What if the Times Square would-be bomber had been an angry white male?

There seems to have been wide belief, before the arrest, that the attempted bombing was the work of an angry white male – Tea Partier.  From MSNBC to Mayor Bloomberg, the Tea Partiers were guilty. The white male American scenario conjures up plenty of memories of the Murrah Federal building bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995.

There are lessons to be taken from the attempted bombing at Times Square this past weekend and it is not any of the typical lessons you’re going to read.  Yes, people need to quit jumping to conclusions, and there are certainly people that want to prove that the Tea Party crowd is violent (despite the lack of violence), just as various liberal causes have spawned violence; the anti-Iraq war protestors (see Waters, Maxine; Congress) and the anti-Arizona illegal immigration bill crowd (see Santa Cruz riot).

Folks, don’t get too cozy now that we know that this attempted bombing was the work of an Islamic terrorist.  There are domestic crazies angry at the U.S. government that have in the past and probably will in the future commit terrorist acts.  See Murrah Federal Building, or for leftist terrorists just check Bill Ayers or any number of other entries to President Obama’s rolodex. 

The terror threats exist from multiple corners of our society; our world.  We cannot eradicate those threats completely. We can only minimize them. Modern weapons and modern scientific technology (i.e. chemistry electronics etc.) give the lone individual tremendous power to maim, kill, and terrorize.  The single individual can do incredible damage and we will never eliminate all of the people that pose these threats.

Therefore: We have to be constantly vigilant and constantly on guard and at the same time we have to vigorously defend our civil rights and our way of life; our freedoms.  We cannot allow the possibility of those living among us (right-wing, left-wing, Islamist, etc) to commit mass murder and terrorize the general population. We need to take strict anti-terror measures while protecting our freedoms. 

These two objectives can be mutually exclusive.  We can easily get overly zealous in self defense or lose lives to protect civil rights. This means that we are going to have some significant fights, political battles, over how to secure ourselves physically and in our freedoms.  This may be a bigger debate for this nation than the current free market vs European social democracy debate.  The entire concept of freedom is at risk in this debate because if the debate or the outcomes are wrong the loss of freedom or the loss of life is a terrorist win. 

I truly believe that if the political status of our nation, the current political hostility found in our nation today, continues it will leave us impotent in our ability to defend our lives and our freedom.   We have to mature as a political society.  We need to get past the nasty rhetoric that is our current political discourse.  We need vibrant, respectful debate on our defenses against terrorism based on knowledge of what our Constitution really says, and why it says what it says.  And, we need to be thoroughly familiar with the facts surrounding the issues we argue over.

My blog is dedicated to a series of principles. I believe these principles should be read and should be circulated.  Please read them here, and if you agree with these principles circulate them.  For freedom with security.

Tagged as: bill ayers, bloomber, mayor bloomberg, MSNBC, murrah, murrah federal building, obama, Tea Party, terror, terror threat, terrorist, Times Square, Times Square bombing, white male