A New Year, Same Old

While I was taking  year-end break the world seems to have taken a few steps towards the decidedly weird. I think the oddest story of the lot is the activity out in Oregon where a small group of gunmen have hold themselves up in a Federal bird sanctuary as an act of defiance against the Federal government’s tyranny.

And what is this tyranny?

Trying to enforce the law, and trying to extract a small fee for the use of Federally owned lands.

This is not a big deal. Or it ought not be.

The fact is that there appears to be a seam of ferocious anger out there in the white American hinterland. And the aggravation always seems to stem from inconsequential sources. One right wing blogger gets all wound up and and incites insurrection over the government’s ban on the inclusion of phosphates in dishwasher detergent. Yes. Really. This is the cause that he rallies people to and calls for them to attack their respective House members.

Really?

Yes.

The criminals in Oregon seem to imagine that their lawlessness is actually a legitimate struggle for freedom. They are protesting the arrest of a couple of ranchers who burned land to clear it and to prevent wild fires from destroying grazing, only for their fires to sweep into the bird sanctuary and threaten wildlife. It was all fairly minor. Except that the authorities actually applied the law.

Apparently this palpable transgression of the laws is justifiable in the eyes of the locals, who have been living off the land for a while. It is worthy of an uprising of armed ‘militia’ in defiance of the so-called ‘unconstitutional’ application of the laws to the local ranchers who set the fires.

The entire episode is a joke. The gunmen are simply thugs who want to get away with living off of, and avoiding paying for the privilege of using public property. They are archetypical welfare cheats or freeloaders.

Speaking of which: can we all imagine what the media reaction would have been had a small group of armed black or other minority folk taken possession of public property and threatened to ‘live free or die’?

The unevenness of the reaction is astonishing. In Oregon a load of gunmen seize public property, threaten mayhem, disavow the law, cast doubt on the legitimacy of government, and otherwise incite uprising, and they get white glove treatment. They are allowed to continue with their protest unmolested. The press listens and propagates their message. The media generally looks at them as relatively harmless lunatics unworthy of aggressive suppression. And, worse, the authorities tread lightly because they would surely be blamed for any subsequent bloodshed.

This is not the reaction the black community gets when it raises the alarm when a police officer shoots an unarmed black person.

I think it’s time for us to get serious about these so-called ‘militias’ who arm themselves to the teeth and then pretend to represent the ‘people’ against the government.

They sure as heck don’t represent me.

They’re just freeloading thugs. And their possession of a pile of sophisticated guns is a signal of their violent intent. They ought to be dealt with severely.

This isn’t a sick joke. It’s just sick.