I’m still in shock. Don’t read what follows unless you’re willing to sleep in your comfy-cozy  High Point Police-protected beds a little less…peacefully.

Last night a total stranger assaulted, attempted to rape, and perhaps kill my oldest and  best friend, Linda in her own home.   She lives at home alone on McCain Place in North East High Point, a few blocks from High Point University.  She’s alive today because she’s an exceptionally strong and resourceful woman, in no sense a “victim” by disposition and constitution, and perhaps because of the combined grace of God and the little chrome-plated 38 I gave her for her birthday a few years back, because she lives alone and, well, I worry about her.   While being strangled and man-handled, she fired three shots at her assailant.  After about ten minutes of extraordinarily determined—and resisted–efforts to have his felonious way with my heroic friend, the criminal gave up and left.

I’m sorry that at this point I can’t share more details of Linda’s horrifying ordeal, because the police are presently searching for her assailant, still at large.  The present publishing of those details might hinder their success in nailing him, and Dear God knows how I want them to nail him.

Just before Sunrise on Monday morning, she encountered her domestic invader and personal tormentor in the darkness of her bathroom, where he was lurking in wait to spring his attack.  She had her gun within reach, having been the victim  of  several previous burglaries, all reported to and investigated by High Point Police over the past 2 years.  The prior burglaries involved breakings and enterings, and some theft was involved.  Again, exact details at this point must be withheld. (In addition to being Linda’s friend—and now her number-one fan—I’m proud to be her attorney).

I don’t want to make this about me.  In my state of shock and awe, however, something quite strange occurred to me this Tuesday morning after….while I was reading the paper with its several articles relating to our national nemesis… Al Quida, bin Laden, Hamas, Saddham….those bad “insurgents” in Iraq. THOSE TERRORISTS… giving us enough collective fear to scare us into keeping the same fascists in power who took us to war because we’ve grown  afraid of the enemies we’ve accumulated outside and inside our borders. Accumulated principally through our oily alliances with Israel and sheiks in their respective war with and indifferent depredations of the majority of native Muslims in their midst.

Yesterday morning, while the police were doing their C.S.I. thing in Linda’s house, and as I was cleaning the blood off her brave, beautiful and brutally-contused face, I could think only of retribution… Hunting down, arresting and slamming her sick assailant in the slammer…for the balance of his miserable life. I awoke this morning with a disconcertingly  different perspective. Linda wasn’t a victim of a local burglar, and would-be rapist; she was the victim of domestic terrorism.

Just as those depressed, sex-starved and brain-washed Islamic boys, seduced by the promise of prurient paradise in return for self-sacrifice, are all victims before they are molded by imbecilic ideologies into killers,  this “felonious” burglar of Linda’s—inevitably had his story, served his term as “victim” to some form of developmental  degradation and indoctrination before he sank to the level of…burglar and rapist.  What that degradation and indoctrination in specific detail comprise constitutes a story yet to unfold…hopefully at a soon-to-be sentencing session in down-town court.

“Has he…(I)…finally gone nuts?”…. I can hear some of you saying. I don’t think so. There is a likeness. There are denominators common to the terrorism Bush claims to be fighting and the terrorism to which my friend almost fell fatally victim this bright Sunday night, Monday morning, while many of us were getting ready for work.

Before I qualify what those common denominators are, let me first quantify their occurrences, and their consequences:  In these United States, (e.g., take 1996) over one million felonies were committed.  Precisely, 43,839 were charged in the Federal Courts and 997,970 in the State courts, for a total of 1,041,809.  In 1996 the population of the U.S. was 265,228,572, which meant that more than one out of every 265 of us committed a felonious crime against another of us.  In 2002, in the South alone, there were nearly 7,000 murders—twice the loss of souls in bin Laden’s attack on N.Y, the worst “terrorist” attack in the history of our nation.  In the entire nation that year (2002), three were 34,910 murders.

If you define “terrorism” as the rape, murder, kidnapping, torturing  or otherwise grievous assault on a people by another for the sake of inspiring fear in  and/or exerting control over that people, our country is under the siege of its resident terrorists in a manner and degree that relegates bin Laden and Al Qaida to petty offender status as competing terrorists.  What matter those foreign Muslims collecting weapons of mass destruction when we have residents among us destroying our masses?

