opinion__
The recourse to violence, life imitating TV
In Spokane, Washington, the mother of a
convicted Rapist was arrested on charges of
hiring a “Hitman” to kill the judge and
prosecutor in her son’s case. This may not be a
case of life imitating art — but, a case of life
imitating bad television.
The Rapist’s mother is charged with two
counts of criminal solicitation to commit first
degree murder. The woman’s actions are
rather bizarre when one sees that her son was
convicted on four counts of rape — and
believed responsible for 20 sexual assaults
over a two-year period. The trial judge went to
great lengths — including a change of veneer
(bringing in a jury from another county) — to
ensure a fair trial. And yet, despite all judicial
efforts for an untainted judgment in the case,
the Rapist’s mother is apparently gunning for
the judge and prosecutor.
Why is this siutation an imitation of
television? It has all the earmarks of a poorly
plotted Kojak script.
But this case, more than television
melodrama, is symptomatic of a cancer
festering within American society — that
violence, rather than the least tenable
resolution, can eradicate misfortune. This
attitude has manifest in recent years as the
complexities of acceptable societal behavior
become too much for many to cope with.
We, as Americans, are too quick to clear the
street and go for our guns when words and
deeds are frustrated. That old-west, dusty
Main Street shoot-out saga of right defeating
wrong in a free exchange of lead has played so
long it is practically congenital. The shoot-out
has become so common the lines demarking
right and wrong no-longer exist as perceptible
boundries of conduct. We have lost the moral
terror.
What abets this violent tendancy is the fact
there are just too many guns, too readily
available, in this society. What is the nec
cessity to be armed — or have quick access to
a gun? Having a gun presupposes its use. If
one brings out a gun to "protect” themself it
crosses a line where use is mandatory.
The Spokane Rapist’s mother is one of a
puzzling type — a close kin of Hinkley and
Chapman and Oswald and Sirhan and Ray and
too too many others. They used a gun to solve
problems — problems for the most part within
themselves. They fixated on a celebrity as the
object of their inner torment.
The difference between us and them? There
may be little difference.
How often have the words “I'll kill you,” in
mock seriousness been said? Too often oaths
are sworn, "If you touch that I’ll kill you” or,
“Do that and you die.” The barrier dividing
word and deed is a transparency more and
more people step through without com
punction.
And after a fashion —
such murderous
behavior is regaled — witness the thousands
who have been killers so dramatically on
television and in motion pictures under the
auspices of entertainment.
The FBI reports that deaths by handguns
are the most common homocide in this
country — and there is no end to the slaughter
in sight. Handgun legislation is virtually
impossible to enact because of the money and
lobbying power against such legislation by the
National Rifle Association. They oppose legal
restraints on guns with an all-encompassing
principle that turns something of a blind eye to
the deadly accessibility of lethal weapons.
But guns don’t kill, people do — and people
are killing people at an ever-increasing rate.
The carnage will continue with no regard
toward right or wrong — only a perverse sense
of justice, as in the Spokane case, to get a
gunslinger’s type of vengence.
letters
Demonstrations failed
The anti-nuclear demonstration on this campus
failed in its efforts to persuade against the use and
proliferation of nuclear weapons. By showing films
of the destruction and carnage wrought by the
dropping of atomic bombs on Japan, we are
repulsed, yet at the same time reminded of the
brutally efficient way in which we ended Japan’s
reign of terror in the Pacific. For every day the
decision to unleash nuclear destruction was
delayed, innocent American soldiers were dying.
Lest this campus’ liberal majority has forgotten,
Pearl Harbor was not a tea party. Rather, it was a
hideous and unprovoked attack which left hun
dreds of Americans slaughtered. It marked the
beginning of Japanese atrocities against this
country’s citizens, atrocities which we are finding
out today were every bit as heinous as those
Germany was inflicting in Europe. While the
“nukies” have chosen to use Hiroshima and
Nagasaki as the focal point in its argument against
nuclear weapons, it is at the same time using an
example which represents the utter fulfillment of
the atomic bomb; that it should be used to crush
and annihilate a country whose brutally aggressive
attacks on us has erased their right to exist.
The misguided leaders of the anti-nuke rally
were circulating a petition during the showing of
the films. The petition called for a joint U.S.-Soviet
“freeze” on the testing, producton and deployment
of nuclear armaments. The petition states: “This is
an essential, verifiable first step toward lessening
the risk of nuclear war.” Perhaps this sort of pie-in
the-sky... idiocy would work if the Ruskies were the
good guys they would have us believe.
As George Bush recently said, it doesn’t take too
much mental prowess to see how conniving the
Russians are. Afghanistan and he recent sub in
cident in the “Sea of Peace” are only two exam
ples. To reason with the Russians, superior
military strength is the first step. “Peace through
Superior Firepower,” though a tired adage, is none
the less true.
As for the recent Emerald article describing the
scenario of a nuclear attack on Eugene, I can only
hope and pray. What better way to silence this
areas liberal/pseudo-communist factions. In the
final 40 seconds of their lives, as they see and hear
the enormous red bomb screaming down through
the sky, as they huddle together quietly urinating
on themselves, they will have been convinced,
albeit too late, that Russian leadership is every bit
as ruthless, conniving and greedy as we’ve been
told.
P. Sharkey Bleeg
Senior, Accounting
Real terrorists
The U.S. government and media cries about
"international terrorism,” but we can’t let them
pull the wool over our eyes. Who are the real
terrorists?
Who has the largest killing apparatus in the
world? Who invented the atomic bomb and used it,
and initiated the arms race? Who napalmed the
Vietnamese and is now engaged in a genocidal war
against the people of El Salvador? And closer to
home — it is the U.S. government that committed
wholesale genocide against American Indians and
enslaved millions of African people for profit. And
today the lynching, the murders of black children
by cops, the malnutrition amidst wealth,
sterilization, and the de-humanizing conditions
continues to bring death and terror to black
communities all across this continent. And yet the
U.S. government has the nerve to label any people
or nations who fight this oppression as
"terrorists.”
Black people have always resisted this op
pression and terror and have organized on every
level for their self defense and liberation. A recent
example is the attempted expropriation of a Brinks
Armored car by the Black Liberation Army and
members of the Weather Underground. This was
not a self-serving "bank robbery” but a recovery of
funds stolen off the sweat, blood and poverty of
African people. The money was to be used as
resources for the black liberation movement.
It’s now “open season” on the black community.
Police and FBI are kicking down doors, stopping,
searching and terrorizing black people and the
"left” — gestapo style. There are criticisms of the
political line, strategy, timing and bungling tactics
— criticisms that need to expose the errors of an
approach which seperates military action from the
educational, community and organization work
that must preceed nd accompany such tactics. Yet
we must defend the Black Liberaton Army and the
entire black liberation movement against this
unleashed FBI and retalliatory police terror. We
must also support the white people who were taking
a stand in solidarity with the BLA. Moreover, we
have the responsibility to support the right of black
people to organize for self defense and to seek out
and unite with leading overall strategies in the
black liberation movement such as put forth by the
African People’s Socialist Party.
The focus must be turned against the U.S.
government for the criminal terror it has con
sistently waged against people around the world
inorder to build and maintain the wealth, power
and privilege of a very select few.
Margaret M. Riddle
Uhuru House Solidarity Comm.