Fifteen years ago, give or take, I sat in a crowded convention room at the Sands hotel in Las Vegas, (which, by the way, was leveled long ago, wiping out a legacy of Frank Sinatra and ushering in Disney), and listened to a parade of speakers at the annual Soldier of Fortune convention who, basically, set up the construct that we were potentially at war with the U.S. government and that we needed to protect ourselves from invading jack-booted thugs who might want to mount assaults on our homes and take away all our guns.

I learned about how to bury my assault weapons and other arsenals in special underground vaults that the dreaded bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms would never find.  I learned how to make my own bazooka.  I learned how to use urban or rural settings to protect myself from the government stormtroopers who were coming to steal my guns.  I learned hand-to-hand combat.  I signed up to receive publications that would teach me how to prepare for the coming war--including hoarding gold, stockpiling canned goods and water, and home-schooling my children--without leaving any kind of imprint that would put me on some government-snooping radar.  I paid cash.  For obvious reasons.

At the enormous gun show, I perused booths where I could buy complete military uniforms, (including various medals), every kind of gun imaginable, mean-looking knives with scabbards, tasers--well, you name the weapon and I defy you to come up with one I didn't pick up in my own hands at that gun show. 

At the gunshow, I bought books on explosives, firearms, sniper rifles, techniques of warfare, creating new identities so that I could disappear, and catalogues of books that are not published in any mainstream press.  I picked up lots of pamphlets on "Slick Willie" and his evil manipulative she-wolf wife, Hillary.

I passed a life-sized cut-out of an armed ATF agent, clad head-to-toe in Ninja black and leveling an automatic weapon at me, with a cartoon-bubble overhead that read, "Hi.  I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you."

And I spent some time around the bars that proliferated at each and every convention event--set up right outside each room of the conference--talking to mercenaries, gun-nuts, off-duty cops, rednecks, wannabe warriors, and militia paranoids.  (In some of the talks, you could count beer bottles lined up beneath people's chairs.)

I was the only unescorted female there. 

One of the convention speakers, a highly-regarded former helicopter pilot in Vietnam, gave us a rundown of what really happened at the Branch Davidian tragedy, which had occured a little over a year before the convention, on April 19, 1993.  (This was early September of 1994.)

With great authority, he told the packed room that he had a copy of the autopsy reports "on my desk in Washington, D.C." of the ATF agents who had been killed in the initial raid on the Waco area, Texas, compound.

"They were shot by their own people, folks," he declared, swiveling his body so that the backs of his thighs faced the crowd.  "Automatic weapons fire stitched right up the backs of their legs," he demonstrated, adding, with a scowl, "The Davidians didn't have any automatic weapons.  The ATF did it to their own guys."

Leaning forward conspiratorially, he said to the hushed crowd, "And I'll tell you something else.  There WAS NO .50-caliber weapon in that compound.  That's another myth perpetrated by the government."

Funny thing about myths.

See, the TRUTH is that I actually DID have an official copy of the autopsy done on the fallen ATF agents. 

It had been given to me by the same Texas Ranger who had hand-carried a .50-caliber weapon out of the smoking ruins of the compound.

"If they didn't have a .50-cal," he told me drily, "then I'd like to know what the hell it was I carried out of there."

The REAL autopsy reports showed no wounds "stitched up the thighs" of those dead agents.  Far from it. 

They were wounded horribly and fatally in the kinds of places where you shoot to kill someone who is wearing bulletproof body armor.

Sitting in those rooms during that three-day conference, the atmosphere of hatred and paranoia and rage was PALPABLE, real and tangible, like a black foggy cloud settling over our heads.  By the time I got back home to Texas, I was physically ill, literally sick to my stomach from the tension I'd absorbed. 

A tension, I might add, that was completely off the media radar and unknown to the vast majority of Americans at that time.

My little adventure to the Vegas SoF convention was just the start of a year's worth of research I was conducting for a book I was to write called, Ordeal.  (You can buy it in hardcover on amazon for like, a penny, plus a few bucks' postage.  Also in paperback.  It was also published in Great Britain, Japan, Germany, and Australia.) 

The book was a thriller which dealt with a fringe group of right-wing extremists known at the time as "survivalists."

Before the convention, my research had yeilded virtually nothing about this group, these private militias who were arming themselves.  A quarter-page spread in Time, half-page in Newsweek.  I think 20-20 might have done a brief piece.  Really, there was nothing else.  Nobody took them seriously.

But once I'd gone to the convention and been exposed front and center to the real nuttery going on in this group, I became very worried. 

In my fictional story line, I had a militia group that plans to bomb a federal building in Midland, Texas.  The charismatic leader of the group kidnaps a former girlfriend and her 15-year old son because he wants to use her expertise in explosives, and because he wants her back.  But she's living a quiet life as a happily married high school chemistry teacher, and nobody except her husband knows about her checkered past with this man.

