LETTERS: FOUNDERS WERE ANTI-GOVERNMENT TOO

To the editor:

I am writing with regard to a Feb. 8 article, "Man wanted as bombing witness held anti-government views, acquaintances say." The headline and content of this piece are both very disturbing. In the past couple of years, the term "anti-government" has been wholeheartedly embraced by the media as a means to describe fanatics, extremists and terrorists, thereby attaching a very negative connotation to the phrase.

What reporters -- The Associated Press is notorious for this -- choose to ignore is the fact that our great nation was founded by men who were anti-government. These men organized a revolution against what they considered to be an unjust and burdensome government. Our Founding Fathers then wrote a Constitution whose purpose is to ensure liberty by limiting the power of a federal government and denying it the means to become oppressive.

The body of the article may as well have been written by the Ministry of Truth, an arm of the totalitarian government described in George Orwell's book, "1984." An acquaintance is quoted in the article as saying, "I remember him because it was strange that he never hung out with anybody. ... You'd see him out working, and then he'd go home. That was it." Since when did enjoying one's own company become evidence of wrongdoing? In "1984," Oceania, whose citizens are not even permitted to think negative thoughts about the Party, similar attitudes concerning behavior are the norm. "In principle, a Party member had no spare time and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not taking part in some kind of communal recreations, to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: `ownlife' it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity."

The entire article basically crucified this many, aggressively implying that "lack of involvement in the community," and an anti-government paper Eric Robert Rudolph wrote 14 years ago (as a high school student) are evidence that he murdered people. I ask the readers: How would you like it if the police and the press started dragging out old papers you'd written in high school a decade ago every time a bombing occurred somewhere within 250 miles?

The author was totally irresponsible in writing this article. Should we all look gravely upon a man who did not do cartwheels at the mere mention of the word government? Should we vilify and consider guilty and man who has not been arrested, charged or tried by a jury of his peers, simply because he chose to spend his time along or with his family? This article would have us do so, and it is dead wrong.

If you plant to print such a story such as this in the future, take care to distinguish fact from fiction, evidence from conjecture. The media, as the eyes and ears of the American public, should be watchdogs and champions of liberty, not the boot that stomps all over it.

MARK T. BRICKNER

Cape Girardeau