Jim,
        Actually, the scenario you paint, quoted below, seems to avoid
actually threatening my person, and I would thus feel pretty pissed off and
get on the cops to do something about it, but the actions (the way you have
carefully described them) would not make me feel personally threatened or
"terrorized," because I can recognize the clearly executed action as just as
clearly intended NOT to harm my person, only to disrupt my work. Now, it
would have been much easier for them to have assaulted me on the street or
invaded my home, which is very personally threatening. So, that they did not
do that, I would find relieving and would allow my anger - rather than my
fear - to rule me. My own experience, with the FBI and other police
authorities in the 60s, who were monitoring my activities, supports my
feeling as stated above: I was pissed and paranoiac about being framed, but
I was perhaps idealistic or naive enough to think that the FBI would not
actually do me personal harm. Of course, I'm white, which makes a
difference, and I was not engaged in making the FBI look bad (as was my
Tucson neighbor and acquaintance, Joseph Bonanno, who had his backyard wall
blown up by the FBI seeking to intimidate him by blaming it on a rival mob
faction). During my own antigovernment career, only at certain times did I
think they would actually come after me, extrajudicially. At those time, I
was fairly frightened, perhaps terrorized. That the activists you mention
below pointedly avoided assaulting me actually builds my personal confidence
that they are careful, principled practitioners of direct action.

Your quote:

Tony, do you mean to say that if some deranged and disgruntled
internet-surfing capitalist now came down to your office in Houston, broke
into your office and trashed your computer making all your files
irrecoverable, and then left you a message stating that the reason YOU were
personally selected for such "direct action" was because of your
anti-capitalism rhetoric on the internet, you wouldn't feel at least a
*twinge* of fear or intimidation?  Let's also say they then come back two
weeks later, leave your new replacement computer alone but now proceed to
rip all of the pages out of all of the books in your office: wouldn't you
consider what now looks to be an emerging pattern of anti-green harassment
the least bit threatening?

Your second point, about my personal savings, seems rather off-topic, as my
savings are pretty meager and not arrived at through the exploitation of my
students, colleagues, or employer. Are you suggesting that they are wrongly
invested? Or wrongly earned? If what your getting at is that any savings
whatever are by definition, wrongly earned, then it would require some case
analysis of specific circumstances to determine whether mine are ill-gotten.
I'm pretty sure they're not, but one does need to be careful about the
companies one's pension funds invests in, to be sure. Mine are socially
aware, in a special fund for that. I don't earn so much as to make me a part
of the landed classes.

        That's it, and tiring to me,

-Tc

Anthony R. S. Chiaviello, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Professional Writing
Department of English
University of Houston-Downtown
One Main Street
Houston, TX 77009
713.221.8520/713.868.3979
"Question Reality"

> ----------
> From:         Jim Tantillo[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent:         Wednesday, February 14, 2001 8:35 AM
> To:   [log in to unmask]
> Subject:      Re: eco-terrorism
>
>