#563 – Dick Bernard: The (uncomfortable) Terrorist incident

On Tuesday evening CBS News a segment played about five anarchists who had been arrested in a plot to blow up a bridge in Ohio. There was a good visual of the bridge, and not much information about the anarchists, except that they were from the midwest. The terrorist act was apparently to be an anti-corporate May Day activity.
Wednesday mornings Minneapolis Star Tribune had a significant story about the foiled plot on page A11. The story has been updated.
I was curious about how this particular story would ‘play’ in the regular and alternative news media that I have access to.
The anarchists were all white men, Americans, identified with the Occupy Movement in one way or another. And they were arrested, not executed.
To date I have seen nothing on the assorted news streams that come from my left.
Similarly, there has been nothing from the right side of the spectrum either.
It is somewhat of a Timothy McVeigh moment, in other words.
If somebody with a funny name and darker skin complexion had bombed the Murrah Building in 1995, even then there would have been outrage against those evil others.
When it turned out that the perpetrators were ordinary white Americans, and McVeigh a military veteran at that, It was more difficult to deal with. It violated a stereotype.
As for the left, it similarly does not fit into a convenient box of news.
They’re lucky the bomb didn’t go off.
There’s plenty of evil lurking around in our own country, and the arrest of these five ordinary white guys is perhaps a good place to emphasize that we have our own evildoers in our midst and they blend right in with the typical American, of whatever hue.
I recall being at a laundromat a couple of weeks after 9-11-01 and while looking for something to read came up with a U.S. News and World Report dated September 25. I looked at the table of contents, and there was an interesting article about terror in our midst, but there was not a single reference to the World Trade Centers, which was very puzzling to me.
I looked again: the magazine was September 25, 2000. A year earlier.
Here’s the article I read that day in 2001: USNews 9-25-2000001
And coincidentally, right after I saved this draft, I noted this article in on-line news.