Alternet reports:
Thursday night, after having driven cross-country from California to Washington, John Patrick Bedell walked up to a screening area at the Pentagon and starting firing his two semiautomatic weapons. In less than a minute, he'd wounded two police offers and received gunshot injuries that would later kill him.
Predictably, Bedell believed the government, or a rouge, monotonically powerful agency within it, to have been behind 9/11 as well as the JFK assignation as well as current foriegn policy:
The videos, writings and audio Bedell left for investigators' and the eager media's discovery, on the other hand, show he believed the United States had been run by a secret cabal ever since President Kennedy's assassination in 1963. He claimed this "coup regime" was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and the wars in the Middle East.
But had many reasonable grievances as well:
Stack wrote detailed his frustrations with the tax system, it also centered around his concerns that the current economic recession was caused by an economic elite that gets away with financial crimes -- even financial murder -- every day. "Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes," he wrote.
What is surely unfortunate is that his anger, rather than being put toward constructive activism was instead release in a suicidal act, of the kind recently advocated by Chris Hedges. As Hedges quotes French philosopher Albert Camus with approval:
"How do we resist? How, if this descent is inevitable, as I believe it is, do we fight back? Why should we resist at all? Why not give in to cynicism and despair? Why not carve out as comfortable a niche as possible within the embrace of the corporate state and spend our lives attempting to satiate our private needs? The power elite, including most of those who graduate from our top universities and our liberal and intellectual classes, have sold out for personal comfort. Why not us?"
While martyrdom may be a noble action in the face of a hopeless situation, it seems, to me, silly when potential solutions are fairly obvious and as far as one can tell credible, as seem the case for most of the domestic victims of US policy. Notably the left is guilty for failing to capitalizes on latent anger of this sort before it reaches a melodramatic and destructive conclusion.
Peter Ward pontificatingwithoutalicense.wordpress.com
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