How about this, just in from the St. Albans Police Dept?
On November 23, 2010 the St. Albans Police Department initiated a criminal investigation regarding a threat of violence against the building occupants and State employees at the Vermont State Office Building on Houghton Street in the City of St. Albans. The actual threat was posted on Facebook by a client who was identified as Robert McMillan, age 31 of Fairfax Vermont. McMillan was upset about perceived slow services and a lack of speedy financial assistance that he was seeking.
It would appear that Mr. McMillan has encountered the log-jam in state services that we have been discussing here. This is what the police report that he posted on Facebook:
“This message is too anyone who is friends with the workers at the state building, tell them to stay home if they don’t want to be in the middle of a riot… if people don’t get their benifits and I find enough people, let’s just say, columbine was nothing.. Hunger, will make people do crazy things..”.
McMillan was apprehended in Fairfax and will face a charge of False Public Alarm.
While Mr. McMillan’s threats may not have been genuine, they bring to the table the reality that, when cutbacks in public services that would normally be extended to unstable people are joined by failure to deliver relief to the desperately poor, the combination can have terrible implications for civil society as a whole.
The cuts in services are horrendous and that there needs to be serious push back against them, but this response wasn’t a consequences of the cutbacks. This response was the consequences of someone choosing to post something reckless and thoughtless in a public forum.
I want to make this clear: the cuts need to be addressed with all due haste and alarm. But I can’t justify using this incident as a part of that alarm. What this guy did was threaten people who are trying to do their job under very difficult circumstances and to do so is every bit as obscene as the cuts themselves.
That these police officers (a.k.a. public employees) were doing their job and arrested this cretin before he could act. Thanks to them and to all the state employees who are bearing the brunt of the public’s frustration with this delivery system in progress.
State and non-profit front line workers are subject to this kind of harassment from time to time in any year, unfortunately. Not all eligible and deserving recipients of public assistance are nice people too. Some are jerks, as with the general population.
This incident should not be used to inflame an already bad situation. The people doing the application processing are working their butts off. Many have been temporary “redeployed” from other essential functions to get through the backlog.
So, what happens now? Well, the St. Albans police department could see this as an opportunity to justify a demand for more “tools” to deal with an increasingly desperate populace, and they’ll order up a box of tasers for xmas. And since there is (apparently) still ample money in the system (Federal as well as state, thru various homeland security related channels), they’re likely to get what they claim to need.
Meanwhile, social services, food stamps and other programs branded as “expensive”, “wasteful” and, well, socialist, will be further cut, both at a state as well as federal level, in a futile but endless attempt at appeasing the irate and increasingly unreasonable tax payers while still somehow funding wars, top-tier tax cuts, various hedge fund bailouts, etc.
The upshot will be further frustration among the growing number of increasingly marginalized people languishing at the bottom of the food chain, some of whom will be tempted to get out their pitch forks, and that, in turn, will legitimize the increased demand for firepower on the part of law enforcement.
Does that sound about right?
Being mammals, humans are not immune from the inclination to attack when they feel endangered. Some humans will do the attacking in a metaphoric sense (like working to change policy) and others will take a more blood-thirsty path. Riots and carnage are often associated with revolts by the underclass in societies throughout history, when their circumstances become too bleak.
This person, sane or insane, apparently believes he is endangered by the lack of social services, and threatened to attack as a result. As the underclass remains unaided in our failing economy, more people, sane or not, are likely to feel similarly.
Most won’t go to extremes (thank goodness), but some will, and it’s important that we recognize and understand that fact.
What does it mean for us as a society that more and more people will find themselves reaching a point where they choose irrational acts to assuage themselves? Are there things we can do to minimize the number of people who reach that point? Either way, if we don’t minimize the number of people who feel that way, what will we, as a society, choose to do to mitigate the resulting violence? One need not approve of violence to recognize that it often occurs in response to difficult economic circumstances.
Let’s think again about how this all came about.
Staff at the Agency of Human Services was cut by 300 workers.
Caseload increased.
Challenges for Change meant that they were looking for ways to improve efficiency. As Con Hogan pointed out, this is a laudable goal but takes more money, not less to implement before you can achieve savings.
But we can’t raise the money we need to provide these needed services because that would have to come from people that have the money and don’t want to part with it. And politicians aren’t willing to take the heat to obtain it.
So, we have people that are in desperate need of services that are totally unable to get through to those whose job it is to help them. Telephone wait times were reported as over 200 minutes.
Incredible frustration and helplessness results. Some people act on that in unfortunate and illegal ways. What else do they know that they can do?
The individual in question should not have done what he did. He may choose to take a necessity defense.