They Shot Five Congressmen, by Mike Gold – Brainiac on Banjo #324 | @MDWorld

April 29, 2013 Mike Gold 1 Comment

59 years ago, four men and women came to Washington DC and shot five Congressmen on the House floor. It’s possible you haven’t heard of this one; I’ve been surprising people with this story for a long, long time.

On March 1, 1954, in an attempt to illuminate the world on the horrors of American imperialism, four Puerto Rican nationalists came to Washington armed to the teeth, got themselves seats in the visitors’ balcony (referred to as the Ladies’ Gallery) and, at the moment they deemed appropriate, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag, whipped out their semi-automatic pistols and got off 30 rounds, wounded five Congressmen – one seriously but none fatally. They did not have to be burdened with gun laws or checkpoints, and they were not shot down by schoolteachers where they stood.

Amusingly, at the time Congress was debating the pros and cons of a new immigration bill. I live for irony.

They were arrested and convicted in Federal court and given 76 years at various government resorts, including Leavenworth and Alcatraz. Twenty-five years later they were pardoned by President Jimmy Carter and were returned to Puerto Rico, reportedly as part of a deal with Fidel Castro in trade for a bunch of our spies.

Obviously, the shooters failed to make their point. Even if you were aware of this event, it’s now almost 60 years later and not only are most people unaware of the day Congress was shot up, but Puerto Rico remains American property.

In all my reading of newspaper accounts published at the time, at no point was the word “terrorist” used.

Come to think of it, nine years later a man purportedly (“innocent until proven guilty in a court of law” and, being dead, he was neither tried nor convicted) wounded a United States governor and killed the United States president. He was not referred to as a terrorist in the newspapers at the time.

I’m sure both incidents would be perceived in such a manner today. Back in 1954 Congress responded by tightening security but nothing else of substance was done. Even the JFK assassination was met with little more than lengthy jawboning. No draconian measures were taken, and we survived under the cloak of sanity and the American principles of fair play for all. Mostly.

As individuals, our liberties were not threatened. Our right to habeas corpus was maintained. We didn’t ship untried Puerto Ricans off to internment camps. We could take our favorite shampoo on the airplane. We didn’t have to take off our shoes.

In other to get to that point, we had to redefine a label so that we could use to promote and maintain a continuous state of paranoia.

Let us remember that the folks in Boston, the people who spotted the suspects, the folks who whipped out their cellphone cameras, the various police agencies that conducted a reasonable and highly effective investigation, the marathoners who ran 26 miles and then immediately gave blood, the folks at New York’s Penn Station who didn’t utter a peep when their Boston-bound trains were terminated and they were tossed into a busy and often confusing city… let us remember that these people and so many more did not react out of paranoia. Anger, yes. Support for their fellow human being, to be sure. Terror… not so much. And paranoia… not at all.

Because if you’re paranoid – no matter how justifiably so – you can’t do squat.

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check the website above for times. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.