
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, May 4, 1995                   TAG: 9505050024
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-16   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ANARCHISTS

RADIO FREE America. Missiles are being launched from the White House. Tanks full of legislators, lobbyists and IRS agents are crossing the beltway. EPA, HHS and OEO snipers have already reached main street. They are coming after us. But we are armed and ready, and we will never give in.

Say what? While many Americans see the federal government as an unwieldy system in need of serious fixing, a fanatical fringe sees it as a force of tyranny and evil moving into the hinterlands to steal our liberties and even our lives.

In fact, unbridled hatred and fear of the federal government are irrational - dangerously so, as we saw in Oklahoma. No wonder an emotional President Clinton lashed out Monday night in his strongest denunciation yet of armed fanatics who apparently prepare to overthrow a democratically elected government while professing to ``love'' America. ``People who say, `I love my country but I hate my government.' These people - who do they think they are, saying that their government has stamped out human freedom?''

Commenting on far-right paramilitary groups that have sprung up in many states, Clinton said: ``I don't know that there's another country in the world that would by law protect the right of a lot of these groups to say what they want to say, ... to assemble over the weekend and do whatever they want to do, and to bear arms, which today means more than the right to keep and bear arms; it may mean the right to keep and bear an arsenal of artillery.''

You betcha. No other country provides America's level of rights, freedoms and protections for those with a martial mentality and an angry bent against the authority of the nation's government. This country forbids no one to speak out against gun control or the welfare system or paying federal taxes; it prohibits no protest or assembling for whatever the cause. So where is the oppression?

Do we really believe, as Wayne LaPierre with the National Rifle Association warns, that ``jack-booted government thugs'' may soon be storming private homes ``to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us''?

Federal lawmakers and employees can be justly accused of excesses, of arrogant insensitivity. (Waco won't likely be forgotten any sooner than Oklahoma City.) Many Americans don't like the direction their government is taking. But the place to turn it around is at the ballot box, which thankfully we still have access to. That's what makes it our government, the absence of which is called anarchy.

by CNB