Home -Grown Terrorism and Where the Police Waste Their Time

I remember back in undergrad after it was revealed that the police had been spying on a group of mostly elderly priests and nuns I did anti-war work with, the mother of the girl I was dating at the time explained to me that it was necessary for the police to keep tabs even on pacifists, because "terrorists do run in those circles."

Now, it goes without saying that this lady was incredibly stupid (though for many more reasons that just that statement), but she was even more astoundingly stupid than usual that time.

Because American terrorists are not leftists, they are conservatives. After the recent murder of the chair of the Arkansas Democratic party, we have the second story in just a few weeks of a right-wing nutjob going crazy and shooting up leftists because of Rush Limbaugh convinced him it's ok to do so.

But really what these stories point to is that incredible ways in which our law enforcement resources are woefully mismanaged in order to intimidate progressive activists rather than actually, oh I don't know, enforce the laws or stop crazed right-wingers from blowing up federal buildings, for example.

Time and time again, the facts have proven that lefty peacenicks are completely non-violent (you know, much like the names "pacifism" would imply), while radical right-wingers are not afraid to use murder to achieve their aims, whether it be against abortion, liberal churches, black churches, or any other group or institution they feel is a threat to their insane world view.

But yet where do local, state, and federal law enforcement put their resources in investigating political groups?

Though to be fair, it must be pretty hard. I mean, on the one hand you have groups asking the government to stop killing, and on the other hand, you have groups openly advocating murder. It must be pretty hard to figure out which one poses the bigger threat...but then again, I guess it depends on what you define as a threat. While I might say people who advocate murdering innocent people are a threat, I can see how people who say that perchance the United States shouldn't dictatorially control the world or murder over a million people in a war based on lies must seem pretty threatening, too...