Let me now disinter  my lead: The common denominators that I say bail me out of bedlam in my present thesis:  Every Islamic terrorist who ever failed in a suicide mission and lived to debrief his tale to psychiatric authorities has been diagnosed  a psychotically-depressed (and extremely horny) young man. They’re not allowed to date, touch or even see a woman until a marriage is brokered for them by their fundamentalist patriarchs…most often with a female who’s really not the one they would have fancied or chosen had they been allowed to take part in the selection process.  When these financially and libidinally desperate and destitute young men are shown the way to attain Allah, the deaths of their enemies, surcease from their worldly suffering and similar wealth for their parents (except for the 39 virgins on as many couches, which is the jihad’s private stock offering), they invariably say YES to terrorism.  They become the ICBM’s—the Intercontinental Ballistic Muslims for their cowardly manipulators, who, as our Bully-boy Bush, declare the wars and send the sons of others to the fronts to wage them.

This assailant of Linda’s certainly wasn’t a jihaddist  searching for Allah’s soft array of virgin-stocked couches,  I can hear you saying as I write…as I heard myself saying when the idea first occurred to me.  Oh yes he was.  This Tuesday morning, that was my  epiphany…Oh yes, he certainly was.  All the denominators were there….between the Eastern and the American terrorist….the ones presently holding that Christian Monitor reporter, and the one who held Linda on Monday morning, in those dark moments before sunrise.

When Jesus (and the Dalai Lama, and others among our great prophets in their own times) have admonished us to love our enemies, they’re really telling us to …know our enemies. It’s hard to hate what you truly understand.  If and when we get to know them, we will see those common denominators…the things that motivate men to become terrorists among their fellow men. They are always the same. They consist of any mixture of the following “sufficient conditions” to become a terrorist among peaceful co-habitants: (1) abuse (2) parental and institutional neglect with resulting ignorance (3) poverty (4) hunger (5) social and sexual privations (6) failure to experience at any time unconditional love (7) exposure to criminal remedies for–or escapes from–(1) through (6), including, use of drugs, forceful taking of what was not given in (1) thru (6), and finally (8)..sociopathy resulting from living a life conditioned by (1) through (7)  to the point of habit and eventual addiction.

We Americans are a morally and materially impoverished, militant, arrogant and increasingly oblivious bunch of bullies over here now, and we need to stop and clean up our own back yards of our homeless, criminal and other terror-bound RESIDENTS.  Residents of our own communities who are terrorizing our own neighborhoods now at ten-fold the rate any foreign or resident-alien lot ever has or ever will.  Over 35,000 of us are murdered every year, and in 1997, there were 96,122 forcible rapes, of which though the majority were committed by friends or acquaintances of the victims,  about 20,000, as with Linda, were committed by total strangers.  Terrorists.

Accepting the suggested lesson – i.e. that there is little meaningful difference between foreign/clerical  and domestic/secular  terrorism, what’s the point I would make?  What’s the remedy I’d propose?

In a nutshell:  Let’s get the Christian  Hades out of Islam’s back yard and admit that , as between those two warring sons of Abraham, Israel and Islam, peace will come as soon (and no sooner) than it will come to any clans of Hatfield’s and McCoy’s who are willing to fight over desert sand few of us care much to visit, and fight for reasons which date back so far no one can remember who killed whose brother first.

After we bring our troops home, let’s use them to shore up our borders like they do the borders of Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland and every other sane country that realizes the world has enough people and the U.S. can no longer both thrive and serve as refuse repository for the over-population bleed off from other nations.  It is abundantly clear that the  Statue of Liberty’s obsolete open invitation ought to be openly amended in acknowledgment  of the fact that American is no longer taking care of  her own “tired, poor huddled masses….yearning to breathe free.”

While our troops are shoring up our borders against the influx of foreign terrorists, let’s invest some of those trillions of saved dollars to help our police protect us from the terrorists among us, and HUGE numbers of those dollars addressing and tending to those factors (1 through 8) outlined above, which combine to give birth to the terrorists among us.

These thoughts…and wishful ruminations are dedicated to you, Linda, my friend and our community’s  most recent victim of …real terrorism.

Dusty Schoch
High Point, NC
January 31, 2006
[email protected]