In one sense, justice has been done this day in Tennessee. Jim Adkisson, the shooter who violated the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church,will be spending the rest of his life behind bars.
But there are still troubling loose ends. Still wondering whether it was a hate crime?
"This was a hate crime," Adkisson wrote in a four-page "manifesto" he had left inside his truck and intended to serve as a suicide letter.
[snip]
This was a symbolic killing," Adkisson wrote. "Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate and House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I knew these people were inaccessible to me.
I invite you, if you are strong of stomach, to read the whole thing.
If I weren't one of the people whom he shot at, I could more easily be moved by the despair and self-loathing written here. "I know my life is going downhill fast from here," he said. "If you would take my sorry carcass to the body farm, or donate it to science, or just throw me in the Tennessee River." Here's a man who felt like he had no options.
But how did he feel like he could best use this time he had remaining?
Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them. Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather.
This is where my sympathy for him ends. He apparently remains unrepentant:
Matthew David Chamberlain, a 47-year-old nonviolent sex offender who shared a pod with Adkisson, said Adkisson insisted that the motive behind the attack was purely ideological.
"He said if he got out (of prison), he’d do it again," Chamberlain said.
I've got more thoughts about this, all still half-formed, but right now I just want to set this down: Obama's election will not save us. Adkisson read Michael Savage. He read Sean Hannity. He read Bill O'Reilly. And apparently Goldberg. His pain came from his own life, but his target was given to him by the Right Wing Noise Machine. The Right Wing Hate Machine, Borg-like, collectivized him. We need to resist this whenever and wherever it happens. Elections have consequences--fine. But so do words. Consequences to the families of Linda Kraeger and Greg McKendry. Consequences to Tammy Sommers and Linda Chavez, to Joe, Jack, and Betty Barnhart, to John Worth. Consequences to the entire congregation of the church. Consequences to my daughter, fortunately still backstage at the time, who never got to perform the play she and her friends had worked on for two solid weeks. To my son, wailing in the pews under my wife as she shielded him with her body.
It's easy for an event like this to get lost in the news cycle, the press of lost jobs and financial crisis. But Adkisson starts his letter with a lament to his lost job; these conditions also serve to fertilize the ground in which the seeds of hate get sown. We have some power to influence the conditions, but we have even more power to stop those seeds before they sprout.
UPDATE: Antidote. Here are the sermons of Rev. Chris Buice, in podcast form. I particularly recommend the ones from August, starting with the sanctuary rededication. The MLK weekend sermon is also great.
Here also is the Bill Moyers segment with Chris. Required viewing.
Background: Benintn's diary from the day. and
Elrod's diary, too.
Transcript, from the comments. For those, as ihumanable points out, who can't read the handwriting. Convenient also for those relying on reading software.
Thanks to all for the warm wishes and support. I'll pass them along to the congregation. Interestingly, the discussion on the church listserv mirrors the free speech/hate speech discussion we've been having here. Great minds run in the same channel.
Lots of good comments, by the way, about this murky issue of hate speech and how to deal with it. Perhaps a comment thread is the wrong place to really find answers, but we're a smart group of people. How do we accomplish the education that some suggest would help this situation? How do we face the issue of hate speech in other ways? This, obviously, has more than academic interest to me.