American Everyman, Joe Stack: He’s You. He’s Me.
The government doesn’t want us to read Joe Stack’s dying declaration. They moved quickly to suppress it, but their efforts proved futile, thanks to the Internet.
Stack’s musings aren’t the best or the worst in the literature of suicide notes. It’s not in a class with actor George Sanders’s “I’ve seen it all, done it all, and I’m bored,” but it is hard to look away or dismiss once you’ve read it. The statement is long, and that itself works against its effectiveness in our short attention span age. Of course, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence face the same problem nowadays.
But it’s a mistake to dismiss Stack’s pages as the ranting of a madman, the disjointed grumbling of a chronic loser so unlike the rest of us that we needn’t take it seriously. It’s a tragedy and unfortunate, yes, but come on! How many people are there running around like Joe Stack?
Conservatively, I’d estimate millions. Stack’s dying declaration is most fascinating because it sounds like so many people I know. At times he perfectly articulates the core position of the Tea Baggers, while at others he speaks clearly for those who wonder what happened to all that progressive hope and change we elected in 2008. Either way, millions sympathize. Maybe not with killing themselves by flying planes into buildings (yet) but with his key complaints, well, a lot of Americans are right there with him.
Like Stack, they’re frustrated and furious with our government. They’re convinced that elected officials from top to bottom, with very few exceptions (hang in there, Dennis Kucinich), do not care about them in the least, being bought slaves of their financial masters (banks, insurance, and drug companies). They don’t need polls or op-eds or what passes for journalism in the media to tell them that the middle-class is nearly extinct, that the wealth of the land writhes between the grubby paws of a greedy 5% of the population.
En masse, they’re beginning to wonder what it’s going to take to turn things around. The more time passes with no good faith answers and ideas, the more this smoldering citizen army drifts toward violent solutions.
Joe Stack reached that point of no return. Joe Stack, described by his ex-wife as a good, kind man, arrived, like anyone repeatedly abused and battered and ignored, at a point where he could contemplate and do the unthinkable. History tells us it will happen again, and in greater numbers, if we do not address the cause of the sickness.
That root cause is greed, which is itself as old as love and death. It’s critical that we face up to this. The time is coming when a Martin Luther King, Jr., of economic conditions will appear to articulate a vision of a more advanced, compassionate society and inspire a generation (or two) to move as one unstoppable mass. We’ve seen it in our lifetime in the Civil Rights Movement. We’ve seen it in the collapse of the Berlin Wall. We’ve seen it on thousands of occasions as men and women have come together to advance humanitarian causes. We will see it again, too, and it will be much more terrifying to the powers-that-be than planes flying into buildings.
As for Joe Stack, may he rest in a peace he could not find in his own country, and may every single one of us deeply ponder all of the people and conditions that prodded him to his end.
Here is a poem of mine that seems appropriate to this occasion.
Grateful
Be grateful that you live
Inside the head you do.
How many times have you
Gone sailing through
Your bed or favorite chair to
Wave a sign in the riot
Of traffic, Need Money, Please!
How many times have you
Suffered with the losers
Of war, or chafed and simmered
On a reservation, or brokered
The rescue of many from fear?
How many hours have you
Survived the lessons of gender
Change, or held your hero,
So splendid because of you?
Be grateful. Be father and mother,
Be teacher, sister, and brother
In all that you dream and do.
Against the day your ledger
Is opened up to you.