What Next?

Yesterday on Facebook, one of our friends changed his status to read: "is bone tired just thinking of the inevitable stampede of every possible group under the sun to blame each other for Joe Stack's suicide and claim him as their martyr. Even Paddy Chayefsky's head would explode."

Sounds like an invitation!

On the one hand, you'll have the Glenn Beck-Rush Limbaugh contingent screaming that Joe Stack crashed his Cessna into the Austin, TX, offices of the IRS because he was pushed too far by the federal government and the incipient despotism of Barack Obama: Stack as Buddhist monk self-immolating to protest injustice. On the other hand, you will have the left-wing countercries pointing out that this is what happens when the Glenn Beck-Rush Limbaugh contingent inveighs unceasingly against the incipient despotism of Barack Obama.

You know into which ring we throw our own hat.

Stack was an unbalanced loser.

(DIGRESSION: If you think we lack sympathy, you're right. Look, if he had just wanted to commit suicide, Stack could have just blown his own brains out--or even flown his plane into an empty IRS building at midnight. We might have felt a twinge about the "poor man's" fate. But Stack's actions were not simply suicide--they were a 9/11-style attack writ small--one that seems to have claimed at least one victim in addition to Stack. EOD)

But his attack could prove to be the shot heard 'round the world at the start of a new American revolution. We hope not, but when we read about how the Tea Party and other like-minded organizations are "bracing for tyranny," we worry.

We tell ourselves that the loathing of people towards the federal government is nothing new. It's been over 15 years since Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City; indeed, a distrust of government is one of the bedrock principles on which the United States was founded. But now one cannot go a day without hearing some screed against Washington that seems like nothing so much as a call to civil war.

Could we possibly take a moment in the face of this most graphic demonstration of anti-government outrage to try to pull back from the brink? Could we focus for a moment on things that all people of all backgrounds conceivably want: a modicum of physical and financial security; the right to say and do what we want as long as it doesn't infringe upon the individual liberty of others; a sense that the "game"--of business, of labor, of education--is fair and being monitored by honest brokers. Feel free to add your own favorite to the list.

Until we recognize that there are some principles that everybody agrees on and stop trying to destroy each other for the sake of some misplaced ideology, we can expect to have ever more militants and martyrs, a stack of Stacks, a squadron of planes small and large, circling like Thanksgiving over LaGuardia, picking out targets across the land, and launching themselves headlong into the breach.