If I read one more blog post or online comment describing the guy who flew the plane into the Eschelon Building as oppressed, I will have to write a screed of my own. Anyone who thinks someone doing well enough to move across the country, start his own business, buy a house in a very nice neighborhood, drive a nice car, own his own airplane, and can pay a CPA to sort out his independent-contractor tax forms for him is “oppressed” needs look out the window of their ivory tower every so often … maybe even travel the world a little without staying in five-star hotels. There’s a world full of true oppression out there, and this guy isn’t a poster child for it.

It’d be funny if they weren’t being serious, but they are. Sorry, but I’m having a hard time feeling any sympathy for this poor, oppressed white guy who decided that leaving his wife and kid homeless –not to mention his wife was teaching piano out of their home, so now she’s also unemployed– likely still with an expensive tax issue to sort out, and very likely no insurance payouts for any of it seeing as he destroyed his own house, crashed his own plane, and took his own life. That’s true love!

And as if taking his own life and destroying anything of worth his surviving family might have used to live on without him, he also decides to fly his plane into a building full of people who probably never did any damn thing to him other than suggest he pay taxes on his unreported income. As far as I am concerned, he was nothing more than a selfish asshole more concerned with money than anything else and with a decent dose of crazy on the side. No, not oppressed, and certainly not the beginning of a slave revolt (as I read on one journal I will no longer be reading). If this guy was an oppressed slave, then what the hell does that make the vast majority of the rest of us?

And since owning your own plane is apparently a middle-class thing, when do I get mine? Never you say?! Come see the oppression inherent in the system!

NOTE: I have just gotten some new information on this whole mess, and once I totally verify it and have the time to sit and rant, there will, in fact, be a standard Just Orb rant about it. All you need to know right now is that this guy was a LOSER and was in trouble with the IRS for pretty much his entire adult life, not because the IRS is evil, but because this guy was an asshole who just didn’t want to pay taxes. But yeah, more later on the poor oppressed tax-evading airplane owner.