Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Of planes and patriots

When I first heard about yesterday's incident in Austin, where a small aircraft crashed into a local IRS office building, I didn't know what to make of it.

Then, of course, we learned that the culprit - who I won't honor by name - was a disgruntled, anti-government conservative, fed up with how "the system" had treated him over the years. I read the suicide note he posted online.

Reading between the lines was a pretty interesting exercise. On the one hand, there is much truth in what he says about how the de-facto reality of the American legal system today is in practice unjust. Celebrities get away with shoplifting and drunk driving. Corporations get away with, well, whatever they want.

Sure, that's frustrating. But where this particular crackpot showed his true stripes was in his response to it.

I mean, I completely empathize with the desire for a system that treats everyone fairly. Genuinely fairly. I totally empathize with the desire for a fully functioning democracy in which the rich can't stomp on the poor, and the voices of the people carry more weight than the voices of corporations.

Those are, at heart, true American values. Believing deeply in those values is the core of patriotism. It is deeply American to voice objections to the way government operates. There is very little we hold more sacred than our right to petition the government for our grievances.

Yet, patriotic values alone do not make a patriot. Not without patriotic actions to back them up.

So let me be clear: murder is not patriotic. I'm down with dissent. Absolutely. But not with murder. That is where I and this homegrown kamikaze pilot, this latest domestic terrorist, part ways. A plane is not a petition, no matter how severe your grievances.

Predictably, the extreme right-wing in American politics is now lauding this domestic terrorist's actions. They do so on some of the same grounds the man cited in his suicide note: that the government itself has stopped following the Constitution.

Well guess what, tea-baggers: so have you.

Here's the thing. The very same Constitution these right-wingers claim to revere so strongly provides 100% legal mechanisms for challenging the government and changing the way government operates.

This Austin killer, apparently, was particularly upset with the tax code. Fine. I'm no great fan of it either. But the thing to do is marshall a whole lot of like-minded folks across the country and petition the Congress to change it. If they won't, then run for office and change it yourself. Do it the right way. The civilized, above-board way. The legal way. Do it like the Founding Fathers intended.

Real patriots don't murder their fellow citizens. Real patriots do not fly planes into buildings, killing themselves and a handful of fellow Americans, some of whom may happen to work for the agency whose operations the killer disapproves of.

That isn't patriotism. It's murder. It's terrorism. It's treason.

Anybody who does something like that isn't a patriot. They're a traitor. And anybody who condones or praises actions like that isn't a patriot either. The tea-baggers sitting on the sidelines, cheering on this suicidal anti-tax maniac, are little more than cowards. They're lazy cowards to boot, upset with the system but unwilling to do the hard, legal work of changing the system they don't like.

If you aren't willing to change the system the way the Founding Fathers intended - if, in fact, you throw over that process in favor of borrowing Al Qaida's signature tactic - then guess what? You're not a patriot, you're a terrorist.

You cannot claim to respect the Constitution - the bedrock of our entire legal system - while acting wholly outside the bounds of the law.

Here's a simple rule of thumb that anybody - tea-baggers and progressives alike - can follow: Crashing the gate is patriotic. Crashing a plane is not.

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