Deluded Minority Poisons Society

The delusions that inspired Hitler and his Nazis - guns will make us strong, hate will show we’re brave, slaughter will make us safe - have not grown less hypnotic with the passing of 50 years. Like a virus, these lies are spreading through a paranoid subculture of the United States.

Let us be honest: The country’s angry new conservatism helped spread the disease. Talk radio has incited hatred against our government and its employees. Religious zealots conscript God as an ally in their political jihads.

Unless we want more bloodshed like the bombing in Oklahoma City, this country’s vast and good majority - including the vast majority of conservatives - must repudiate the wackos.

But how?

Just as the bombing showed us the madness of violence as a political solution, it also showed us what good people can do. President Clinton rightly quoted the Apostle Paul: “Overcome evil with good.” Within minutes of the explosion, people all over the country were pausing in their chores to pray, while rescuers rushed in with helping hands and professional skill. We have done the same thing often in our history.

This also is what we do, in the government that lately has been so viciously criticized. In government, Americans pool their resources to address national priorities: justice, defense, education, aid to the poor. It is true that government has flaws. That is no reason to hate and murder its employees - as we have learned, they are fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, sons, daughters. Humans, not anonymous bureaucrats. And when government disappoints us, we empower legislators to fix it peacefully.

The way for reasonable Americans to defeat the crazies is by continuing, as volunteers and as supporters of our government, to help one another.

We can use our freedom to expose and speak against the militias, the Aryans, the klansmen, and others who espouse loopy conspiracy theories and amass huge arsenals to fight the figments of their paranoia. This past weekend, about a hundred traveled from around the country to an Aryan youth conference in Hayden Lake. A week earlier, 300 gathered for a militia meeting in Post Falls. But in Spokane, nearly 1,000 people, Christians as well as Jews, crowded into Temple Beth Shalom Sunday night to remember Hitler’s Holocaust and to say, in stories and in song, “never again.”

In that gathering, and in the nationwide rush to help and comfort terrorism’s victims, were a power greater than any weapon.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board