Is Jopseph Stack a hero?

On February 18th, 53-year-old Joseph Stack, killed both himself and a 67-year-old IRS employee, Vernon Hunter, by flying a small private plane into a building.

Was Joseph a hero? In a word, no. He didn't become a hero by flying a plane into a building and killing a random person any more than the people flying planes into the World Trade Center or the Pentegon did on September, 11th.

So, was he just a nut? I don't think so. I think he's a little more like a canary in a mine.

Long ago, canaries were used in mines to protect the miners from poisonous gas build up in the mines. Canaries, it seems, were more susceptible to such gasses and would die from breathing them long before they had reached levels that would be dangerous to the miners. So, when a canary died, you knew that something bad was beginning to happen.

Joseph Stack was a canary.

This is a man who, for all appearances, was rather marginally stable. He could withstand just so much before he went over the edge and did something a more rational person would not have done under the same circumstances. Notice I said "more rational" rather than just rational. There are matters of degree to rationality just as there are to mental illness. You see if Joseph Stack could be pushed over the edge, there is a slightly less susceptible canary who is just one step short of the same kind of action. Then there is yet another right behind him.

The higher the level of stress being placed upon people the higher up the "rationality chain" such behavior may progress. The issue is not whether Joseph Stack had a problem, but whether we are all being subjected to something that is very bad for all of us?

Perhaps we should pay attention to what the dead canary is telling us.

Discouragement has its limits

There is no doubt that people are discouraged. Some are losing jobs. Others have been struggling to find jobs with little if any success. All are suffering the loss of buying power for whatever money they have as the dollar takes a beating. City and State governments are on the verge of bankruptcy and are trying to find ways to grab whatever money these people have left. They are even beginning to tax food, an absolute necessity.

People have been discouraged and downtrodden before. They withstood an oppressive system for a very long time. They found ways to "make do" and work around the system. They worked around an oppressive tax system. They found ways around a government that no longer represented them.

Then there was a Revolution.