Yesterday morning, Joe Stack was just another guy with a lot of personal problems and a deep, burning anger toward the people he perceived as his tormentors.
Today, he's a folk hero on Facebook.
I decided to become a "fan" of this page because as of now, it has almost 1,300 fans. I posted the following on the main wall of this page for everyone to see:
Folks, you can say how much you don't condone what he did until you're blue in the face. The cold truth is that you're glorifying the motivations of someone who attempted an act of mass murder. You might as well put up fan pages for the Unabomber, Timothy McVeigh, or any other crackpot who had an axe to grind with the ...government. Are you really so desperate to seek validation for your paranoid, anti-government attitudes that you have to find fellowship with a guy who was attempting to take as many innocent people with him to the grave as he could? Nauseating.
I then started reading through some of the other posts on the wall. I quite literally could not believe some of the sentiments that are being expressed there right now. These are astonishing. And disturbing. Not in a "I don't agree with this and think it's obnoxious" kind of way, but in a "I fear for my personal safety and that of others because these people are walking the streets kind of way."
Everyone spread the word! 2nd American Revolution, finally is beginning!!!
"A disturbing trend", "Lunacy", "Fear of Copycats" Screw you and the govenment bailout you rode in on! You know it, I know it and the few, "enlightened" American people know it, Joe Stack was dead on. This guy had a point and gave his life for it. Like any oppresive regime, the american government will poo poo it ...and say he was a "wack job". Bullshit. he was spot on. "Discredited himself" for God's sake, wake upand smell the coffee! Not all enemies are big, bad and sworn to your immediate dimise! This one is very cunning and, like a virus, works from within.
Thomas Jefferson said during the drafting of the Constituon that he hoped for a revolution in America every 20 years.....and now were just fucking sheep.....thx Joe Stack...although someone else died ............it's part of change.........we are the most docile country in the world given "our leaders" leadership ? Th...e revolution will be televised, FB'ed, tweeted and any other means...Wash. DC is now @ the tipping point....these are all pigs @ the trough !!
i think that the only way to change is with violence. the nation was born with the shedding of blood it will wither and be reborn with the shedding of blood.
You get the point. Because Joe Stack wrote an anti-government manifesto, they accept him as one of them. Because he flew an airplane into an office building, he is a martyr. And that's what makes this so scary. They don't see it as the indiscriminate attempt at mass murder that it was. They see it as the first salvo in a new American revolution.
There's enough of this kind of sentiment on this Facebook page alone to convince me that what Joe Stack did yesterday is going to be repeated. This is going to happen again. Who cares about Al Qaeda militants when American citizens unhinged with dark thoughts of paranoia about their government appear more than willing to take up the torch and carry Joe Stack's work forward?
Update: I think it's important that we combat the idea that Joe Stack is worthy of anything but contempt, by pointing out that the man he murdered was a father and grandfather who served his country first with two tours of duty in Vietnam and then by working with the IRS to help people who couldn't pay their taxes make arrangements to pay. It's some kind of miracle that more people weren't killed. But that's little solace to the family of Vernon Hunter right now.
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