September 29, 2002- We Saw This Before

As we move into the last few months of 2002, we have a new buzzword on America. That buzzword is "terrorism." How many times have you heard that word spoken this year, how many fuckin' times have I typed that word this year, how many different ways have you seen it written or heard it spoken, and so forth. "Terrorist" is everywhere these days. It has become that catch all phrase for everything evil in society, even replacing drugs in that spot. There are all sorts of different types of terrorism now, too. There is "regular" terrorism, bio-terrorism, cyber-terrorism, domestic terrorism, and so on. All of these terms are used to describe acts of evil and malice perpetrated upon a society. You have the shit like what bin Laden did in 2001, and that one falls under the column of general terrorism. You have the cyber wars going on between the Israelis and Palestinians that are related to their disputes, and that one falls under the heading of cyber-terrorism. There has been great concern about the use of smallpox or other such diseases as weapons, and that is one is called bio-terrorism. Then, there was the anthrax outbreak from about a year ago, and that one is known as domestic terrorism now. All throughout America, you hear about how no one can believe that these things have come to pass and how society has changed for the worse and all of that shit.. People are wailing about how they cannot cope with these new things and how terrible they are and so on. The anthrax attacks of last year were especially tough on the American psyche. The people were already scared shitless in many cases from the catastrophic events that they had seen on September 11th, 2001, and were not in the mood to take much more, but it was more that they got. In several places in America, people were sickened and some eventually dies when they received anthrax-laced letters either at home or at work.This created panic in America that had not been seen in quite a while. In many ways, it was easier for the American people to understand what happened on September 11th than it was to understand this anthrax shit. In September, it was these evil foreign dudes that had perpetrated this heinous act because of their hatred of the American way and life and because they were religious fanatics and so forth. So there was a "Bad Guy" a tangible enemy to look at and hate. When the anthrax letters hit, there was no such bad guy to look at. There was no one to look at. Even worse, it was obvious that this had not been perpetrated by some evil foreigner either. This had all come from within the United States, and was obviously done by an American citizen. In a time that was possibly the worst that America had ever seen, one of its own people had decided that he was going to make things worse. And that he did, by starting a new wave of hysteria throughout an America that was still reeling from the first one. This is what made it so hard for many Americans to comprehend. Here we were in a time of unprecedented crisis, when all Americans needed to band together as one to get through it all, and a fellow American was going and making things worse than they already were, obviously taking advantage of the situation. There was no coincidence that this happened when it did. So this ushered in the term "Domestic Terrorism" in the lexicon of America. One of its own people had decided to go onto the terrorist business for himself and see what he could do. So far, he has killed a few people and eluded the Pigs for a year now. He has made the history books by his actions as well. He has made the American people well aware that domestic terrorists are alive and well in America today, even though most American citizens never thought that such a thing could ever happen. They never thought that one of their own could ever or would ever be capable of doing such a thing as spreading terror throughout America. If some of these American had longer memories, they could have realized that this fact of a fellow American spreading terror throughout his own country is nothing new at all. In fact, America has seen this Domestic Terror scene before.

