The Strange Case of Lucas Helder
A young man named Lucas Helder was apprehended back in 2002 for leaving pipe bombs in people’s mailboxes. He left 18 of them in 6 states, with 6 of them going off and injuring people; he had another 5 in his car when he was caught, apparently on his way to California.
The story is actually quite interesting. Once authorities had him as a suspect, they put out a nationwide APB. Apparently the young man used his cell phone to call his parents and this, authorities say, acted as a beacon and allowed them to find him. A high-speed chase ensued, and somehow an FBI hostage negotiator got involved in the phone call to his folks and convinced him to surrender. He apparently had a gun pointed to his head for some of the time and then gave himself up on the condition that no one hit him. He was arrested without incident.
Why was this University of Wisconsin student leaving pipe bombs in people’s mailboxes? Not, as some of the media are trying to tell us, because of anger at the government, but rather because of his particular philosophy of what happens after death.
This fellow thinks that life goes on after the body, that the body is used as a “learning experience” and that life “is a continuum”, not ending at physical death. He saw the main source of problems in this world as stemming from a fear of death. So he decided to blow some people up so that they would then see the truth and then stop being afraid. He has written a long letter outlining his ideas, which can be seen at www.badgerherald.com.
Of course, assuming all this were so, those who died would be unable to communicate “the truth” to those still involved in the “world of the body” and thus alleviate the fear of death. But this point seems to have escaped him. Also, these pipe bombs were really not big enough to guarantee killing someone. Plus he left detailed notes with the bombs, as if the note could be read before the bomb went off. Obviously the guy has some muddled thinking.
When asked why he had targeted specific mailboxes, he explained that he was trying to make a connect-the-dots smiley face across the US map.
Some say he is a terrorist and should be treated as such under the new domestic terrorism laws in this country. Others argue that he lacks a terrorist’s motive and is simply mentally ill. I am an adherent of the latter viewpoint.
I find this a fascinating case. This blond-haired college student from Minnesota is described as calm, sensitive, and “even sweet at times” by various people who know him. The members of his former neo-punk band Apathy say that he was sometimes known to be a bit overdramatic, but that the band had not played together in over a year and a half so they didn’t really know what was up with him. A University of Wisconsin-Stout (where Helder went to school) junior who knew him during his time with the band speculates that his major problem might be his “tenacity,” whatever the hell that means.
Profilers are stymied, needless to say. They had expected an angry, older man without education, and instead they get this nice-looking college student who was just trying to be helpful, in his mind, at least. I mean, a SMILEY FACE, ya know?
Of course, the old “he was such a nice guy” line has been repeatedly heard in cases like Ted Bundy and Jeffery “Midnight Snack” Dalmer (another Wisconsin resident, oddly enough). Yet this guy has a fairly cohesive philosophical viewpoint and has written it down, much like the Unibomber, except that Halder’s message is quite different. The Unibomber was a man who saw himself as a revolutionary in the political sense. Timothy McVeigh also acted from political motives. While I am sure we will hear many attempts to draw comparisons between our new pipe bomber and these previous two explosives aficionados, Lucas Halder is operating from a totally different perspective.
He Who Thinks He Knows, Doesn't Know
Many intriguing questions are raised by this case – for example the appropriateness of seriously discussing and debating the points he raises while condemning his ultimate method. Is what he is saying to be dismissed simply because somewhere along the way a gear slipped loose, rolled out of his ear, and slipped unnoticed onto the floor and he decided to start blowing people up? And did, in fact, a gear slip loose? Can we not say that Halder just has another viewpoint on things and that his methods, seen from that perspective, make a certain sense (though they are by no means inevitable and the only way he could have developed his ideas)?
The use of violence is often spun as “justified” when we agree with the goal (witness America’s Operations Noble Eagle and Enduring Freedom as well as Desert Shield a decade ago, Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield, the “greatest generation” of WWII, killing in self-defense, and so on) and spun as “wrong” and “unjustified” when we disagree with the goal (suicide bombings and hijackings, Pol Pot and other “atrocities”…all of which are seen by someone someplace as desirable and justified, though we here in the US condemn them, at least for the time being). Has the point not been made repeatedly that history is written by the victors and that one man’s meat is another man’s poison, one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter, and one man’s colonial military strong-arming is another’s liberating force of democracy?
Some in the media and the public at large, in an attempt to simplify a rather complicated case (and so make it more easily digestible) and avoid some of the questions it raises, have been trying to draw comparisons between young Mr. Halder and young Mr. Walker, the so-called American Taliban. Is that an accurate comparison?
Another question that comes up is – how the hell did the police/FBI use his cell phone as a “beacon”? Are all cell phone calls monitored? Can anyone be found in this way?
What about the abundance of information out there on how to make things like pipe bombs? THE ANARCHIST’S COOKBOOK comes to mind (which I am a big fan of, by the way). How can a society protect itself from some of its citizens blowing up other citizens and still allow free exchange of information without judgement or censorship of content? Are events like this just the price we pay for the amount of freedom that we do enjoy? Must we trade freedom for safety? Some will certainly argue that we must, as they have since 9/11/01.
