On the Other Hand...
by Jim Davies
Suggestions for Bombers
It's just possible that one of the readers of this column is planning another bombing, so I'd like to suggest moderation. Perhaps I can save lives.
Apparently unlike the President, I can readily understand the rage of a lot of people out there, fed to the teeth with the arrogance, intrusiveness, and utterly insatiable greed of government. One recent survey said that as many as 52% of those polled felt afraid of, or hostile to, the Feds. I'm one of them, so that's fine by me; but let's be very careful how we express our well justified outrage; and blowing up children is not in the least acceptable.
Nor is it, in any remote degree, "necessary". Here follow four alternative ways to express such anger - all, much more productive. Some of them are legal, others not; but an intending bomber is presumably little worried about the law.
Let's suppose there is 1% of the population willing to use violence against government targets, in protest. That's more than I think, but it's 52 times less than the statistic quoted above.
Suppose then that one of those 1% is reading this while putting the final touches to a truckload of fertilizer explosive. Please, will you pause a while, and read the rest of this? You will be unconcerned about breaking any laws, so let's start with an example that our enemies will call illegal.
It is, to with-hold taxes . If the money spigot is turned off, the Feds will shrivel up. To do any of the things you detest, they need that vast flow of money like a Ryder truck needs gas. Agreed? - so, pay them nothing, and encourage all your militant friends to do the same. Or better yet, monkeywrench the tax collection system. Sure, it's illegal, but you don't care about that.
All you have to do is to persuade all your friends in that 1% of the population to file a well-written but fictitious tax return EVERY WEEK, all different, and all with refunds requested. Within half a year, the entire IRS bureaucracy will screech to a grinding halt, hopelessly swamped by an impossible workload. Not only will they not get the money they want from you and your friends, they will be unable to process the money mailed to them by the other 99% of us peasants.
And then, hearing of their difficulties, a large chunk of that other 99% is going to think, Well, since the IRS is melting down, why should I not join the revolt, and with-hold my payments too?
Not one of the agencies you understandably loathe can work without our money. So by using smarts instead of fertilizer, you can accomplish infinitely more! More, even, than if you bombed every IRS office in the country; because they keep all their computer files on backup tapes in separate places. Moderation works better, and not a single child in day-care would have been killed. Like I said, that's all illegal, so I'm not here to recommend it, but just to suggest to any whose mind is set on breaking laws by setting bombs, that this is a far cleaner and more productive way to break them. Infinitely more humane. And incidentally, they have not yet enacted a death penalty for doing it.
Second suggestion: peacefully protest . You know, get a small crowd of friends to sit down in the road, or on the bridges across the Potomac, or any other place which will cause the bureaucracy to glue up in short order. This is the kind of technique used by the Left in the 1960s (our current President did it in London, I recall) and since that's the gang now in charge in D.C., they can't object too strongly. Sure, they'll have you arrested, but I'm presuming you don't mind that too much, especially since the sentences are very light and since they can't be increased while all the beds are taken up by pot smokers.
That method took them a few years, but it worked, didn't it? - and so it would for us. Yet not a single child in day care would have been murdered.
Third idea: get political . Yes, I know, this is far less exciting than lighting a fuse and feeling that thrilling, earth-shaking thump! and seeing all that smoke and debris. It gets dead boring, at times. But it has a lot of things going for it. For instance, it's still legal... at this writing.
So unless you happen to distribute literature on the steps of some Post Office where the Master hasn't read the First Amendment, you'll not even get arrested. Even if that doesn't matter to you, it surely matters to some of your friends, so it will be easier to get more of them to join you. And bit by bit, terribly slowly I know, our ideas (that government needs reducing by 95% or so) will get in to the mainstream and laws will start to get repealed.
How do I know? - it's already happening. The Republicans didn't this year write laws to limit their own power because they got religion, they did it because they know the only alternative is to lose more and more ground to Libertarians and others. Sure, they're doing too little, too slowly; but it's a heap more than if nobody was on their tail. Political action works!
Fourth suggestion: hit the books . Okay, I know that that's even less glamorous yet, but bear with me. If you have your brain unscrambled, you'll be that much better prepared for any and every specific way you spend the next 15 or 20 years working to take down the monstrous apparatus of government... except, it's true, setting off explosions.
You wouldn't know it by visiting any government-funded library, but there is a lifetime's reading out there of books that are not "wacko" at all, but closely reasoned, and readable by any moderately intelligent non-academic, and which demolish the view, currently dominant in our schools and universities, that anything more than a VERY minimal government has any valid function at all.
If you mean to read such books and want to find them, write to me in care of this newspaper. I'm as much a revolutionary as you, I hope, but when the job is done, I want it to be permanent. And bombing babies doesn't do that.