“I don’t know what to do,” sighed Gene Rosen. “I’m getting hang-up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting emails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ‘how much am I being paid?’” Someone posted a photo of his house online. There have been phony Google+ and YouTube accounts created in his name, messages on white supremacist message boards ridiculing the “emotional Jewish guy,” and dozens of blog posts and videos “exposing” him as a fraud. One email purporting to be a business inquiry taunted: “How are all those little students doing? You know, the ones that showed up at your house after the ‘shooting’. What is the going rate for getting involved in a gov’t sponsored hoax anyway?”
“The quantity of the material is overwhelming,” he said. So much so that a friend shields him from most of it by doing daily sweeps of the Web so Rosen doesn’t have to. His wife is worried for their safety. He’s logged every email and every call, and consulted with a retired state police officer, who took the complaint seriously but said police probably can’t do anything at the moment; he plans to do the same with the FBI.
What did Rosen do to deserve this? One month ago, he found six little children and a bus driver at the end of the driveway of his home in Newtown, Conn. “We can’t go back to school,” one little boy told Rosen. “Our teacher is dead.” He brought them inside and gave them food and juice and toys. He called their parents. He sat with them and listened to their shocked accounts of what had happened just down the street inside Sandy Hook Elementary, close enough that Rosen heard the gunshots.
What can I add but that these are the Second Amendment Heroes making a Patriotic Stand to protect their God-Given right to an adult pacifier. Cowards who can’t imagine facing the world without a gun in each hand and plenty of extra ammo. Constantly terrified paranoid maniacs who think that the slightest little thing that affects them — no matter how remotely — can only be explained by some shadowy conspiracy of monsters out to get them, while the shadow of an imaginary Hitler-like figure looms over every minute of the sick, joyless wastes they call their lives. Twisted by fear and stalked by demons of their own imagining, they feel they must attack everyone and everything, before everyone and everything attacks them. They don’t belong in a free society, they belong in mental institutions. They don’t deserve respect, they don’t deserve pity, and they certainly don’t deserve to be taken seriously. They aren’t even worth the effort it would take to give them a swift kick in the ass.
Anonymous phone calls, threats, and emails to a man whose only “crime” was in giving terrified children snacks and juice and a place to be safe? Yeah, you guys are real fucking heroes. Now get the fuck out of our public discourse.
