Q: You condemn Gore Vidal for claiming that Timothy McVeigh has a sense of justice. You’re wrong. However unfortunate his target due to his ignorance of the presence of the day care center, remember that the Department of Justice and the FBI’s HRT did know that there were children present at Waco when they launched their gas and mechanized assault two years earlier.
A: Mistakes of the kind you just made are not innocent ones. I can see that you, like Gore Vidal, are a Timothy McVeigh soulmate. First of all, McVeigh knew full well that he was striking the building during business hours. He deliberately timed it that way. He might not have known there was a day care center, but it’s reasonable to assume that a huge office building would have a day care center since day care facilities in the workplace, like athletic facilities, are commonplace today. But even if McVeigh was not aware of the day care center, do you mean to imply that it somehow would have been OK to “merely” kill adults?
I totally agree that injustice took place at Waco, and takes place elsewhere in the government, all the time. We are rapidly approaching a point — if not having surpassed it — that we can match the list of grievances of the original American Revolutionaries. The Clinton-Reno So-Called Justice Department may have been the most disgraceful in all of American history. But does this give those angry with our irrational politicians the moral or political right to initiate force against fellow citizens who are not directly responsible, one way or the other, for all of these injustices? And shouldn’t we at least give an intellectual, ideological battle a try first, since by and large we still have freedom of speech in this country? The American Revolutionaries–as opposed to the hippie-Nazis, like McVeigh, of today–waged an intellectual battle and a battle against the British military, not directly against civilians. Only a moral and physical coward would do something like McVeigh did; and only the equivalent would support him.
If your answer is, “Too bad, it’s every man for himself when it comes time to fight the government,” then that must mean you too. You probably would have no complaints if McVeigh had blown you up (or a loved one) that day in 1995, right? If you managed to escape such a bombing with your life, I take it that you would cherish and honor the bomber rather than prosecute him? If you are willing to give up your life for the cause of your choosing, that’s your business. But you have no right to impose that desire on others who provided no such consent.
