...but I can't help but feel familiar with him after reading his suicide letter. He was almost the same age as I, and it sounds like we've had some similar experiences. I'm not Joe Stack-- I've came to this point in my life pissed off but not despairing, and rather than taking my life, I'm more likely to just leave it behind and go try something less stressful.

But I still feel a lot of empathy for Joe Stack, and his complaints about the state of U.S. government and of society resonate with me.

There are lots of threads on DU condemning what Stack did. There are threads debating whether he is a right wing terrorist or a left wing terrorist, whether he's a tea bagger at heart or an anarchist. I don't want to debate any of those questions in this thread because I don't think they are very important questions, frankly. I'm not interested in assigning blame, or in "my side" dodging it.

I'm moved by Stark's anger about what has happened to the U.S.-- and I admit to sharing that anger. His voice resonates with me even if his hatred of the IRS is less of an issue for me than my anger about U.S. foreign policy and corporate culture. The society we are creating in this country is not a good one. Joe Stark makes me ask myself what I'm doing about that. I have some easy answers, but I need to take a longer look at some of the harder ones. Maybe we all do.

What Stark did was wrong, and it ultimately took away any hope he might have ever had for genuine redress of his grievances. But my friends, we don't make the rules anymore, or at least not many of them. Most of the means for redressing our common (and not so common) grievances have been made "wrong" by the institutions that seek to protect their interests against the people's interests. Most of the ways we have to fight back are illegal now, or socially unacceptable, or not what our employers want, or whatever. Change does not come easy, and The Man resists it with all the force of The State.

Stark's last words were about socialism and capitalism, about whether we take care of one another or elevate naked greed to a virtue. Make no mistake that in that struggle, the institutions of the state and of the people who want to maintain the status quo are arrayed against us.

I don't think I would have liked Joe Stark. The gulf of personality seemed too wide between he and I, at least judging by the comments he left behind. But I think we were pretty much on the same side.