True North

The man at the left is Cookie Thornton. He is now dead, shot to death this week after breaking into a suburban St. Louis city council meeting and attempting to blow away as many town officials as he could. He got six, including the mayor.

The media has labeled Thornton as crazy. The governor has called the shootings terroristic, senseless and a crime. But perhaps it's Cookie's own family that has gotten it most correct. "My brother went to war against the government," explained one of them.

I can see robbery, murder and rape being called a crime; it's violence for personal gain. But when freedom-loving citizens feel they have exhausted all avenues to remove the oppresive yolk of a magistrate, is it still a crime when they lash out or is it war? And if it's war, are the aldermen, the IRS auditor and your mailman still to be seen as innocent bystanders or can they now rightfully be considered "players"?

I have always been fascinated by our War for Independence. But despite all my study, I have still not managed to get a firm grip on our state of mind when it started. Was it sparked by big-time operations like the Boston Tea Party  or Bunker Hill (Oklahoma City, Waco), or was it more the proletariat who, one-by-one, reached the end of their rope and sacrificed themselves anonomously for the cause of liberty?

If I went back to colonial America, I would want to believe that Sam Adams, Paul Revere and George Washington were still considered the real heroes that we do today. However, even then, the people's love was for big government and the King's charity. That's why I'm not so sure our Founding Fathers wouldn't've been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic crazies, much like our own Kaczynski, Weaver and Thornton.