I spent a year working on the book, and during that time, right-wing talk radio began to climb in ratings and in nut-case ranting.  G. Gordon Liddy made a new name for himself beyond just being a Watergate crook and sadistic nutcase by advocating that when the ATF came for you, you were to "aim for the head" because they wore body armor.

During that time, I begged my conservative family and friends not to encourage that sort of dialogue, that the hate-rhetoric had gone too far.

They laughed at me.

"You don't understand," I pleaded.  "That kind of talk gives the unhinged among us VALIDATION.  It certifies that whatever awful thing he may be planning to do is acceptable, even NECESSARY."

They mocked me for being a crazy liberal, for taking life too seriously, for having a wimpy draft-dodging womanizing president who needed to be impeached.

But as the year wore on and the publications I'd secretly subscribed to kept arriving in my mail box, I began to experience a terrible feeling of dread.

"Something terrible is going to happen," I insisted.  "You guys have GOT to tone this stuff down."

Turns out though, that I wasn't alone in my reasoning.

Because it wasn't just me who attended that Soldier of Fortune convention.

Turns out Timothy McVeigh was there too.  (That link'll take you to a PBS "Frontline" documentary timeline of McVeigh's movements in the months proceeding the Oklahoma City bombing.)

On April 19, 1995, the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma was bombed into oblivion by that same Timothy McVeigh.

I was 400 pages into the manuscript of my book by then, and watched in horror as the worst-case scenario I had imagined took place before my eyes, and the death toll mounted to more than 160, including 19 children.

Of course, nobody could understand why McVeigh would give law enforcement officers only his name, rank, and serial number from his army days.

They didn't GET that he considered himself to be at war with the U.S. government.

The children, you see.  Just collateral damage.


Soldier of Fortune published an editorial a month after the bombing condeming the act, saying that even in times of real war, the U.S. army did its best to avoid the collateral deaths of civilians and that McVeigh's act had been reprehensible and in no way condoned by Soldier of Fortune.

Way too little and way, way too late, because that's not the way they had behaved at their rollicking convention six months before that.

After Oklahoma City, at least my own conservative family and friends calmed down considerably, even apologetically.  They couldn't understand how any thinking American human being could possibly consider bombing and killing babies to be worth making some kind of point.

Which is why, after all, I had chosen to write the book in the first place.

My book was auctioned to fourteen publishers a couple months after the bombing.  My own publisher rejected it, "because we don't want it to look as though we're taking advantage of the bombing."

The publisher who bought it paid a high five figure advance, and foreign sales brought it over the six-figure mark.

But in the days following the terrible bombing, there was a flood of interest in the mentality of such a person as McVeigh, and sudden whitehot media interest in militias and right-wing extremists.

I begged my new publisher to bring out the book as quickly as possible in order to meet that interest, but they dawdled, putting me in the excruciatingly slow book-publishing line-up.

By the time the book came out, two full years later, it was smack in the middle of the McVeigh trial.  By that time, survivalists had become so familiar in every venue from action movies to Walker, Texas Ranger, that they were now pretty much cartoon characters.  My painstaking, careful, and accurate research was swamped by the stereotype, and people were sick of the subject.

Even though the book received rave reviews, the bad timing killed sales.  Although I did three more books after that, for a total of eleven, my career as a suspense novelist was never the same.  It seems it, too, had come down beneath the rubble of the Murrah building.

Time passed.  The right-wingers got their wet dream fantasy with a cowboy president whose inattention to Intelligence briefings during his usual prolonged August vacation in 2001 brought them a REAL enemy in September to hate:  "Islamofascists."

And for eight years, we didn't hear so much anymore about how the government was the enemy and we needed to prepare for war when they came to get our guns, not with Bubba Bush in the White House by God!

Not with the NRA in the West Wing!

But the hate rhetoric did not stop--indeed, the influx of Internet access, blogging, social networking sites, viral e-mails, and the explosion of websites reliable and not-so-much opened up the floodgates of it, especially when, first, their most dreaded enemy of all ran for president.

Hillary Clinton.

And then, of all things, she got beat...BY A BLACK GUY!!!

A LIBERAL!!!

I've been watching the hate rhetoric ratcheting up ever since the campaign, and I'm not alone.

The incomparable Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups nationwide in Intelligence reports that are routinely relied upon by the F.B.I., among others, demonstrates how, in their latest issue, hate groups in recent years have skyrocketed to the highest number in U.S. history--almost a thousand.

I have continued to support the SPLC ever since writing Ordeal, (and am very proud that my name appears on their Wall of Tolerance in Birmingham, Alabama), and through the years since my book was published, I've seen the trend go up based on whatever demons the right-wing has decided to attack. 

