The Flight to Nowhere

A few days ago, a crazy, bitter man flew a small plane into a building a couple of miles from here, my home. It happened within sight of my office. Our Executive Director saw it happen. Our receptionist's brother-in-law was driving by when it happened. He called her, and we started looking out of windows.

We could see the smoke from the fourth floor of my office building. It was horribly black, and didn't rise like a normal smoke. It went straight up instead of drifting off to one side. It looked like a gruesome crown hovering just above the building. Like evil spirits hanging in the air, waiting to swoop down at any time.

I know the details now: a man in trouble with the IRS set his house on fire with his wife and daughter inside, drove to an airport, stole a barrel of fuel, put it in a plane, got in and flew it into a building that leased space to the IRS.

I cannot wrap my mind around any of it. None of it makes sense.

Like hundreds of millions of Americans, I don't much care for paying taxes. Doing so amounts to a necessary evil. I don't much like it, but a loathing of the IRS in no way constitutes justifiable homicide. I recognize that and remain befuddled over how tax problems can lead to attempted mass murder.

Irony was not on the attacker's side that day, however. He crashed into a vacant suite of offices on the first floor. His mass-murder victim count: one dead (unless you want to count him, too) and two with injuries that required hospitalization.

He left behind a wife and daughter with nowhere to live. She faces foreclosure and possible bankruptcy because I don't think insurance companies honor policies when an owner sets his own house on fire. And any life insurance he might have had is probably null and void because he killed himself. Insurance companies don't like to pay for suicides, either.

While he claimed to die for a cause, all I see is the ultimate act of selfishness and cowardice. Instead of being a man and dealing with his problems, he blamed others and took revenge, even including his own family among the intended victims. To me that says "coward".

It's all too big for me to comprehend. How does one go from tax protester to attempted mass-murder? The scale is out of proportion.

I have to wonder if inflammatory talk radio combined with a news cycle that makes people famous for 15 minutes doesn't contribute. Talk radio feeds the impetus, and news cycles take advantage of it.

Andy Warhol predicted it: "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes". I'm not sure he anticipated the horrible reasons for which some people would be famous.
Perhaps he did. Someone shot him several years before he died.

In the final analysis, Warhol was a keen observer of and commentator on contemporary culture. I doubt that he would be shocked by the dive bomber, but he might be surprised.

I remain befuddled. I might understand it better if his goal was to kill a particular individual. And even then, I wouldn't really. I don't understand the impetus to kill except in self-defense. It's beyond my scope of understanding.

Attempting to kill nameless, faceless people because they work for a particular employer leaves me even further at sea. The total disregard for human life astounds me. It runs counter to every moral principle I hold and live by.

When it happened, I wondered if it might have been deliberate because of the circumstances. He had been circling overhead for a while and then flew full-speed into the building. Had he been dealing with mechanical problems, there's a toll road with fairly light traffic within sight that he could have set down on. None of it made sense.

No more than it makes today.

"Why?" usually ranks at the top of the list of questions in these situations. We know the who, what, when, where and how. But we don't really know the why. Except that someone wanted to die trying to kill as many people as he could.

I don't understand, and I doubt I ever will. Other than to say that God has sense of justice. The pilot went in very low on the first floor into an empty office suite. If he had taken the time the find out who was on what floor, the death and injury toll would have been higher.

The building is a mess, but the owners’ are going to try repairing it. That’s cheaper than tearing it down and starting over. The repairs will take a year or so.

One innocent man is dead and was laid to rest today. One coward is also dead. He died on impact. His funeral arrangements have yet to be released. If they ever will be. The family is probably worried about his grave being desecrated.

I keep wanting to ask someone “Was it worth it all?” But I don’t know whom to ask. The only person who could tell me died on a flight to nowhere.

Small Town Despots

I am not a nurse, but I work for nurses, so I know more about the profession than I ever expected. I know about the challenges of the profession, the high likelihood of early burn-out and the shortage looming over the profession that, if not addressed, will lead to more burn-out because of diminishing working conditions.

Still, I depend on them to take care of the people I love. To provide routine care when someone has minor surgery, and to provide palliative care when hope took the last train out and death took the same one in. To fiercely and vigilantly monitor their care.

Part of that means speaking up when things aren’t working. It means putting your money where your mouth is. It means doing the hard thing and picking up the pieces, later.

Too many people only get one chance at quality health care. If it’s not there, they might die. Every hospital admission, whether to the emergency room or a general ward, has the potential to end fatally. The possibility always hangs like a heavy, dark and wet blanket regardless of why one is there.

That’s why the case of the persecution of two west Texas nurses has gotten my dander up so bad. They filed a complaint against a doctor with political connections, ended up indicted because of evidence that was probably obtained illegally (complaints to the Texas Medical Board are confidential) and were subsequently fired and tried.

