John Whitehead's Commentary
Pipe Bombers and the New Revolution: The Violent Cry of Generation Y
There is a new name to add to the roster of dissatisfied, violent young people of Generation Y whose panache seems to be engaging in acts of anarchy and rebellion: Lucas John Helder.
Also known as the Pipe Bomber, this seemingly normal 21-year-old planted 18 pipe bombs in rural mailboxes in five states in as many days, causing one letter carrier to injure his arm and lose his hearing; another to require 14 stitches in his right hand; and a 70-year-old farmer's wife to end up with a bloody face.
Those baffled individuals seeking some sort of logic behind Helder's pipe bomb expedition need look no further than David Fincher's 1999 film Fight Club. Adapted from Chuck Palahniuk's novel of the same name, the film is about two frustrated 20-somethingers turning to anarchy in an effort to destroy the materialistic establishment culture and bring back a world that is simpler and hopefully more sane.
For instance, the news media recently reported that in connecting the dots between the places where Helder planted his pipe bombs, one ends up with something resembling a smiley face--an image etched by anarchists in Fight Club on a building they had set fire to.
Even Helder's philosophy bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Tyler Durden, the main character in Fight Club. In a six-page letter sent to the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin, Helder wrote:
"I often wonder why so many people spend their entire lives consuming what is fed to them, without knowing if they are consuming anything at all... All of my family and friends were raised to believe...to be gullible...to be materialistic...to fear authority...to blindly follow. Do you wonder why people blow themselves up to hurt others?... Do you wonder why you are here? Do you wonder what is out there...way out there?"
Almost word for word, his letter could have been lifted out of Fight Club. As Tyler Durden says to Jack, the film's narrator:
Look at the guys in fight club. The strongest and smartest men who have ever lived--and they're pumping gas and waiting tables; or they're slaves with white collars. Advertising has them chasing cars and clothes. A whole generation working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy shit they don't really need. We're the middle children of history, with no special purpose or place. We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression. The great depression is our lives. The great war is a spiritual war.
If there were an instruction manual for the angst-ridden young people searching for meaning, Fight Club might be it.
In fact, with its distrust of corporations and modern pursuit of materialism, Fight Club might very well be the Catcher in the Rye for those belonging to Generation Y, also known as the Millennials or Echo Boomers.
After all, Helder is not alone in his discontent. Too many members of his generation--young men like 20-year-old American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh, 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold of Columbine infamy--have engaged in desperate acts of violence for us to consider them isolated incidents. (Lest we forget, Timothy McVeigh was 27 when he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.) Sometimes it appears to be senseless, as in the case of Charles J. Bishop, the 15-year-old who flew a single-engine Cessna into a Bank of America building in downtown Tampa, Florida several months after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
In size alone, this Echo Boomer generation, characterized as cynical and having a distinctly practical worldview, will command attention. Born between 1980 and 1996, these 70 million young people might just surpass the size of their parents' generation, the Baby Boomers.
According to BusinessWeek Online, one in four of them lives in a single-parent household. Three in four have working mothers. Disillusioned by a materialistic and self-involved culture, they are a generation to be reckoned with. As Jim DeRogatis wrote for Salon.com:
...a revolution is a-brewin'. A small but passionate vanguard of Generation Y has been galvanized by the issue of globalization. They see as their enemy the mega-corporations that are trying to spread consumerism to every corner of the globe, killing Western culture and turning us all into the equivalent of those cannibalistic zombies traipsing through the shopping mall in "Dawn of the Dead." In addition to our souls, they believe that corporatization is claiming the blood of the Third World, as child laborers from Beijing to Jakarta and sweatshop workers from Tijuana to the Philippines manufacture the overpriced jeans and useless sunglasses that American companies brand with their copyrighted logos and spend billions to market to us as indispensable accoutrements of our hip, modern lifestyles.
For many Gen Yers, convinced that there's not much to be hopeful about, paranoid about an increasingly intrusive and militant government, and resentful of marketing forces that are moving towards globalization, their rebellion seems to be taking the form of anarchy and, in some instances, violence. For example, it was the Gen Yers who rioted in Seattle in '99 during the meeting of the World Trade Organization and again at the Group of Eight summit in Genoa, Italy last year.
Theirs is, in effect, the new revolution.
And for a generation in crisis and the world around them, the actions of this young man from Minnesota and others like him must serve as a wake-up call, rather than a call to arms. Unlike the so-called Sixties Generation, today's protesters talk little of peace and love.
In the midst of this war on terrorism, an increasingly overzealous government, and diminishing rights to individual privacy, many of today's revolutionaries speak only of paranoia, power, and violence.
