Dear James Lee (open letter)

My name is Dan, and despite my not liking mainstream "news" sources, I tuned into CNN today around 4:30 pm to follow your exploits. As i suspected, the coverage was less than desirable, the "live footage" consisted of the same aerial shots of the Discovery Channel building and some green fatigue clad bomb squad tech running as fast as one can with 100+ pounds of crap strapped to his body. The pundit sounded a lot like a broken record, simply repeating the same limited information on the situation every two minutes and talking to "experts", who while providing interesting insight on aspects of negotiation techniques and whatnot, provided no actual information on you or your three hostages. needless to say i was disappointed but not surprised at CNN's coverage. but hey, its news, baby.

Eventually, a high ranking police official came to the mic podium placed somewhere on the streets of Silver Spring and informed me (and the public) that you had been shot. He went on to say you were in custody and that he knew nothing of your condition. he actually repeated this about 15 times in response to reporter's inquiries on your state of being. I found this amusing.

I have, however since discovered that you are, in fact, no longer with us. I personally don't like to see anyone die needlessly, so I find your death disappointing, albeit not surprising. I hope you rest well in whatever afterlife (or lack thereof) you chose during your tenure on this ailing planet.

The reason i am writing you is in regards to your actions today, or at least what i understand of them. CNN said you had a manifesto and that you were a radical environmentalist. naturally, they only mentioned a few contrived blurbs about how you wanted to halt people from breeding and making "filthy babies", and preceded to show pictures of your myspace (the pundit called it your facebook). trough minimal searching on the google, i have found and read your manifesto, which was actually only two and a half pages long (but you knew that already). I found it interesting. You had alot of good (if not impractical) ideas on what we could do to help save this planet. You even mentioned a book that i so happen to own a copy of. perhaps now I'll be a bit more inspired to read it. I'm sort of bad with reading books in a timely manner as it were.

I will continue to study today's events as details become available, but until then I would like to tell you that I will not forget you. I in no way condone the methods you used or solutions you proposed to save the planet, but in the end we had very similar concerns. Human kind is quickly destroying this planet piece by piece through pollution, terraforming, draining resources and overpopulation. I can relate to your discontent with "fake peace movements" as well, although in a much different way. Again, waiving a gun around in the Discovery Channel building with hostages was not a good way to get your message out. Endangering the lives of others is not only ethically wrong, it's also a great way to get shot (as you are intimately aware).

I know how this is going to go down though. In the tombs of history, you will be remembered as a crazy homeless Asian man, and not as someone who's legitimate concern for the future of our planet drove him to drastic actions. While I can never get behind your methods or solutions for bettering this planet, I do get behind your desire for change. You may have been discoraged by the peace and environmental movements of our present day, but I would like to let you know that I think there are many among this species that really do want to see this world become a better place, and will continue to fight for it.

My real moral of the story here is that we as a people should not be so quick to dismiss the ideals, ideas and passions of people just because we don't agree with all of them or because we don't get behind the actions that stemmed from them. If we're going to stand together and make any kind of change in this world, we need to sit down and actually talk to people that many times will have different views and ideas on things. We may not be able to see completely eye to eye, but at least if we try to understand one another we may be able to come to respect each other for our differences. In my opinion, a good majority of the world population want generally the same kinds of things, just in very different ways. its by identifying the different ways of saying the same thing that can help unify those who wish to change this world. But if we continue to be set in our ways and dismiss people as being "unreachable" or "crazy", we're not going to go too far. I feel as though the events of today will come to illustrate this more and more as the story progresses.

So to you James Lee, I wish you only the best in your post-mortal endeavors, and thank you for not actually hurting anyone.

Cheers,

Dan Ellis