Bits and Pieces

We used to make a big deal of the Waco slaughter, and I still recall the bumper sticker: “Is your church BATF approved?” But when independent researches pulled off the band-aid to reveal the putrid lies beneath, that sound bite missed the point. And then the Murrah Building bombing, Terrance Yeakey, Kenneth Trentadue… and now we consider those pretty minor. Not forgotten by any means, but simply the opening salvo of the war on citizens. Now it’s Waco everywhere, every day.
Some changes come slowly, and we realize them later. My self-identification as a Christian Mystic came after a decade of slow shift. Other things come as shocks. When Waco first came across the TV channels, I was on the government’s side. A few years later, when the Feds got me kicked out of my church, I realized what a fool I’d been, and tossed all my DARE Program stuff into a bonfire.
Don’t get me wrong; the Branch Davidians were a hideous bad religion. But that was not the way to deal with them. They weren’t that kind of threat. I can understand what got JFK murdered, but for all the digging, it seems Waco was just blundering into something. No real threat to anyone, just a confluence of bad trends coming to a head. There were no good guys, and too many bad guys on all sides, making too much out of nothing. Trentadue’s murder was the same kind of thing, only more stupid, a simple case of misidentification. Yeakey I understand, because he was going to blow the lid off a huge cover-up in the Murrah Building Bombing, itself something too bizarre to contemplate.
Each of these events are like old friends. If you are a thoroughly independent type person, as I am, most of your friends will tend to be the same. It’s not that I don’t care; I’m very warm and touchy-feely with those who tolerate it, and ornery enough to do it with some who don’t like it. But if whatever made us good friends goes away, we don’t stop being friends, we simply don’t have any reason to communicate all the time. So if I see my best buddy from the time I served as a Military Policeman, we’ll share a big bearhug and talk about our lives. Then we’ll part all warm and fuzzy and not talk again until the next encounter, whenever that might be. I don’t have any emotional need to keep things warm and fuzzy if there’s nothing to share. What we did so much of together in those days is no longer possible. So it is with those conspiracies. I’m not spending much time these days digging into the various cover-ups, but I’ll read any new discoveries if I run across a report about them.
And on days like today, I remember both.