Mr. Beach implies that the current silence on the tragic events that unfolded recently in Homer is an indication that community concerns were misplaced. I beg to differ. There still runs a deep current of concern, even among those “strangely silent in the light of day.”
I would submit that the stillness is not due to insight suddenly achieved by “the ignorant, the enablers and the conspiracy theorists,” but is due to people patiently waiting for information. What is being enabled? What conspiracy has been theorized? Insults and name-calling have so clogged our media, that rational dialogue has almost disappeared.
It is not clear how “solipsism, prejudice and naiveté” are appropriate condemnations of parents anxious over the safety of their children, of individuals distraught over deaths and grievous injuries, and of citizens asking if there are ways to avoid such tragedies in the future. It is not clear what is “self centered and convoluted” about community efforts to avert further violence.
Mr. Beach rightly denounces speculation, but then engages in speculation. He chastises early reports that the 2-year-old child’s injury resulted from a bullet entering from behind. Permit me to point out that this was not the invention of a reporter, but came from the child’s mother and the physicians attending to the child. Regardless, a child was horribly injured, and though the question of who fired the shot is important, the more relevant question is whether this unthinkable act could have been prevented.
The incident at the airport was closely followed by another tragedy; we lost a vital young member of our community to an insidious drug. Methamphetamine is a national scourge. Unques-tionably, it is a grave danger that needs to be addressed. One positive outcome of this senseless death has been galvanizing community involvement in combating this problem.
Unfortunately, the close proximity of these two tragedies has created an overlap that has clouded the issues. Mr. Beach speculates that Jason Anderson “crept up to Alaska a year ago to deal methamphetamine.” No law enforcement agency has released this information. More egregiously, Mr. Beach speculates that it “was Jason Anderson’s junk that killed a teenage girl in this town.” This is precisely the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that Mr. Beach rails against. No one will dispute that we need to rid our community of this poison, but to use unrelated events to justify acts of violence is plainly wrong, and disturbingly reminiscent of national politics.
Good guys are indeed in blue uniforms. They are respected members of our community out of uniform as well. Support for our local police has in fact flourished through this difficult period. Their job is extremely demanding, we expect much of them, and we share in their tribulations.
It is challenging, however, to support stonewalling. More that eight weeks has passed since this incident, and most of us, Mr. Beach, are not shooting off our mouths, but are waiting patiently for answers to our questions. How much time is appropriate for our government agencies to withhold information?
We should avoid speculation, but we should not avoid asking questions. We must ask questions. And many questions remain unanswered. Jason Anderson did not come to the Homer airport with guns drawn and blazing, he was lured there by federal marshals. It does matter that the airport was packed with passengers, it does matter that many were students, and it does matter that all these people were placed in harms way.
We are waiting for answers as to why this situation was created by the marshals, and why it was not aborted before the tragic consequences culminated. We are waiting for answers as to why the marshals chose to endanger the children after they had been informed of this man’s volatility. We are waiting for answers as to why patience, restraint, and forethought were so minimally exercised. There may be good answers for our questions, but we are still waiting.
Homer lost a measure of innocence in March 2006. Our community was exposed to some heartrending scenes from which we are usually comfortably insulated. It is easy to whitewash what happened, and chalk it up to an inevitable slide into the morass of human corruption. After all, it was just a “creep” that was killed.
I don’t think many folks take the “cosmic hamlet” stuff literally. It is a little corny. Yet, I’m not sure it is such a bad aspiration. The moniker came from folks who believed that the slide into the morass is not inevitable, that we have some control over our existence and our community, and that we have the potential to rise above evil and violence. It is not a lie. It is a goal, a goal still worthy of examination.
Even in the light of day.
Allan Phelps is a Homer resident.
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