ARSON AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
Posted by davidlaibow 10 years, 11 months ago to Politics
I think I would have liked Atlas Shrugged better if Ayn Rand had given a more complete explanation of how large institutions that purport to care about “the poor” – the Roman Catholic Church, for example – dealt with the decline in national wealth that served as the background for the story.
One incident in the book, in particular, that has always intrigued me is the episode where the wheat farmers of Minnesota who are served by Taggart Transcontinental, somehow produce a bumper crop, and bring it, in a long string of trucks and wagons, to the railhead to be loaded on freight cars.
Unfortunately, thanks to the Unification Board, the needed freight cars are in Louisiana pickup up Ma Chalmers’ soy beans, or in Arizona picking up grapefruit. The farmers dump their wheat crop and leave it to rot at the roadside. Some of them are described as burning the county court house, and “every home worth over ten thousand dollars”.
I was raised to be an unapologetic intellectual terrorist (never insulting people deliberately, but never being afraid to trash intellectual “comfort zones”), but never to harm or endanger other people or their property. My concept of intellectual terrorism is to be courteous and forthright in expressing myself, but if people don’t like what I set forth, that’s their problem, not mine. I’ve been praised, and I’ve been cursed, and I’ve received serious death threats, as well. But I’ve never knowingly, deliberately engaged in physical harm to any other human being, or to their property.
If your life goes south, I can appreciate your setting fire to your own property – house, car, land, clothing – you acquired it, you can torch it. But when does a person acquire the right to torch someone else's home? When Ayn Rand added this line to the manuscript, what did she have in mind?
Was she expressing extreme desperation in a new and novel way, alluding to a depth of despair that had never been reached before? Or was she legitimizing arson as political expression?
One of the on-site caretaking staff at our gated subdivision attempted suicide last Christmas, attempting to hang himself from the overhanging branch of a large tree in back of the clubhouse. Is there a circumstance where he would have been justified drenching the garden of the largest house in the subdivision with gasoline and throwing a Molotov cocktail into the flowers? Would he have been justified saying to himself, “Laibow, the rich American, has 3 grandchildren in the house; let’s kill the kids”, and torching my home?
Adam Kokesh, whom I’d first heard of a week ago, came up with a plan I consider seriously ill-judged, to have a march on Washington of firearms owners. As far as I know, you can’t take your firearm out of your home without a carry permit, and carry permits are for (at the most) the state you reside in, not the whole country. I’ll be glad to be corrected by any gun owner with a nationwide carry permit, who will take the trouble to educate me, but it seems to me that if you don’t have a carry permit for the District of Columbia, you’re flirting with arrest by bringing your firearm to DC. If it were me, I’d carry a sign saying, “if this sign were an AK-47, you’d be right to be scared”. I don’t believe in civil disobedience that courts arrest; I believe in protest and dissent that makes arrest inappropriate, and leaves law officers wishing they could arrest you, but powerless to do so.
In the 1980s, my late wife Susan (peace to her soul!) and I used to participate in the New York area Jewish community’s annual “Salute To Israel Youth Parade”, up New York’s Fifth Avenue from 42nd Street to 59th Street. There would usually be a small space cordoned off on the eastern sidewalk, for a group of Palestinian/Arab protestors to scream curses and protests at the marchers. One year, a Jewish parade marshal asked me to throw a rock into the group of Palestinians as a contingent of Jewish school children marched by, in hopes of provoking a violent attack by the Palestinians on the children, to set off a riot and get some additional TV coverage on the evening news. I refused; I mention that as an example of the lengths some people who don’t share my viewpoint will go to to advance their viewpoint. To me, this kind of behavior is on all fours with that of Adam Kokesh, and I hope his march never takes place.
Protest and dissent are necessary to a free society, but they have to stay within the limits of civilized behavior. Trash my intellectual “comfort zone”? Bring it on. Trash my home? Threaten me and my family? Outside the boundaries.