Little wonder, then, that our young people are being caught up in a tide of despair and hopelessness--searching for answers in a world that, to them, only poses ominous questions.
Also known as the Pipe Bomber, this seemingly normal 21-year-old planted 18 pipe bombs in rural mailboxes in five states in as many days, causing one letter carrier to injure his arm and lose his hearing; another to require 14 stitches in his right hand; and a 70-year-old farmer's wife to end up with a bloody face.
Those baffled individuals seeking some sort of logic behind Helder's pipe bomb expedition need look no further than David Fincher's 1999 film Fight Club. Adapted from Chuck Palahniuk's novel of the same name, the film is about two frustrated 20-somethingers turning to anarchy in an effort to destroy the materialistic establishment culture and bring back a world that is simpler and hopefully more sane.
For instance, the news media recently reported that in connecting the dots between the places where Helder planted his pipe bombs, one ends up with something resembling a smiley face--an image etched by anarchists in Fight Club on a building they had set fire to.
Even Helder's philosophy bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Tyler Durden, the main character in Fight Club. In a six-page letter sent to the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin, Helder wrote:
"I often wonder why so many people spend their entire lives consuming what is fed to them, without knowing if they are consuming anything at all... All of my family and friends were raised to believe...to be gullible...to be materialistic...to fear authority...to blindly follow. Do you wonder why people blow themselves up to hurt others?... Do you wonder why you are here? Do you wonder what is out there...way out there?"
Almost word for word, his letter could have been lifted out of Fight Club. As Tyler Durden says to Jack, the film's narrator:
Look at the guys in fight club. The strongest and smartest men who have ever lived--and they're pumping gas and waiting tables; or they're slaves with white collars. Advertising has them chasing cars and clothes. A whole generation working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy shit they don't really need. We're the middle children of history, with no special purpose or place. We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression. The great depression is our lives. The great war is a spiritual war.
If there were an instruction manual for the angst-ridden young people searching for meaning, Fight Club might be it.
In fact, with its distrust of corporations and modern pursuit of materialism, Fight Club might very well be the Catcher in the Rye for those belonging to Generation Y, also known as the Millennials or Echo Boomers.
After all, Helder is not alone in his discontent. Too many members of his generation--young men like 20-year-old American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh, 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold of Columbine infamy--have engaged in desperate acts of violence for us to consider them isolated incidents. (Lest we forget, Timothy McVeigh was 27 when he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.) Sometimes it appears to be senseless, as in the case of Charles J. Bishop, the 15-year-old who flew a single-engine Cessna into a Bank of America building in downtown Tampa, Florida several months after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
In size alone, this Echo Boomer generation, characterized as cynical and having a distinctly practical worldview, will command attention. Born between 1980 and 1996, these 70 million young people might just surpass the size of their parents' generation, the Baby Boomers.
According to BusinessWeek Online, one in four of them lives in a single-parent household. Three in four have working mothers. Disillusioned by a materialistic and self-involved culture, they are a generation to be reckoned with. As Jim DeRogatis wrote for Salon.com:
...a revolution is a-brewin'. A small but passionate vanguard of Generation Y has been galvanized by the issue of globalization. They see as their enemy the mega-corporations that are trying to spread consumerism to every corner of the globe, killing Western culture and turning us all into the equivalent of those cannibalistic zombies traipsing through the shopping mall in "Dawn of the Dead." In addition to our souls, they believe that corporatization is claiming the blood of the Third World, as child laborers from Beijing to Jakarta and sweatshop workers from Tijuana to the Philippines manufacture the overpriced jeans and useless sunglasses that American companies brand with their copyrighted logos and spend billions to market to us as indispensable accoutrements of our hip, modern lifestyles.
For many Gen Yers, convinced that there's not much to be hopeful about, paranoid about an increasingly intrusive and militant government, and resentful of marketing forces that are moving towards globalization, their rebellion seems to be taking the form of anarchy and, in some instances, violence. For example, it was the Gen Yers who rioted in Seattle in '99 during the meeting of the World Trade Organization and again at the Group of Eight summit in Genoa, Italy last year.
Theirs is, in effect, the new revolution.
And for a generation in crisis and the world around them, the actions of this young man from Minnesota and others like him must serve as a wake-up call, rather than a call to arms. Unlike the so-called Sixties Generation, today's protesters talk little of peace and love.
In the midst of this war on terrorism, an increasingly overzealous government, and diminishing rights to individual privacy, many of today's revolutionaries speak only of paranoia, power, and violence.
Little wonder, then, that our young people are being caught up in a tide of despair and hopelessness--searching for answers in a world that, to them, only poses ominous questions.
ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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