At the very least, I think we can see from this case and others like it a very good case for increasing funding for mental health programs. There are lots of nutty folks out there and a little bit of prevention goes a long way.
But is Lucas Halder nuts? Let us examine his ideas and then move on to his methods.
“All games contain the idea of death”
- Jim Morrison
A few quotes from the beginning part of the letter Lucas Halder sent to the Badger Herald:
“You do things because you can and want (desire) to. If the government controls what you want, they control what you can do. If you are under the impression that death exists, and you fear it, you do anything to avoid it. (This is the same way pain operates. Naturally we strive to avoid negative emotion/pain.) You allow yourself to fear death! World authorities allowed, and still allow you to fear death! In avoiding death you are forced to conform, if you fail to conform, you suffer mentally and physically….To ‘live’ (avoid death) in this society you are forced to conform/slave away.”
So far, no argument from me. He also asks if the world powers are using the natural survival instinct people have in order to use them. There is so much discourse and documentation on this line of thought that it is redundant to go over it here. Western governments try to control what their citizens want, and people conform so that they can continue to get the bio-survival tickets (money) that are required to obtain food, shelter, clothing, and all the various goods and services they have been convinced they need in order to be happy. In order to get these bio-survival tickets, people enter into a system in which their labor is exploited for the benefit of others, in exchange for the tickets. Failure to conform results in social ostracization and even denial of bio-survival tickets.
He goes on to ask several questions, such as “When 1% of the nation controls 99% of the nations (sic) total wealth, is it a wonder there are control problems?…Do we really have personal freedom?….Does the definition of freedom include limitation?” All very good questions, and ones most people who contemplate the plight of man consider and discuss at some time in their lives. He then goes on with “Do people enjoy this trend of limitation? If not, change it!”
He then goes on to link the American tendency to conform with people’s uninformed state about the actual nature of death. The logic seems to be that people do not know what happens after death, so they fear it, and the dominant elements in society play off this fear to get the populace to conform to a limiting and limited way of life. It would therefore follow that having knowledge of the true nature of death and what happens afterwards would free people from the fear of death, and thus from the soul-crushing system Western Civilization has become in the early 21st century.
Perhaps he is on to something, perhaps this is only part of the picture. I have maintained for years that everything comes back to fear of the unknown and that the source of that fear is the lack of knowledge as to where we came from and where we are going. In short, what the hell life is all about, if anything, and what the hell death is. The questions of Life and Death are the primal questions that haunt every thought and action of every human being on the planet – culture, gender, age, or race notwithstanding. All philosophy, religion, and art stem from these two questions. Man is not, recent research shows, the only animal that laughs, or kills for sport. Man is, however, the only animal that knows that it will die some day. Some of the various ways people have dealt with this fact, and the consequences of those actions, are admirably documented in the non-narrative film “Baraka.”
No matter what your personal belief system – whether you think humans are merely complicated animals, or are bridges to the divine, or fledgling gods, or descendants of aliens, or here to worship and obey a particular deity – you know that you will one day die, and so does everyone else. We can all agree on this point. This is the common ground that unites all of humanity.
Beyond the Veil – A Death Primer
Mr. Halder has distilled concepts from a variety of sources and come up with his own explanation of things. He asks us, “why (would) anyone be content with believing when they could know?” He then goes on to tell us what he has discovered in his quest for truth.
After dividing consciousness on earth into Plant, Animal, and Human, he claims that Death is a fairy tale on a par with “the tooth fairy, Humpty Dumpty, and Santa Clause (sic).” He says that we are on a very exciting journey and that the fear of death prevents us from seeing that.
Asking why the notion of death exists, he mentions that what he calls the Revealed Religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) were created to order people, provide spiritual relief (from the suffering that is life, one assumes) and to “maintain the survival instinct.” He says that any system that does not give you substantial evidence does not really provide spiritual relief – “religious people still fear death” because they are nor given anything except beliefs. “You are simply asked to believe, and most do.” He asks if a particular spiritual organization is worth being involved in “when you have no idea if it is legitimate or not?”
I was originally going to detail much more of Mr. Halder’s writing, but I feel that the reader can make their own judgements by accessing the letter in question at the Badger Herald. The point here is that the lad’s thinking is pretty reasonable, whether you agree with him or not, until he somehow reaches the conclusion that killing people will release them (and the rest of us, by osmosis) from the fear of death. I do not think he is a terrorist, and while he may be mentally unbalanced or may simply have been extending the practical application of his ideas into an area that this society says is not permissible (and I for one agree with drawing the line at killing people), he should be treated and kept away from society until such time as he is able to understand that blowing people up just don’t wash here. Maybe he should move to the Middle East, where such tactics apparently are more in favor.
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