Twelve years ago I was in college, and I stayed up until ridiculous hours for no reason under the sun. As a consequence, I generally slept until very late in the morning. Many days, I didn't see illuminated AM hours at all.
One morning in April of 1995, a good friend of mine who was very much aware of my sleeping "schedule" called just before 10AM. Groggy as I was at the time, I still remember the conversation remarkably well.
"What are you doing?"
"Sleeping. What do you think I'm doing?"
"You need to get up and turn on the TV. Someone just blew up half a building in Oklahoma."
Later that afternoon I ran into a somewhat emotional, and at times reactionary family member. "That's it! That's it! We need to close our borders. Right now." Fortunately for me, I had in the preceding months been reading a number of publications that had sounded small but disturbing alarms about a growing, largely rural movement afoot in America. It seemed that increasing numbers of angry white men were coagulating into small but significantly armed cells. Unlike most social groups that tend to form around shared loves, these folks were united around shared hates: the FBI, ATF, Bill Clinton, immigrants, minorities, the IRS, the "liberal" media.
I had not read a lot about these new "militias"; hell, not a lot had been written about them. But I had read enough to have a hunch.
"I've got a bad feeling about this", I replied to the aforementioned relative. "I have a bad feeling that this was an inside job."
I was more than ready to be proven wrong. I didn't want to believe that these folks were capable of this. I sure as hell didn't want to believe that one or more of these folks was comfortable with having dropped a nine-story building onto a daycare center.
In less than a week, though, my hunch was confirmed. These men - these American men - were capable of this. They were more than willing to kill children for their "cause".
Fast forward.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote of the arrests of a handful of men in northeast Alabama who were calling themselves the "Free Militia." This past Sunday, The Huntsville (AL) Times published a front-page story by staff writer Challen Stephens that provided a little more insight into the group. But instead of any single revelation about this particular bunch, I was struck by the following passage:
"This group was completely under the radar screen. We knew of none of the people arrested," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery.
Potok oversees the center's program that tracks anti-government militias and hate groups. He said the center is tracking only one potential anti-government militia in Alabama, an offshoot of the Constitution Party.
He said militias began to die out after 2000, dropping from 858 nationwide in 1996 to 147 now. "They're typically hard-line anti-government and eaten up with conspiracy theories."
Odd.
Back in late 2001, when the so-called-Patriot Act was sailing through Congress with what can only be described as atypical velocity, I remember thinking "Boy - those nutty militia-types are going to lose their minds over this." But this doesn't seem to have happened.
How is it that when something as broad and intrusive as some of the provisions of the Patriot Act are is high-speed railroaded through Congress, these nuts (whose greatest fear is an intrusive Federal government) remain unusually silent?
What can account for the astonishing decrease in ultra right-wing militia activity since 2000 - especially considering the astonishing increase in this activity over the preceding decade?
Viewed reasonably, one can draw only a single conclusion:
The sorts of individuals who tend to form these militias consider the Republican Party to be - at least nominally - allies.
And this scares the hell out of me.
Please know that I am in no way an alarmist. I consider myself to be fairly level-headed and in most instances I will advocate a slow and steady analysis of any issue that I as an individual or we as a nation face. I absolutely believe that the adage "speed kills" can be applied not just to driving, but to virtually all aspects of life.
That this is even a concern in incredibly disheartening. But as we approach 2008, when we will solidify our hold on Congress and retake the White House, I feel as though we'd be remiss if we didn't begin to discuss the militia issue now. And, given the very real possibility that our next President will be a woman or an African-American man, we should likely be acutely aware of the extreme right in the coming months and years. (That Senator Obama has already had to be placed under Secret Service protection, and that CBS.com has had to disallow comments on stories about Obama due to the volume of racist remarks serves as a testament to these concerns.)
Do I fear another 9/11? Not so much.
Do I fear another Oklahoma City? I'm ashamed to say...Yeah. Yes I do.