Oklahoma City

It’s been 15 years since Timothy McVeigh, motivated by anti-government zealotry, murdered 168 people in Oklahoma City. His actions weren’t different in principle from those of Osama bin Laden. Both had their reasons. In a creative writing class, my teacher told the class that every bad guy pretty much has reasons for thinking that they aren’t bad. We’re all the protagonists in our own heads, and every protagonist has an internal story in which they are the good guy. I’m sure the same is true of guys like bin Laden and McVeigh

At the end of the day, the rest of us need to condemn the use of violence as a tool of policy, particularly by individuals or non-government entities. (We can argue about the legitimate uses of war by governments who hold or try to hold a monopoly on violence in their societies.)

So, I don’t have a lot of patience for people trying to minimize McVeigh and bin Laden. They’re both murderous bastards who deserve to die. (Mission Accomplished with McVeigh.) We can talk about the issues that concerned them in other contexts and try to understand them in an effort to minimize future problems. But McVeigh and bin Laden should be pariahs and those who sympathize with them should be marginalized.

Update: I just thought of another lesson from English class that seemed appropriate. At some point in college, we were reading >Catcher in the Rye (side note: I think Holden is a whiny little s.o.b.). My teacher highlighted a passage for us:

The mark of an immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

I remember that passage really made me mad for some reason. I guess I felt like it robbed someone devoted to a cause of the potential for nobly going out in a blaze of glory or somesuch. Must be an adolescent thing. Because now I very much respect that statement. Dying for a cause, in a voluntary, violent way seems essentially lazy and ostentatious.