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.