After 9/11 it was anyone who was even THOUGHT to be a Muslim, even if he was a hapless turban-wearing Hindu Sikh.

Then they decided that illegal immigrants from Mexico were the newest threat, which saw the growth of the "Patriot" groups on border states, hunting down "wetbacks" crossing the Rio Grande.  Crimes against Mexican-Americans--legal and illegal citizens--shot up.

Only NOW we've got a black president to demonize, and they have not hesitated to do so.  Barack Obama received Secret Service protection long before he even got the nomination, and over the course of his campaign, that protection was beefed up several times.  Death-threats against him have increased along with the growth of hate-groups.

So now we've got an actual sitting congresswoman telling her home state voters that they should be "armed and dangerous," and various other right-wing spokespeople seem to be increasingly advocating for some kind of coming "revolution."

When I mentioned this to my moderate Republican husband--a Gary Cooperesque educated Texas cowboy--he shook his head and said quietly, "Boy, those Republicans just can't STAND not being in power, can they?"

(Note: he voted for Obama.)

I never dreamed after the madness of the nineties that I would see this country going through such convulsions again, carried on the fever-wave of yet more right-wing rage, hatred, and paranoia. 

(Granted, our far-left fringe suffers similar fainting spells, but it's been a real real long time since any of them bombed any buildings.  Not so for the right wing.  Before OkCity we had the abortion clinic bombings.  Then the militias.  And so on.  Armed and dangerous, indeed.)

I'm just as terrified for my president now as I was for Bill Clinton, sitting in that dark-cloud room of collective gun-nut insanity in Vegas all those years ago, and just as worried about gun violence--and with good reason, as witnessed by the recent tsunami of shootings that have taken the lives of innocents as well as police officers across this country.

As before in the nineties, I hear the rhetoric ratcheting up again, only the megaphone is much louder these days, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge lighting fires while Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney gleefully spread the kerosene.

There's hope, though.

That's because, this time, it's different.

For one thing, this time, I'm not all alone.

The media is paying attention.

In yesterday's New York Times, Charles M. Blow wrote a powerful piece called, "Pitchforks and Pistols."

After following right-wing media for a while, he reports, "They're apocolyptic.  They feel isolated, angry, betrayed and besieged.  And some of their 'leaders' seem to be trying to mold them into militias."

Well, they won't have to try too hard.  I've been down this road before.  And there is a certain unhinged group of our society who just seem to psychologically (or psychotically, if you prefer), need to have someone to hate and fear, someone they are certain is out to get them.  Or at least, their precious guns.

Blow says, "It's not all just harmless talk."  (It never was.)  "For some, their disaffection has hardened into something more dark and dangerous.  They're talking about a revolution."

Of course he mentions congresswoman Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota (which was a real hotbed of militias in the '90's, I can tell you), Glenn Beck of the sobbing "I just love my country so much" variety, and so on.

And he brings up the panic-buying of firearms and ammunition by those convinced, YET AGAIN, that the Democratic president is going to send the ATF or the army after them to round up their guns.

Blow ends the piece by mentioning what a "really bad feeling" all this rhetoric is giving him.

Welcome to my world, dear.

Still...I AM more hopeful this time.

Cockroaches only proliferate in darkness.  During the 90's, this nutcase rhetoric was allowed to burn along like an untamed wildfire for months because no one in the media was paying attention and the Internet was not so widely used.

The fire burned until it exploded on April 19, 1995.

Now, these kinds of signature YouTube moments are immediately exposed on such popular venues as Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, where they are mocked, as well as on late-night television like Jay Leno and David Letterman.  A surprising number of Americans actually get much of their news from such sources, and back in the nineties, they either didn't exist or didn't know what was going on at places like the Soldier of Fortune convention.

This effectively sprays foam on the fire.  It may not put the whole thing out, but it can damp a lot of it down and show that it is a potential hazard and that people need to be paying attention and not tolerating it.

That's not enough of course, but I do know some things that we can do to help put out this fire.

First of all, I've mentioned before my friend Robby, who is as right-wing gun-nut as any of them, but who was so turned off by right-wing talk radio during the campaign that he stopped listening for the first time in 15 years.  

"This isn't who we are," he said.  "I don't know who these people think we are, but this isn't it."

He reports to me that many of his right-wing friends have also sworn off talk-radio.  It's gotten so disgusting, in other words, that it is even running off its own people.  I think this is in part because, as they hear the hysterical rhetoric and read the viral e-mails, they juxtapose what they've just seen or read or heard with, for instance, the president himself.

Here he is, going about his business in a reasonable, thoughtful, intelligent way, and this has not been lost on every wingnut out there.  They may not agree with his policies, but they just don't see him being the demon they're hearing about.

Robby and I even teamed up together to investigate one of these viral e-mails, and I have to give credit where credit is due:  Robby asked me first.