That’s not prosecution. It’s persecution. And there’s nothing right about it.

They did the right thing, and their lives got turned upside down and inside out.

I am not a nurse, as I said earlier. Nor do I want to be. It’s not a job I could do. My aversion to blood and sickness has led me to a career in accounting where the only bleeding I see is on a financial statement, and hopefully not too often.

I rely on nurses to take care of all the blood and gore. I respect their commitment to their profession and their patients. And to see them in any way constrained or intimidated while they treat and care for patients scares me. It could be my father or mother or partner they’re taking care of.

When my father was dieing, the nurse on duty told me not to bother about visiting time. She’d buzz me in to the ICU whenever I showed up. When my partner was in the CCU and crazy as hell, the nurse showed me the back entrance and told me use it whenever I wanted to. It was always open, he said. Use it.

Both of them did things that defied policy but were in no way criminal. They were taking care of their patients, and in their judgment, the rules could be bent to accommodate loved ones. And west Texas nurses didn’t even do that. They didn’t violate hospital policy unless the policy was to ignore and then punish nurses for expressing legitimate concerns about the quality of care their patients were receiving.

The doctor, hospital administrators, sheriff and D.A. all probably violated Texas law, which has explicit protections for nurses in cases like this. It provides for civil remedies, but not criminal penalties, however.

The problem the prosecution in this case came back up against and couldn’t overcome was that the nurses were ethically, morally and legally obligated to report their concerns. Can one break the law by obeying it? That doing so, even theoretically, was the case they couldn’t make.

They couldn’t make the case because it runs counter to every principle of the rule of law. We are a country of laws, one that the founders, had they been unsuccessful in their attempt to establish, would have lost everything, including their lives. While European aristocrats and petty dictators were ruling by caveat, we were making laws that applied to everyone.

If you lose sight of that, you should probably either have a religious experience (what I call a “come to Jesus” moment) or move to a country that doesn’t respect law. Find one with a petty dictator that you can cozy up to, and then wait to fall out of favor.

Law in a democracy is not arbitrary or capricious. Or at least should not be. When it becomes so, it points to a broader problem: the lack of will to abide by or enforce laws as written. To the peculiar ability of power to corrupt and allow petty despots to ignore them.

That is no more right in west Texas than it is in China, Iran or North Korea.

A small town despot is a despot, no less.

Half Truths and Whole Lies

For more than a decade, I lived the suffocating life of trying to pretend I was straight.  I knew when I was 12 or 13, but the guilt I felt was too overpowering to move beyond.  I prayed every night for God to change me. 

I dated girls and even tried to have sex with them.  They were willing; I was unable.

My last attempt was with Kathy.  She lived upstairs from me in what was once a grand old house that had been converted to apartments.  I was in grad school and still hoping I was straight or at least bisexual, despite my fascination with gay porn. 

Once we got naked and in bed, I realized I had no idea what to do with her boobs or other parts.  I knew instinctively what to do with a man, but didn’t know what to do with her. 

So I did what most men would do in that kind of situation:  I threw my clothes on in less than a minute and took refuge at a burger place that was open all night.  I sat and thought about the lie my life had become.

After that, I didn’t answer my door or phone for 3 days.  I sat on my couch and ignored everyone while I tried to make sense of my life.  My conclusion was that it was a lie that I had to correct.

On the fourth day, I answered the door.  I told Kathy that I was gay and always have been.  That I couldn’t admit it to myself, so I couldn’t very well tell her.  That I was sorry for any pain I’d caused her.

For the first time in my life, though, I could breathe.  I had been living a half-truth, but a whole lie. 

Kathy wasn’t too happy.  I was the latest of a string of boyfriends that ended up being gay.  But I had to end the living lie somewhere.  We remained close friends, and she was happy when I met my first partner and truly saddened when he died 20 years ago.

I have been in the same job for 10 years, and I’ve never said “I’m gay” to anyone there.  They either don’t care or just assume.  It’s a female-dominated workplace; they bitch about their husbands (or ex-husbands), and I bitch about mine.

None of them really know about my struggles and internal conflict about my sexuality.  They don’t realize that those struggles and conflicts have made me a stronger person, one at peace with himself.  I have already conquered the biggest challenge I will ever have to face.

Turning off life support for my first partner and, more recently, my father were easy by comparison.  I had grown into a man who knew who he was and what he believed.  One living outside the dark world of lies.

Now I live in the harsh light of day.  It’s not always easy, but it’s easier and better than living in the shadow of half-truths that add up to out-right lies.  At the end of the day, honesty is still the best policy.