Twenty years ago, here in the Chicagoland area, there were some people that had headaches, whether due to the stresses of daily living or whatever. So what they did was to go and use some of the over-the counter medicines available to treat such things in America and in other First World countries. These particular people went for the non prescription version of Tylenol. They followed the instructions on the label and took a couple of capsules of the stuff. Within minutes, these people all collapsed to the floor of the place that they were at, and became stone dead forever. There was a paramedic that responded to a couple of these cases. He saw that these people had died from sudden asphyxiation, something that happens with acute cyanide poisoning. He found out that all of these victims had taken Tylenol a little while before they died. So, the paramedic took the bottles that these pills that they had taken were in, and had them analyzed by a chemist. The results came back that there were several capsules in every one of these bottles that contained cyanide rather than Tylenol. So, it became obvious that someone had been using these Tylenol capsules to poison people with cyanide and kill them. A press conference was called to release this fact to the public, and then the hysteria was on like nothing ever before. There was an instant recall of all Tylenol products nationwide. Every bottle of the shit that could be found was and their contents analyzed. Cyanide was found in the capsules of more than a few bottles, not thousands, or even hundreds, but in a few dozen nationwide, with many of these bottles being concentrated here in the Chicago area. People were freaking the fuck out from coast to coast. The final death toll from this act was more than what the anthrax killer managed to do in 2001. In his scene, not everyone that he got died, some just got sick. With the Tylenol scene, everyone that took one of those capsules died within minutes, agonizing death at that. So there was plenty of terror spread all throughout America with this one. There wree other aspects of this that the anthrax dude could not make happen too. With him, all we had in terms of copycat shit was people taking some kind of white powder shit and telling someone or inferring that it was anthrax or some other biological agent, which it was not 100% of the time. No one successfully copied what he did. But with the Tylenol thing, it was copycat heaven in America. Within days of this story breaking, there were reports from stores all across the country about something on the shelf being tampered with in some way. There was insecticide in soda, pins in candy, razor blades in meat, caustic chemicals in liquid products, and of course, all kinds of weird and dangerous powder shit put in over-the-counter capsules of every kind, so much so that every brand of capsules had to be pulled from the shelves to put a stop to it all. Every day, there were stories about this type of shit going on somewhere in America. E$specially here in Chicagoland, which was the epicenter of it all. You almost had to x-ray and spectronomically analyze everything that you bought at the store to make sure that some fuckin' screwball hadn't tampered with it in some way. And some of these idiots were successful in harming others by what they did too. There were many people throughout the country that were harmed by these adulterated goods, and a few more died from it too. So, the death toll from these acts of what is now called domestic terrorism was much higher than what the anthrax dude was able to do. Plus, there was someone that decided to take advantage of the situation there, too. That was Mr. James Lewis, who had the bright idea to write an extortion letter to the makers of Tylenol , Johnson and Johnson, and tell them that if they wanted the killing to stop, that they should pay him some big amount of money, I forget what it was. Well, Johnson and Johnson went straight to the Pigs with htis, and the Pigs went straight for Mr. Lewis, and busted his ass forthwith. They tried and tried to find anything that they could to tie him into the actual Tylenol poisonings, but all they could do was come up a surveillance tape in a store where some of the poisoned capsules were found around the time that they were found. So, the Pigs had to settle for convicting him of writing the extortion letter, they had proof of that, and Lewis spent the next 13 years in prison. But no one to this very day has ever been charged with these killings, just like no one has yet been charged in the anthrax killings, even though both investigations had(or have) a prime suspect. Also, there has never been a reason given for why the Tylenol killings occurred, whether it was out of some sort of pathological hatred, or some sort of sick commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the debut of "The Beverly Hillbillies" on CBS TV, we have never found out. Just like we have not found out why the anthrax killings occurred last year. So, the parallels between these two situations go on and on and on. What that proves is that the acts of a year ago were nothing new in America, they were not even anything that America had not seen in a worse fashion in the past. So, we had indeed seen this all before.

When these acts happened back 20 years ago, they changed American society forever. Mr. Businessman had to lose a lot of his money because he had to go and learn how to re-make and re-package his products so that they'd be safe on store shelves. The capsule form of drugs had to go, because that was just too easy to tamper with. They were replaced with the caplet, a pill made in the shape of a capsule. Every form of product packaging had to be changed. There had to be a lot more security in packaging. All sorts of tamper-proof locks and packages and seals and the like were added to products, and of course the cost of all of this was passed right on to the consumer. But it was better than buying shit at the store that could kill you, or at least kill you quickly anyway, not like pork rinds or Oreos or chitterlings, shit that kills you slowly. So, products were made safer, and the consumer was happy, and Mr. Businessman did not have to face all kinds of lawsuits about tampered products and shit. So that act of domestic terrorism changed American life profoundly. What the effects of the anthrax things will be have not been fully realized yet. There was not such a great state of emergency in that case, because it was well known that these were isolated cases and that the entire mail system was not compromised by it all, juts a part of it. Back in 1982, there was widespread panic that there was severe contamination of just about everything on store shelves all across America. So the countermeasures to this had to be implemented quickly before there was any more trouble. With the anthrax thing, there will be changes in how the mail is handled, but they have been implemented slowly, not at the accelerated pace that the shit was introduced 20 years ago. Since the number of copycat crimes was low in the anthrax case, and none of them resulted in any further deaths, things are progressing at a more reasonable pace then they did 20 years ago. The fact that the copycatting of the anthrax thing stopped reasonably soon helps too. But it is inevitable that that act of domestic terrorism will permanently affect American life too. Not just in the mail department, but in everyday life too. It has already made American paranoid of any kind of powdery substance of any kind. Products that are made in this form are going to have to change things so that they can stay in business. The US Mail is losing ever more customers to private mail carriers after this. And, most importantly, it has awakened Americans to the fact that one of their own is every bit as capable of committing acts of terrorism as any Islamic fanatic on the other side of the world is. That is going to be the biggest effect that the anthrax shit has on American society. That effect may very well help bring about the rise of the Police State in America, the limiting if citizen's rights and freedoms, or many other social catastrophes. That all remains to be seen. What is obvious for the here and now is that none of this activity is anything new, America has seen it before and dealt with it before. Sadly, this is all a rerun of something that no one ever wanted to watch again. The last time, it did not permanently ruin American society, just made it a little worse, and if the same comes out of the anthrax thing, that is the best that can be gotten out of a very bad situation.