Recently, we all heard about it when a man stormed into an office building in Dallas, Texas, in search of a father and son who had an office on one of the floors. He shot them both, and then himself.
It was a tragic, ruthless, targeted murder, but to state the sad truth, similar things happen every day and it doesn’t get reported on the cable news networks. The reason this horrible incident was considered “special” and made national headlines was because we are currently in the grips of a domestic terrorism fever.
Within the last month, a man flew his plane into an IRS building — also in Texas — in an attack eerily similar to those on 9/11, and another attacked and killed two police outside The Pentagon. And those are just the latest incidents.
The media, as it happens, is having all sorts of trouble with these events. Cable news networks made news themselves by conspicuously avoiding the word “terrorism” in their reporting on the plane crasher. Political pundits embarrassed themselves by blaming far-left or far-right ideology for each attack.
Everyone asked themselves: were these events terrorism? Should we avoid calling it terrorism, even if it is?
Bear in mind, these are not “Hollywood-style” foreign attackers — they were home-grown disgruntled Americans. And the brunt of the scrutiny appears to be piled onto the far-right conservative elements of our media and political structure.
The IRS bomber, for instance, hated the government and doesn’t believe in taxes. The Pentagon shooter, too, appeared to be attacking a government structure. And who could forget the Holocaust Museum shooter, who subscribed to a far-right philosophy — and then there’s always the haunting memory of Timothy McVeigh, the anti-government Oklahoma City bomber. Don’t all of these men have a common right-wing thread?
Not so much. You see, the IRS bomber posted a ranting screed on his website that included quotes from Karl Marx, founder of the modern far-left. The Pentagon shooter had a history of violent mental illness, and little political philosophy. The Holocaust Museum shooter was a white supremacist, not a Republican fundraiser; and Timothy McVeigh had almost no political affiliations, his most famous rant being in opposition to the first U.S. war in Iraq (and thus Republican policy), which he also participated in.
This is because the only actual common thread among these men is that they were crazy, and each held half-cocked ideas of themselves as righteous free-thinkers, who not only rejected government, but society at large. A general opposition to government might imply that you are politically conservative, but it has nothing to do with embracing terrorism or provoking murder.
When the Holocaust Museum shooter first struck, there was a bit of a rush to classify him as a right-wing terrorist. Coupled with a few other anti-government incidents around the country (not long before, a man shot at police officers, claiming they were there to take away his gun rights), left-wing pundits were disgustingly quick, yet delicate, to assert that it had something to do with the attention-seeking rants of people like Glenn Beck, who often use battle cries and revolutionary flourishes in their rhetoric to fire up their audience.
This, of course, outraged right wing pundits like Beck and his cohorts. But their outrage lasted only until the IRS attack, when they were perhaps the quickest of all to claim the reasoning behind the attack had leftist overtones.
It’s all part of the job, I suppose — accusing one another of being at fault for the world’s problems. But sometimes there are real lives at stake, and real lives lost.
That’s when it’s time for the fun and games to stop, and reason should kick in: politics had nothing to do with creating these murderers — even those who seemed to search for solace in one philosophy or another. The fact is, they never found that solace, and they turned to tragedy.
— Mark Casey is a freelance writer from Brownsburg.
