Interesting read for insight as to why Rural America may be angry.
ARMED AND DANGEROUS: THE DESPERATION OF RURAL AMERICAAn Interview with Joel Dyer
Published in "The Sun"
December 1999
Eight years ago, I got a flat tire while collecting firewood way back on a dirt road in the hills of northeastern Washington. No spare. Thumping along at about five miles per hour, I came to a small house and asked to borrow a pump. The owner didn't have one, but offered me a spare tire instead. I drove home on the spare and returned the next day with his tire and a cake. The man, clearly a logger, asked if I wanted some firewood. I said sure, and he picked up his chain saw.
Before starting up the saw, the logger asked what I did. "I'm a writer," I said. He asked what I wrote. Relations between loggers and environmentalists being poor at best, I was tempted to lie, but nothing came to mind. So I told him the truth: that I was writing about how the big four timber companies in the Pacific Northwest had gotten their land illegally from the American public. The logger turned red in the face and started swearing. I was looking for a chance to make a break for it when I realized he was swearing not at me, but at the timber companies. An independent logger, he'd been put out of business by Plum Creek Timber Company and hated them even more than I did. Within minutes, we were swapping stories about Plum Creek's atrocities and planning how to take on the big corporations.
Too often, however, what seems like a natural alliance between environmentalists and people who make their living off the land - whether loggers or ranchers or farmers - never comes into being. Joel Dyer's book Harvest of Rage: Why Oklahoma City Is Only the Beginning (Westview Press) offers some compelling reasons why farmers end up allied not with environmentalists but with the far Right.
Dyer was drawn to write about the farm crisis when he learned that American farmers are killing themselves in droves: suicide has long since replaced equipment accidents as the primary cause of unnatural death on the farm. Dyer wanted to know why, and what could be done to help. So, working closely with Glen Wallace, head of the Oklahoma Rural Mental Health Department, he began to interview farmers throughout the Midwest, and to visit militia compounds to figure out their attraction.
He found people driven to desperation by a political and economic system out of control - one that does not represent them and, moreover, is destroying their way of life. And he found people with a level of anger and dedication that is inconceivable to most of us. "We will continue to see rural America turn to terrorism to protect its way of life," Dyer says, "because it doesn't have the numbers or the resources to fight any other way."
Dyer points out that, though we tend to think our nation's history is fairly smooth, we've always had "radical" movements: in the 1890s, the 1930s, the 1960s. Common people changed the world during these periods. The rise of the antigovernment movement is a sign that it could happen again. He has written: "There may be conspiracy afoot. But it's not a conspiracy of Jewish bankers against Christians; it's a conspiracy of wealth holders versus the rest of us."
A journalist living in Longmont, Colorado, Dyer was editor of the Boulder Weekly for four years and in 1997 won the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies' first-place prize for social reporting. He is now a frequent lecturer on college campuses and commentator on television and public-radio networks. His most recent book, The Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits from Crime (Westview Press), explores this country's prison-population explosion, the largest in history. Dyer has written for Mother Jones, Utne Reader, and the New York Times Magazine. He is currently cowriting a screenplay, with actor-author Peter Coyote, based on Harvest of Rage.
This conversation took place at the Boulder Public Library in June 1999.
more here:
http://www.derrickjensen.org/dyer.html
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