Front Sight, Press

Joe Stack flew his very nice Piper Cherokee into an office complex in Austin, Texas which housed some offices for the Infernal Revenue Service. He had recently gotten a tax bill on unpaid income for $13,000. Have you priced a Piper Cherokee lately? (hint: it’s a lot more than $13K). Before he did that, he set on fire his lovely home, which he shared with his wife and step daughter. (Houses in north Austin are a bit more than $13K, too. I’ve been there.) And, he obviously planned this out really well because he had his whole IRS kamikaze manifesto posted on the web so that all of the news services could find it quickly and they did. Tragically, he also killed Vern Hunter, a Nam vet and IRS worker, injured several others and demolished a very nice airplane.

OK, let’s review. You have your own business, moderately successful with some ups and downs. You live in a lovely house with your wife and step-daughter in one of the most interesting cities in the country. You play base in a rock band with your friends just for fun, and privately own your own aircraft. You get a bill from the revenuers for $13K and the best you can think to do with yourself is to burn down your house and fly this great plane into a cheap black glass office complex and kill yourself and some other people. Great. Way to go, Joe.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present to you Joseph Stack III, stone cold bug nuts crazy.

Joe, you probably can’t hear me very well right now since you’re dead and probably scattered around in a bunch of little pieces, but I’m superstitious enough not to take anything for granted, so I’ll say it anyway. Joe, there are people in Haiti right now with their arms and legs torn off drinking from sewers because they have no fresh water, and they still cling to life because something in their souls tells them that this life is worth living and what they do with it counts. There are soldiers walking the dusty streets of Afghanistan knowing any minute they can be hideously maimed, but they do it anyway because they believe that what they’re doing matters and the world will be a better place if they do their job well. There are old ladies sitting in dark and cold apartments trying to decide if they should buy food or the heart medication to keep them alive, and they buy the meds because they believe that their lives matter.

And you, Joe? You’re just insane. That’s all. You’re not a hero or a martyr. All you really managed to do was to raise questions about the security of civil aviation. Nothing changed, except for Vern and his wife, and your friends and your wife. They are all really hurt because you let them down in a big way. Everyone trusted you and you proved yourself completely unworthy. The news media is all a-twitter about if you are a “domestic terrorist” or not. But, we know the truth, don’t we? You’re not a terrorist; you’re just plain old crazy.

Before we sweep the scattered little bits of you into history’s garbage compacter, I want to be clear on this. Were we supposed to be inspired, to rush into the streets and lynch all the IRS agents? Were we supposed to speak in hushed tones of your “heroic sacrifice”? Were we supposed to memorize your narcissistic tome as if it were some kind of gospel? Sorry. I didn’t get the memo. What you did manage to do, however, was to accomplish the impossible: you caused me to feel sympathy for an IRS agent. Ain’t that a bite in the ass?