Copyright 2013 by Caballa Family Enterprises, 2000 City of San Fernando Pampanga, Philippines
Contact email address: “davidlaibow1215[at]yahoo.com”
Posted on MaY 22, 2013
One incident in the book, in particular, that has always intrigued me is the episode where the wheat farmers of Minnesota who are served by Taggart Transcontinental, somehow produce a bumper crop, and bring it, in a long string of trucks and wagons, to the railhead to be loaded on freight cars.
Unfortunately, thanks to the Unification Board, the needed freight cars are in Louisiana pickup up Ma Chalmers’ soy beans, or in Arizona picking up grapefruit. The farmers dump their wheat crop and leave it to rot at the roadside. Some of them are described as burning the county court house, and “every home worth over ten thousand dollars”.
I was raised to be an unapologetic intellectual terrorist (never insulting people deliberately, but never being afraid to trash intellectual “comfort zones”), but never to harm or endanger other people or their property. My concept of intellectual terrorism is to be courteous and forthright in expressing myself, but if people don’t like what I set forth, that’s their problem, not mine. I’ve been praised, and I’ve been cursed, and I’ve received serious death threats, as well. But I’ve never knowingly, deliberately engaged in physical harm to any other human being, or to their property.
If your life goes south, I can appreciate your setting fire to your own property – house, car, land, clothing – you acquired it, you can torch it. But when does a person acquire the right to torch someone else's home? When Ayn Rand added this line to the manuscript, what did she have in mind?
Was she expressing extreme desperation in a new and novel way, alluding to a depth of despair that had never been reached before? Or was she legitimizing arson as political expression?
One of the on-site caretaking staff at our gated subdivision attempted suicide last Christmas, attempting to hang himself from the overhanging branch of a large tree in back of the clubhouse. Is there a circumstance where he would have been justified drenching the garden of the largest house in the subdivision with gasoline and throwing a Molotov cocktail into the flowers? Would he have been justified saying to himself, “Laibow, the rich American, has 3 grandchildren in the house; let’s kill the kids”, and torching my home?
Adam Kokesh, whom I’d first heard of a week ago, came up with a plan I consider seriously ill-judged, to have a march on Washington of firearms owners. As far as I know, you can’t take your firearm out of your home without a carry permit, and carry permits are for (at the most) the state you reside in, not the whole country. I’ll be glad to be corrected by any gun owner with a nationwide carry permit, who will take the trouble to educate me, but it seems to me that if you don’t have a carry permit for the District of Columbia, you’re flirting with arrest by bringing your firearm to DC. If it were me, I’d carry a sign saying, “if this sign were an AK-47, you’d be right to be scared”. I don’t believe in civil disobedience that courts arrest; I believe in protest and dissent that makes arrest inappropriate, and leaves law officers wishing they could arrest you, but powerless to do so.
In the 1980s, my late wife Susan (peace to her soul!) and I used to participate in the New York area Jewish community’s annual “Salute To Israel Youth Parade”, up New York’s Fifth Avenue from 42nd Street to 59th Street. There would usually be a small space cordoned off on the eastern sidewalk, for a group of Palestinian/Arab protestors to scream curses and protests at the marchers. One year, a Jewish parade marshal asked me to throw a rock into the group of Palestinians as a contingent of Jewish school children marched by, in hopes of provoking a violent attack by the Palestinians on the children, to set off a riot and get some additional TV coverage on the evening news. I refused; I mention that as an example of the lengths some people who don’t share my viewpoint will go to to advance their viewpoint. To me, this kind of behavior is on all fours with that of Adam Kokesh, and I hope his march never takes place.
Protest and dissent are necessary to a free society, but they have to stay within the limits of civilized behavior. Trash my intellectual “comfort zone”? Bring it on. Trash my home? Threaten me and my family? Outside the boundaries.
Copyright 2013 by Caballa Family Enterprises, 2000 City of San Fernando Pampanga, Philippines
Contact email address: “davidlaibow1215[at]yahoo.com”
Posted on MaY 22, 2013
