299 Days: The Community

Chapter 73 This Ain’t Paddy Cakes Anymore (May 7)

Tom Foster’s home was near the historic district of downtown Olympia, within walking distance from the WAB offices. His family had been shut in their house for two days as the protests raged. They were nothing like the usual little protests they saw in the state capitol. These were more like mobs. It reminded him of the WTO riots in Seattle in 1999, but worse. Riot police, the smell of tear gas, broken glass everywhere, constant sirens. He’d been awake for most of those two days. He’d doze off for a few minutes and then wake up when he heard more sirens or yelling. He was starting to lose his grip on reality. He couldn’t tell what was real and what might be a dream from when he dozed off.

His family was handling it well. His wife, Joyce, was scared, but not saying so. Even before all of this, she had been afraid that some loony leftist would attack her husband. They got death threats every so often.

Tom’s son, Derek, was fifteen years old. He was a good kid, and looked exactly like his dad. Derek was looking forward to defending his house against the people who seemed to hate his dad. He had even started carrying a bat around lately and would love to use it.

Tom had his gun; a 9mm Sig Sauer handgun. He was so glad he’d gotten that. It seemed crazy at the time, but now he understood why he needed it. He could not have slept at all if he hadn’t had it.

They had enough food for a few days. They basically watched the place to see if anyone tried to break in. It wasn’t random crime they were afraid of, although that was a concern. They were afraid that someone in the crowd of angry leftists would realize that evil Tom Foster of the Washington Association of Business “hate group,” a group representing small businesses, was sitting right there. Mobs of union thugs had been “visiting” the homes of people they didn’t like. Tom had not heard of any mobs attacking the families, but there wasn’t a lot of specific news anymore. The news focused only on giant events like the Olympia protests and looting in Seattle. The national news constantly reported on the terrorists’ strikes, the regional power outages, and the Southern and mountain West states “opting out” of the federal government. Besides, even if the media found out that homes of “right wingers” had been attacked by the mobs, they probably wouldn’t report it. It didn’t fit into the media’s general theme of “concerned public employees and vulnerable citizens expressing their anger at budget cuts.”

Two days after the big protests started, Tom decided to finally venture out of his house. It was early morning and things were pretty quiet. Even union thugs had to take a rest, and protesting was probably some of the hardest work these government employees had done in a while. He tucked his gun into his pants and left while Joyce and Derek were asleep.

Things were OK a few blocks around his house. The destruction seemed pretty contained to the offices downtown. WAB’s beautiful brick office building was eight blocks from his house. As he got closer to his office, he got more and more reluctant to see what had happened. He knew the protestors would hit WAB’s offices, but he could not believe what he saw two blocks from the office.

There was smoke rising up from the direction of WAB’s offices. Oh, God. They didn’t. Did they?

Tom started to run toward the office, but he could only jog because the gun in his belt would come out. So he jogged, holding his gun in his belt. He wondered if any of his employees were still in there. He had sent them all home, but maybe some came, anyway. He prayed not.

Tom got closer and could see all the windows smashed and swastikas spray-painted on the beautiful brick walls of the historic building. Were the swastikas to say that WAB were Nazis or were the protestors admitting they were fascist thugs? Tom knew that the protestors were too stupid to understand that they were the actual fascists. He concluded that they spray-painted the swastikas to make people think the occupants of the building were Nazis.

As Tom got closer, he was actually a bit relieved. The fire was pretty small. It was a brick office building, so the structure wasn’t burning. It looked like papers and other combustibles inside the building were burning. That beautiful building now looked like a charred hull of its former greatness. It looked like a black eye on a beautiful woman.

Tom ran in and checked to see if anyone was in there. He pulled his gun out when he went through the front door. He remembered what Grant had told him about checking to make sure the safety was off when he wanted to use the gun. He found himself pointing the gun like he’d seen in the movies.

Tom ran through the office to see if anyone, friend or foe, was in there. It was empty. Thank God. He looked around at all the destruction. It was weirdly quiet in the office. The only sound was the soft crackle of small fires, and papers blowing around. No voices. No hum of office machines running. No phones ringing. Just soft crackling.

