A June day in Terre Haute

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TERRE HAUTE, IN--This quiet city, hometown of Theodore Dreiser and Red Skelton, Steve Martin's "favorite city" has not seen such festivitity since Larry Bird's ISU basketball team played Magic Johnson's MSU team for the NCAA championship in 1979. Venders hawk tee shirts and elephant ears, drunks revel in Courthouse Square and there is open sex among the campers at Jones Jr High softball field.

The party atmosphere is only slightly dampened by the sparse bands of sallow squishies who parade near the Federal Penitentary chanting "Hey,hey, Timothy McVeigh won't die for your sins today".

But tomorrow at 7:00 AM, the lethal injection will be administered and McVeigh's 15 minutes of fame will end after 6 years.

McVeigh remains unrepentent. He insists that the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in OK City in 1995 was part of no larger conspiracy.

"I am sorry these people had to lose their lives. But that's the nature of the beast. It's understood going in what the human toll will be.

For those die-hard conspiracy theorists who will refuse to believe this, I turn the tables and say: Show me where I needed anyone else. Financing? Logistics? Specialized tech skills? Brain power? Strategy? ... Show me where I needed a dark, mysterious 'Mr. X!".

I am camped in my mobile home in a field two miles east of the penitentary. Please join us for a champagne toast tomorrow at 7:00AM as Timothy exits, stage right.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), June 10, 2001

Answers

I'm sick of all this excessive media coverage of McVeigh. It's just what he wanted. Duhbya has fried dozens of people in Texas and none of them got this kind of exclusive coverage at the expense of other important news.

I hope they will finally drop it once he is dead so that we can hear about other things happening in our world. Instead, they will probably go on for weeks about the significance of his last meal.

-- (get it over with @ and. get over it), June 10, 2001.


"I hope they will finally drop it once he is dead..."

Not likely. The newspapers probably will stop soon after the execution, but I predict other media will pick up the slack and keep a slow stream of McVeigh material coming in the form of books and magazine articles - until the public stops paying attention.

The difficulty with the public losing interest in McVeigh is that there may have been other political terrorists, but none that did such damage. There have been other mass murderers, but none that matched McVeigh for sheer numbers. He set off one hell of a bomb. The reverb will last a while longer.

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), June 10, 2001.


I'll bet you a Powerball ticket that something will happen to stop his execution at the last minute.

-- (Weeble@wee.ble), June 10, 2001.

I'll match your powerball ticket and throw in a couple of Twins' tickets.

-- jammy (jammin@with.jammy), June 10, 2001.

Kewl. Who else wants to contribute? Unk can hold the pot.

-- (Weeble@wee.ble), June 10, 2001.


I suspect either Rich or Sumer would be the ones to hold the "pot". LOL!

-- jammy (jammin@with.jammy), June 10, 2001.

This whole media thing paints such a gruesome picture to me. I know that people loathe McVeigh, but I loathe those who want to see him die. I loathe the system that punishes an act of revenge with equal revenge.

And we wonder why our culture is so violent?

What McVeigh did was terribly wrong. Yet I don't believe he is something other than human. He is as human as I am.

I emphatize with the peculiar mindset a Catholic upbringing can accomplish. It's easy to see the world in black-and-white, to view "entities" as more powerful than they are, to polarize the world into "right and wrong," and to become a "martyr" for some abstract cause.

It's easy to lose one's way after such an upbringing. I speak as an ex-Catholic. I know the mindset. I have empathy for McVeigh because of the peculiar set of indoctrination at a very young age that contributed to that person we call evil. McVeigh is very intelligent and sensitive, and very, very deluded.

I remember my response when the bombing occurred. At that time, I loathed McVeigh as much as the next person in America. I hated the man. At that point in time, I even thought that the death penalty was justified in certain cases, and in this case, I felt it was.

Now I have completely changed my position -- not because of McVeigh, but because of a progression in my way of thinking. I no longer think the death penalty is justifiable in any case. Even if you had a Hitler behind bars, I don't think it would be right to execute him.

When I look at McVeigh, I see that that he is as human as I am, and that I, too, am capable of at least thinking sometimes in a way that he thinks -- a singleminded, narrow, even fanatical way. I see that I am just as sensitive to going wrong as he. I think that I am just as capable of doing wrong as he, but I don't think I have the same single-mindedness of aim that he did to commit such a wrong.

I realize what I am saying will probably appear heretical. At this particular point in American history, I think that what I am saying is probably incomprehensible to eighty percent of my fellows. Yet I am filled with sorrow for a country that calls itself "civilized" and conducts "coordinated" deaths, whether in the military or in a penitentiary in Terra Haute, Indiana.

Most of you will be praying for the victims of the Oklahoma City disaster tonight. I will be praying for McVeigh. I trust that God will not punish him for what happened. God will not judge the boy whose mother left him, the boy who was indoctrinated with a terribly twisted "religion" (Catholicism), the young man who was forced to kill in the Gulf War, nor the man who went terribly wrong in his thinking.

God does not seek revenge; God does not think like we humans. God forgives and loves all, even those who commit acts of horror and violence. I believe it is all part of God's plan. And God is love, love for what we cannot love or understand or accept.

I swear that this whole thing makes me want to cry. I hope that in a hundred years Americans will look back in astonishment at this moment in history and wonder how we as a nation could be so barbaric to engage in capital punishment.

McVeigh is reported to be in good spirits, affable and coridal, prepared, willing, and ready to die. Perhaps the example of Timothy McVeigh will do more than anything else to forward the idea that capital punishment is never right, not in any circumstance. Perhaps his death, and the deaths of those he killed, will serve to end the deaths of those hundreds of people who are executed year after year in the United States.

In that sense, McVeigh and those he killed will not have died for nothing.

-- McVeigh Is Me (I@am.mcveigh), June 11, 2001.


Jammy, your winnings are in the mail. This was one bet that I didn't mind losing. Not at all.

-- (Weeble@wee.ble), June 11, 2001.

Cool. I moved recently though. Hopefully the prison system will forward my mail. LOL!

-- jammy (jammin@with.jammy), June 11, 2001.

"I emphatize with the peculiar mindset a Catholic upbringing can accomplish."

"I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul."

That doesn't sound like the Catholic mindset to me.

-- (McVeigh is @ product. of our world), June 11, 2001.



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