He'd been getting all these e-mails about how Obama was coming for their guns, blah blah, just a flood of them, and in the meantime, when he went to buy a box of ammo just to take down to the gunrange for a little target practice with his .9 millimeter Baretta, he couldn't find any at the gun store.

He called me up.

"Dammit!" he said.  "This is RIDICULOUS.  From what I can tell, this president has not done or said ANYTHING that would fuel this kind of panic.  Would you check on your end, see if there's anything that's fueling this run on guns and ammo?"

So, I did.  I checked Daily Kos and Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo and the New York Times. 

Then I reported back.

"Robby, there's not one blogpost or newspaper article from the liberal or progressive side that indicates gun control is on anyone's radar right now.  The president is just so buried under the economy, two wars, and wanted to get health care and energy independence and education upgrades that he's just not going there right now, and neither is anybody else."

"That's what I thought," he said.  "Well, I checked the NRA website--which I visit every day--and the Texas gun enthusiast websites, and believe me when I tell you that there is nothing from official gun enthusiast organizations fueling this thing."

I believed him, because we're good friends.

In disgust he said, "You know what I think?  I think these viral e-mails are being circulated by gun industry people--you know, gun store owners and the like.  They're deliberately fueling this panic so they can sell more guns."

He joked that he was going to sell all his guns and ammo and buy them back when the prices returned to some semblance of normality.

Now, this series of conversations and our little "investigation" proved to me that conservative and progressive friends and family can begin dialogues with one another as long as they are done with respect, in non-accusatory ways, looking for common ground. 

This is what Obama talks about, and it's possible.

Now, I've had conversations with very very conservative friends and family since that talk with Robby, on such topics as Sarah Palin, gun rights, and Obama's birthplace.  At times, they've gotten heated, and when that happens, I carefully change the subject until things calm down.  And I search for common ground and areas of mutual respect.

For example, I told them that I'd been as deeply offended when some liberals claimed that John McCain couldn't be president because he'd been born in Panama (on a military base, which is American soil, the morons), as I had been by the idea that Obama had been secretly born in Kenya.

I told them that I always tried to be aware of such extremist rhetoric no matter WHICH side it came from, and to respect reason and clear logic when it was presented.

I find that showing that kind of respect, no matter how much you may despise some of the things they are saying, helps to throw a little more water on that fire.  It calms things down.

It makes them think.

These are things that we can do within our own circle of family and friends, these are things we can do to defend our president, these are things we can do in reasonable, non-accusatory tones.

When Robby and I completed our little investigation, I sent a little e-mail around to all the conservatives on my e-mail list.  Its subject was, "IT'S NOT COMING FROM US."

In the e-mail, I talked about mine and Robby's friendship, our conversation on the viral gun-rights e-mails, and our little investigation, and Robby's conclusion that someone was deliberately jacking up the fear-quotient in order to sell more guns and ammo.

To my great surprise, I found that several of my most vehement gun-rights proponent friends not only agreed with Robby, but appreciated our mutual attempt to get to the bottom of the campaign.

It is only in such quiet, reasonable, small little ways that we can begin to fight this fire from multiple fronts.  The next time my little list of right-wing family and friends gets one of those viral e-mails on gun paranoia, I don't think they will forward it.  They'll push "delete."

The more of them who do so, the more who wean themselves from hate rhethoric because "it's not who we are," the more hope we have as a nation to avoid another Oklahoma City.

I am appealing to all my progressive friends and family to reach out to your conservative friends in respect whenever an issue arises that you think they might be over-reacting to.  Do your due diligence with research in non-partisan sources they will respect--even conservative ones, if you can find them--and quietly refute the notion.  When they forward you something outrageous, send them a CALM reply with the results of your research in such a way that you just refute the whole thing.  Period.

I'll bet the next time, they'll at least hesitate, and at the very least, might be more willing to see that not everything that crosses their Inbox is the Word of God.

And in the meantime, understand that the psychological flip-side of anger is ALWAYS fear.  These are scary times.  People are losing jobs and homes.  The dark side of human nature gets ripped out and exposed.  Sometimes we hear things too that we are only too eager to believe because it taps into that dark side of our own selves.

Apply that same calm reason to your own fears.  Do your own homework.  Quiet down.  Don't be so quick to believe awful things about opposing points of view.

If WE calm down and do our best to help calm THEM down, in this day of YouTube and Jon Stewart...I think we've got a real chance to survive the hate-tsunami and not be swept away by it.

One more thing.  Don't be surprised if you get no response when you send your calm reasoned e-mail.

They will only rise up and fight with you when they are certain they are right.

If they say nothing...It's a good sign.  It just means they don't want to admit that you're probably right.

But it also means they may hesitate next time, before hitting the "forward" button.

Or before they believe every single little thing they're told by the Soldier of Fortune crowd.