, to smooth over some basic constitutional rights in the quest to make a simple statement -- guns are bad. The BATF had the chance to enforce the law well before it got as bad as it did, in court, or a dozen other constitutional ways. Even after the ATF and FBI got their asses handed to them, they could have waited things out patiently until things simmered down. But, no, they were humiliated in front of America by a bunch of religious fanatics. I don't believe the FBI or ATF killed the Davidians, I think they did it themselves. They may have been trying to be martyrs, or they may have just realized that the gig was up, or maybe they just screwed up on their own part and annihilated themselves by accident. In a myopic act of image self-preservation, so many things have been lied and covered up by both sides in the controversy, Justice Department included, that we may not know for a long time what really happened.

So here's McVeigh, blowing his Special Forces test (his 20s-something ambition) due to war exhaustion. Discharged and disillusioned. A Libertarian, not a Right-Winger as the press portrays, though undeniably as extremist as Newt Gingrich or John Lennon. Waco is on the news, the new government obviously trying to make a statement about citizens with guns.

In extremist libertarianism, there's something almost biblical about the Constitution: The Bible says "The meek shall inherit the Earth", and the Constitution protects the meek citizens. The 1st Amendment is there specifically to protect the sorry assholes like the KKK--if we start making free speech decisions based on idiocy and motivation, then everything becomes a gray area and speech can never be protected. The 2nd Amendment is there specifically to allow individual citizens to shoot up agents of government in self-protection. If the government is the only weapon holder, then there is no balance, no matter how puny, against tyranny -- the first thing Hitler did was confiscate all the guns.

So, McVeigh hits back in fiery idealism -- if the government attacks the meekest amongst its citizens (the fanatical nutcases), then maybe it needs some of its own medicine. Except that there is no government in the tangible sense, unless you count towering stacks of paperwork. McVeigh didn't kill the government, he killed citizens. He killed children, adults, senior citizens, Midwesterners, East and West Coasters, government drones, civilians, and maybe a couple of actual agents that thought the way he hated. McVeigh killed a cross-section of America, almost a perfect statistical match, becoming the mirror image of his hatred...equal in intensity with the same end-result.

There's no question in my mind that he did it, and that he chose to do so -- the evidence is just too overwhelming, and too straightforward to be occluded by the tampering committed by both the government and the extremists. He planned it for months and could have backed out at any time. He recruited two unwilling assistants, who would have been much happier daydreaming and trading what-if fantasies about it than actually doing it. One assistant came to his senses just barely too late for his own good, though he could still have been a hero and prevented everything. The other assistant went along the whole way, too afraid of his fantasy of McVeigh to stop, though he was more of a bumbling hindrance than a Cisco Kid.

Do we kill McVeigh? The one thing every individual comes into this Earth with is his life. Can a government take away the individual itself? He'll never hurt anyone in prison. But, he made his choice, fully knowing the consequences. He'll never be free, society is protected from him. But, he affects society, though his existence--he's already published articles from prison. Does a person have any rights after an atrocity like this? Does any entity, individual or government, have the authority to make that decision about another individual?

I say kill him -- stick the needle in and be done with it. It wasn't one entity that sentenced him on a whim in an hour...it was many people working together, citizen and government, carefully considering the consequences over a long period of time. There were times to pull back at any time, there are still times to pull back, but McVeigh himself is waiving them. I say kill him...but I wonder if, by protection, we damn ourselves just a little?