Mark Rudd | A '60s radical on Tucson and political violence

[BridgeTheGap]

In 1970, when I was 22 years old — the same age as Jared Loughner — I was a founder of the Weather Underground, an offshoot of the antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society. That spring, a small contingent of the Weathermen, as we were known, planned to plant three pipe bombs at a noncommissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix, N.J. Our intention was to remind our fellow Americans that our country was dropping napalm and other explosives on Vietnam, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. I wasn't among the bombmakers, but I knew what was in the offing, and to my eternal shame, I didn't try to stop it.

I considered myself an agent of necessity in a political revolution. I'm not sure if Loughner, who seems to suffer from mental illness, can be considered an agent of anything. But I'm sure that if, as alleged, he pulled the trigger, he had convinced himself that he was doing what needed to be done.
At his age, I had thought myself into a similar corner. My willingness to endorse and engage in violence had something to do with an exaggerated sense of my own importance. I wanted to prove myself as a man — a motive exploited by all armies and terrorist groups. I wanted to be a true revolutionary like my guerrilla hero, Ernesto “Ché” Guevara. I wanted the chant we used at demonstrations defending the Black Panthers to be more than just words: “The revolution has come/Time to pick up the gun!”

As the Weather Underground believed in the absolute necessity of bombs to address actual moral grievances such as the Vietnam War and racism, Loughner might have believed in the absolute necessity of a Glock to answer his imagined moral grievances. Violent actors in this country — whether James Earl Ray, Timothy McVeigh or Scott Roeder, who in 2009 killed a Kansas abortion provider — are always armed not just with weapons, but with the conviction that their grievances demand satisfaction and their violence is righteous.

http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20110119/OPINION04/301190061/1054/OPINION/Mark+Rudd+%7C+A++60s+radical+on+Tucson+and+political+violence

[niyad]

1. k and r--thank you for posting this