Subj:	In Preparation for April 19, 1997
Date:	04/18/97
To:	EdKY01@hr.house.gov

Rep. Whitfield,


I had coffee the other night with a victim of the Oklahoma City Bombing. 
I recall that at one point she said of her husband, "He's gone. He'll 
never be back." To this I replied, "Are you sure?".

"Murderers", she called them. And she is right in the fullest sense.

I don't know the exact mentality of those who would engage or threaten 
such acts, but I think that I can characterize them. They are people in 
a hung-over Cold War mentality, who justified their existence in opposition 
to Communism, and who were over-reached and left behind when the Soviet 
Union ceased to be a threat. They resent Globalization, which has the 
unfortunate synonym of New World Order, because it implies a new set of 
responsibilities including the conservation of natural resources such as 
oil so that the world can have more and so that we do not push up 
International prices for Europeans and others who must pay tax on top of it.

If you will notice, quite a bit of anti-government hostility has been 
directed toward train systems - citing Arizona in particular -- I think 
because they represent a detraction regarding the Personal Independence 
which was possible when we justified our existence as a counterweight to 
Russia and China. And the rest of us have a choice; we can either conserve 
in a free-spirited humanitarian gesture, or we can wait until economics 
forces us and reveals the Tim McVey hiding in a good many of us in some 
degree or another.

It has recently been proposed that our Mexican border be opened up fully 
to Motorized Freight Carriers which are considerably heavier than ours. 
And a multitude more unsafe from several perspectives: from a mechanical 
viewpoint; from a drug transport viewpoint; and from the standpoint of a 
possible future terrorist avenue for destruction. And we must anticipate 
the future conservatively, for you see once the momentum toward truck 
transport has been established, it will be difficult or impossible to 
stop. There should not be allowed across our border with Mexico a single 
large truck which has not been sniffed for drugs and explosives, with an 
eye toward checking them for trace radioactivity in the future. A pound 
of weapons grade plutonium does not have to be fizzed (exploded) to do its 
harm. If properly spread - a heinous oxymoron - it can render hundreds of 
square miles useless for millenia.

And what if we did somehow manage to stop the trucks at some point in the 
future? Would the U.S. not appear paranoid at that point in time? Might 
it then not cause people to panic?

Then there are the more often cited reasons for inter-modal freight transport 
which are sufficient unto themselves: it is on average over five times more 
fuel efficient; it frees up personnel for genuinely productive - and not 
fuel-destructive - labor; it keeps our roads economical and eliminates 
increased indirect subsidies; and it makes our roads safe or even safer. 
And inter-modal freight can be inspected while it is enroute, before it 
has had a chance to encounter cultured areas.

And the Middle-East. Who wishes to trust Tehran and Bagdad enough to take 
an irreversible step? Who wishes to eliminate one of the last means of 
peaceful protests which we have left?

When innocents such as young Israeli schoolgirls are killed I want to protest, 
but cannot and still survive. I must drive a car. I must take a plane.

And it was for this reason that I alluded to several American Martyrs in a 
piece which I wrote called American Portrait:

I am the Mother of three son's fallen, one to the seen, two to
the unseen; all to evil. And tyranny winced, stunned in its path,
and fell backward. Grant that I may never see the day when the
fall of good men (my sacrifice) carries no effect, for in that
day we are all condemned. You ask for whom the bell tolls, it
tolls for my sons; and for thee. (Allusions to Rose Kennedy, after
Ernest Hemingway).

And the Middle-East again. If world order and our national survival dictate 
liquid fuel conservation and price stability in any case, and if such 
sovereignty-inspired conservation is reproachable to Tehran, Bagdad, and 
others, would it not be better to face them down now before more nuclear 
and chemical weapons are available?

Both Judaic and Christian thought indicate that God is omniscient, that 
He sees all history and all future as though it were an instant in time. 
To my mind this is one of the reasons that symbols such as the Menorah are 
symmetric indicating that God sees forward and backward in time with equal 
clarity. To the extent that we set up more death by short-term economics 
while denying long-term humanitarianism, we are murderers ourselves.

We have a choice beginning April 19, 1997. We can either opt for the solution, 
in which case the woman's husband will be among us for a good long time. Or 
we can opt for the problems, in which case he, and probably many more of us, 
will be gone forever.


Sincerely,

Phil A. Hughes
RAIL/90
RAIL/90 Oklahoma

Box 60522
Oklahoma City  OK  73146

405-948-0858

RAIL90@aol.com
RAIL_90@compuserve.com
RAIL_90@msn.com


RAIL/90 Web Site at:

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