The Icy Precipice

Anders Behring Breivik built a bomb from chemical fertilizer, the way Timothy McVeigh did, and blew the hell out of a part of Oslo, Norway, the way Timothy McVeigh did in Oklahoma City. Breivik's lawyer says that his client is mentally ill.

Mental illness isn't a plain thing. It is usually just being a little too far out on the edge.

Breivik ("Bry-veek") said and believed the kinds of things we hear people say every day. He believed, apparently, that Norway should be a Christian nation, and that White people were somehow superior to other human beings or, at least, that Christians and Muslims did not belong in the same place.

I am hoping that Glenn Beck does not have access to chemical fertilizers. He says that those Norwegian kids who were shot were something like a Nazi youth movement during World War II. It must be that he equates the Norwegian Labor Party with Nazis. If Glenn Beck said that, as it is reported, he is insane, too.

It is not very far from calling ourselves "exceptional", to those arguments about us being a Christian nation, to being God's Chosen People. And what does that make everybody else?

When people say crazy things, we do not necessarily assume they are crazy people. Maybe we ought to. Glenn Beck says crazy things. So does Rush Limbaugh. Have you ever listened to those guys talk? that isn't harmless stuff! It is explosive!

Every day we hear people say things about gays that are as intolerant and ignorant as what other people say about skin color. Every day we read something about anti-abortion movements that make decent people cringe. It is not just harmless rhetoric when people speak of being a Chosen People, or say that we are an exceptional nation, somehow beyond the common pack. If we claim to be a Christian nation, then Buddhists and Taoists and secular people really are outsiders, aren't they; tolerated, at best?

We say the kinds of things that Anders Behring Breivik and Glenn Back say.

The edge of the precipice is icy.

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