Now that he knew no one was in the building, Tom went first to his office. He saw the pictures of his family on his desk had been smashed, which pissed him off. This wasn’t just political anymore. It was personal. These assholes were trying to kill him and his family. He was going to try to kill them back.

Tom had always shied away from the “Patriot” and “Don’t Tread On Me” side of the conservative movement. Every time he saw the Don’t Tread on Me flag, he had become uncomfortable because it seemed to imply people couldn’t wait to hang “Loyalists,” like during the Revolutionary War. It was a little too…dramatic and violent. Not that he thought Patriots and those with a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag were violent; he had been to Tea Party rallies and knew they weren’t. It’s just that there was an implied message that liberty must be restored by “any means necessary.” That scared him. Not because he was afraid of a fight—he fought the government all day, every day—but because he didn’t want to become a hater. He was concerned about guys like Eric Benson, a young WAB lawyer, who seemed to have turned into haters and actually enjoyed the “we’ll do what we have to do” part of the liberty movement. Tom knew how good people could ruin their lives with hatred.

His thinking around this changed quickly, though, when he saw his beloved WAB offices on fire. Now he understood the violence. “They’re trying to kill me” kept running through his mind as he looked around his office, burning and trashed.

Violence? Why hold back on violence? It had already happened to him. He didn’t start it. “This ain’t paddy cakes anymore,” he muttered to himself. This is a game for keeps. They wanted to kill him and his family. It’s on.

In an instant, Tom’s entire outlook changed. At his core, he was a “Patriot” and would protect his family “by any means necessary.” He would try not to be a hater, but that seemed like a luxury in these times. Protecting his family and trying to restore liberty were more important than the ill effects of hating people. In fact, Tom thought, hating people might be necessary to have the strength and mental clarity to do the things that needed to be done. That was it: hate is a tool. A necessary tool.

Tom had to get out of the WAB building. He couldn’t take all the destruction. He jogged back to his house, holding his gun in his belt. That gun felt different on the way back. On the way there, it had seemed so foreign and weird. A gun? Him? Carrying a gun?

Now, after seeing the destruction of the WAB building and realizing how much these people really hated him, that gun didn’t feel weird anymore. It felt like a tool. A tool as necessary as hate.

After a block or two, Tom knew what he needed to do. It was time to get Ben and Brian’s families, the senior WAB staff who would be targeted by the protestors or government or whomever, to the Prosser farm.

Tom snuck up on his house. He’d seen on TV too many times when people just walked into their house, only to have a bad guy waiting for them. He carefully entered the house.

His wife was in the kitchen crying. That sound always gets a guy’s attention. He goes into problem-solving mode, to do what it takes to make that crying stop.

“Are you OK, honey?” Tom asked Joyce.

“They say you’re a terrorist,” she choked out through the tears. “A terrorist!”

What? Tom couldn’t even understand what she was saying. He wasn’t a terrorist.

Joyce pointed to her laptop on the kitchen counter. On the screen was a list titled “Persons of Interest.” Under the “F”s was “Foster, Tom…Wash. Assn of Business.”

Tom wasn’t surprised. The political attacks had been increasing for months leading up to this. Before he saw the burned out WAB offices, this terrorist-list thing would have surprised him. Not now. It seemed mild compared to what he’d just seen.

“This is just a list of Persons of Interest. That’s not a terrorist list,” he said. He wanted to reassure his wife.

Joyce screamed, “Read the top of the list!” He did. It explained that the people on this list were “Persons of interest to the police for possible illegal activities, including domestic terrorism.”

Huh? “Domestic terrorism”? That was like the environmental terrorists or the white supremacists or whatever. Not a business association. He kept reading. Sure enough he was on the same list as people described as “Red Brigades,” “Skin Heads,” “Animal Liberation Front,” but also “Tea Party,” “various ‘Patriot’ groups,” and “tax activists.”

Tom looked for his name again. He couldn’t believe he was on this list. Oh God. So were Ben and Brian. “Wash. Assn of Business” was by their names, too. Grant, too.

“We need to get the hell out of here,” Tom said as he grabbed Joyce by the wrist. “Right now. We’re going to the Prosser farm. They burned the office and trashed it. They’re trying to kill us. Get Derek and let’s go.”

Joyce cried louder. Her grandfather had lived through the Holocaust and this seemed a lot like the story he told about leaving Holland.