american terror
One of my friends lives over in Durham and she has a new baby and a two year old. They live in a transitional neighborhood near Duke where they work, but it is near some of the bad blocks. Although in Durham it's hard to not be near a bad neighborhood no matter where you live. Last week their house was the mistaken target of a drive by shooting, seven shots were fired, two entered the house and three lodged in the wall of the children's room. Of course they are moving. I recently was one of the producers for an investigative documentary on gangs in Durham that aired on national television. We didn't show everything I thought we should, and it didn't portray the gang problem as being as bad as I believed things really were. However, right after the program aired, the mayor of Durham and city council members came out protesting saying we depicted Durham to be much worse than it was, that it was slanted, that they get "picked on" a lot since they admit there have been gang problems in the past. Things are better, they said, and the gang problem is not that bad. Anyway, things have been getting worse again over there these past months. One of the things that gangbangers do is get on public busses and start shooting up the joint. Of course the only people who ride the busses in Durham are the people who have to, the poor and elderly. Many people have been killed.
Most of Durham looks like a war zone, and it is consumed by gang territories and violence. The poverty is rampant and there is neighborhood after neighborhood of boarded up houses, crack houses, gang houses, and people living in true blue squalor. Even the nice neighborhoods are home to gang activity. And this is true for many, many cities arount the country. The violence is very bad, and many innocent people have lost their lives or been otherwise permanently damaged. And it has spread to the rural areas, especially MS13, a particularly violent gang based in central America heavily involved in illegal arms trade, prostitution and drug smuggling. Gang grafitti is showing up in unlikely places like upscale malls and rural farm communities. There are even gangs in the upscale suburban town I live in. They are everywhere and it is getting worse. Then I turn on the radio and hear the "office of homeland security" and Donald Rumsfeld declaring unequivocally that "environmental groups" are the "number one domestic terrorism threat" and "we need to focus our attention and resources on preventing these radicals from inflicting their terror on the American people." Although I am aware of several incidents where there was property damage inflicted in the name of some environmental cause, there is not one situation where anyone was killed or hurt, other than having their property damaged. "Eco-terrorist" groups are usually poorly organized and are usually not part of any established environmental groups, or it is one or two people acting on their own. They often claim to be, but no one has ever been able to prove that there was anything behind their activies other than a rebel attitude, a desire to save the environment, some bad judgement, and maybe a little kind bud. Clearly the targets of gang violence are people. The few examples of "eco terrorism" that have actually been indicted, at best, caused property damage andclearly did not target people.
In this country, and especially with this particular admistration, it is clear what is most important. Shoot innocent people on busses (especially if they are poor and black), import and distribute illegal weapons, inflict terror in neighborhoods controled by gang thugs weilding guns and shooting them at will, shoot automatic weapons at houses inhabited by innocent, young families, but for God's sake don't do anything that interferes with the profits of big business. That is true terrorism.