A friend on a forum asked why there was no outrage among the "good Amurrican" types who expound so passionately upon non-domestic terrorism.  In quick succession, we've had the UU shooting, Tiller's murder, and now the shooting at the Holocaust museum.  They have some pretty damning factors in common: the criminals were domestically produced, all were done explicitly in the name of conservative values and against liberal ones, and all failed to rally nearly the public excitement of crimes performed by "other kinds of people". 

It's easy to pass this off as run of the mill dumbass hypocracy, but when we stop pigeonholing people blindly we may realize that they're the same people who give us a smile and an awesome chicken cheesesteak at the diner, or lovingly help out a kid when she scrapes her knee on the far side of the playground from Mom, or go out of their way to give anyone a ride home after a car breaks down.  Understanding that, knowing these people are members of your, yes, your and my own community, we may feel compelled to root out a deeper, more complex, more human understanding of this tendancy.  I am disgusted by this the lack of stance taken by the majority of the American public on these violent acts, especially those people who take such a virulent stance to acts of violence perpetrated by non-Americans.  But more than anything - I am confused by it.  How can people not see the terror implicit in these acts?  How can they not compare it to the non-domestic terrorism that has people wiling to give up all their civil liberties and go on murderous rampages in other countries?

The simple answer is, they don't want to admit to what's in their own back yards.  They don't want the bad guy to be their neighbor, so they're going to turn a blind eye to it.

I think it's a little more complex than that.

The "average American", or at least the loud-mouthed type of American who likes to claim exclusive ownership the label, can sympathize with the core beliefs of the criminals in these cases. They may not approve of the extreme actions taken, may even be upset and disgusted by those actions. But they are fundamentally able to identify with the person because they hold similar beliefs, come from a similar background. That moderates their emotional reactions toward the action and the perpetrator.

When a poor man breaks into a home and steals a television to sell it for food money or cigarette money or drug money, those of us who've been in poverty can empathize with his desperate act to feel normal (or even to survive). We may not approve, we may not be eager to commit those crimes ourselves, but at a deep level we can empathize with the human. The value of that empathy is the recognition that we will never solve most crime through punishment, but only through fixing the root causes. That doesn't mean that punishment has no value - but we realize it's a band-aid, not a solution. Whether it's natural empathy for someone similar to us, or intentional, learned empathy for someone whose life we don't understand (like terrorists from third world countries), those "True Americans" refuse to recognize the value in empathy and opening ourselves to other people's experience.

Those same people who are failing to speak out against the Holocaust museum shooter or Tiller's murderer like to sneer and call us "bleeding heart liberals" and claim that this empathy is a cover for giving certain people a free pass to victimize us. The irony is, this is exactly what they are doing subconsciously in these cases where the criminal is one of their own. They are honestly disgusted and disapproving of the severity of the action. But they cannot get worked up in a righteous rage about it because they can fundamentally empathize with the criminals, their rationales and their lifestyles.

Worse, and this they do not have in common with us bleeding-heart liberals, they are forced to face the fact that their own promotion of extremist viewpoints and lifestyles are partly to blame* for these people's choices about where to snap and enact violence. I'm sure that fact is niggling under the surface for every Bill O'Reilly fan out there. They don't want to let that niggling voice out from under the pillow where it's stuffed. If these people were to enter the public forum, they would be forced to face that fact, even called to account for it publicly. That recognition would be just too painful, so they refuse to risk it.

*No, conservative or extremist rhetoric does not make someone into a homocidal maniac (any joking aside).  If someone is destined to have those particular neurons snap and turn them into a gun wielding freak, that's going to happen whether they're listening to Rush Limbaugh or Thom Hartmann.  But we can't deny that circumstances and the active encouragement of extremist social systems can give direction and encouragement instead of discouragement and aid to someone who's on the edge.  That same extremism could theoretically be of the liberal sort... but in our country, is there any question, any doubt that rallying rhetoric is almost entirely of the conservative type?