There is a frank and honest story on the Huffington Post by Will Bunch over the Austin IRS v. Joe Stack in a small plane. I read the manifesto that Stack left, and his situation sounded rough. What dulls the edges of his plight are the house he burned down and the aggressive nature by which he pursued his agenda. What he, and many that champion his actions, fail to realize is that the occupants of the Echelon Building in Austin were not the fiends twisting the supposed thumb-screws that hammered away at his financial well-being, legislation that he attempted to counteract while part of an anti-tax group in California was. Stack gave up the high road by descending from rational discourse, and found an irrationally violent solution. That is not Maverick-y, it is not patriotic, it is not what defines a hero.
Those who have been championing Stacks attack in Austin call him a first shot in the revolution, a hero. So, now heroes attack civilian that work for the government, unaware, unarmed, and unable to defend themselves. His anger boiled over and he used this incident of violence to encourage a change in the way things are. He wanted to alter the discourse through violence. I would suggest to those who call Stack a champion of the every man to think long and hard on the implications of those actions.
He wasn’t a revolutionary mind and he was not a repressed citizen. By every account and a reading of his manifesto, his failure lay not in the hands of the government and despicable agencies, but in his pursuit of the American Dream. He couldn’t stomach the known pangs of climbing up the financial ladder, and so attacked what he thought was a giant, faceless aggressor. He was a megalomaniac that thought he was special. He didn’t follow the tax codes and rules he did not agree with, he did not qualify for tax break X so he became angry at the system and those that the break applied to. His manifesto reads like the works of a frothing-at-the-mouth madman who feels that being mildly successful isn’t enough for his chops, and that the entities that be are repressing him and only him. In short, he felt singled out and aggravated.
There are a lot of very aggravated people in this country at the moment. With lost jobs to the tune of six million plus, a national underemployment/unemployment rate around 16 percent, and home foreclosures at their highest rate in years Stack wasn’t alone. Stack chose to burn his home, which he owned at the time, to the ground. Last I checked, arson invalidates an insurance policy, meaning he left his family with only an ashy plot of land that used to be a home, torched memories, and no way to replace their belongings.
A gun was never held to Stacks head. He was given a choice. He could negotiate, he could deal, he could have filed his taxes and worked with another accountant, he could have declared bankruptcy and started from scratch like the thousands of Americans that do so every year. He made his decision to take the road less traveled, and didn’t give anyone a warning. Guy Fawkes at least bothered to warn half of Parliament before attempting to blow ti up, whereas Stacks couldn’t even give that single courtesy to all the innocent lives he put at risk. If he had made a call or bomb threat to clear out the building before slamming into it, he would have given his final middle finger to the IRS a Robin Hood-esque aura, rather than an undertone of murder. He would have pinned a noted to the chest of the IRS symbolizing the collective anger many share with what they feel are unjust or restrictive policies. Instead, blood stains his hands and his agenda. There was no warning, there was no concern for human life. There was premeditation, there was planning, there was intent, there was hideous symbolism in a plane slamming into a building in the United States of America. He is, by the letter of the law, a murderer.
Old Jeffersonian 