20 years after Ruby Ridge, there's forgiveness
As the 16-year-old closed in, her mother, Vicki, opened the cabin door and stood behind it, holding Sara Weaver's 10-month-old sister in her arms. Just then, a sniper's bullet struck her mother in the head, killing her.
For the next nine days, the surviving Weavers holed up in the cabin while hundreds of federal agents laid siege in a standoff that helped spark an anti-government patriot movement that grew to include the Oklahoma City bombing.
Today, 20 years later, Sara Weaver has left the anger behind, finding religion — and forgiveness.
"I went 10 years without understanding how to heal" until becoming a born-again Christian, she said. "All bitterness and anger had to go," she said. "I forgave those that pulled the trigger."
These days, the Weavers live near Kalispell, Mont., a city in the northwestern part of the state that is the gateway to Glacier National Park and more than 100 miles east of Ruby Ridge.
Patriarch Randy Weaver, 63, is a doting grandfather, his daughter said. Her two sisters, including the one who was in Vicki Weaver's arms, are working.
For a time, it seemed doubtful that any family members would survive the siege.
Randy Weaver moved his family to northern Idaho in the 1980s to escape what he saw as a corrupt world. Over time, federal agents began investigating the Army veteran for possible ties to white supremacist and anti-government groups. Weaver was eventually suspected of selling a government informant two illegal sawed-off shotguns.
To avoid arrest, Weaver holed up on his land.
On Aug. 21, 1992, a team of U.S. marshals scouting the forest to find suitable places to ambush and arrest Weaver came across his friend, Kevin Harris, and Weaver's 14-year-old son Samuel in the woods. A gunfight broke out. Samuel Weaver and Deputy U.S. Marshal William Degan were killed.
The next day, an FBI sniper shot and wounded Randy Weaver. As Weaver, Harris and Sara ran back toward the house, the sniper fired a second bullet, which passed through Vicki Weaver's head and wounded Harris in the chest.
During the siege, Sara Weaver crawled around her mother's blanket-covered body to get food and water for the survivors, including the infant, until the family surrendered on Aug. 31, 1992.
Harris and Randy Weaver were arrested, and Weaver's daughters went to live with their mother's family in Iowa. Randy Weaver was acquitted of the most serious charges and Harris was acquitted of all charges.
The surviving members of the Weaver family filed a wrongful death lawsuit. The federal government awarded Randy Weaver a $100,000 settlement and his three daughters $1 million each in 1995.
"Ruby Ridge was the opening shot of a new era of anti-government hatred not seen since the Civil War," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which keeps tabs on hate groups.
After Ruby Ridge, federal agents laid siege to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. It ended violently after 51 days on April 19, 1993, when a fire destroyed the compound after an assault was launched, killing 76 people.
Timothy McVeigh cited both Ruby Ridge and Waco as motivators when he bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Ruby Ridge has been cited often by militia and patriot groups since.
"What Ruby Ridge did was energize the radical right in a way it had not been in years," Potok said.
Sara Weaver said she is devastated each time someone commits a violent act in the name of Ruby Ridge. "It killed me inside," she said of the Oklahoma City bombing. "I knew what it was like to lose a family member in violence. I wouldn't wish that on anyone."
In the years after Ruby Ridge, Sara Weaver, now 36, struggled with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as what she called a "toxic bondage" of bitterness and anger at the government.
"After losing mom and Sam, I almost felt guilty even thinking about being happy after they were gone," she said. "But that's a lie. Your family members don't want you to grieve them. They want you to move on."
After graduating from high school in Iowa, Sara Weaver moved to the Kalispell area in 1996. Her sisters and father followed shortly after. In 2003, a meeting with a childhood friend from Ruby Ridge helped her turn things around.
The friend mentioned her positive relationship with Jesus Christ, and something clicked for Sara Weaver. "I was shocked at that," she said. "I had a fear-based relationship with God."
"I decided I was broken and needed to be fixed," she said.
Weaver began reading the Bible, where she learned that "Jesus commands us to forgive," and embarked on a journey that, by 2011, found her speaking to religious groups across the nation. Her journey is described in her recently released book, "From Ruby Ridge to Freedom."
Weaver has not spoken to any of the agents involved in the siege, and doesn't plan to unless they want to meet her
Not everything has been smooth sailing.
Weaver endured a painful divorce a few years ago, and is now married for a second time. She and her husband, Marc, operate a quarter horse breeding ranch just outside of Kalispell. She has an 11-year-old son from her first marriage.
Sara Weaver said Randy Weaver does not do interviews and would not release a statement on the anniversary.
She has been back to Ruby Ridge, to the land her family still owns. All that remains of the family's modest home is the foundation, she said. She recalled with affection her unconventional childhood there, and her mother. "It's hard to live without her to turn to," she said. "I want to turn to my mother for advice."
"We miss her terribly. It never goes away," she said.
http://news.yahoo.com/20-years-ruby-ridge-theres-forgiveness-200635491.html
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Survivalist congressman is ready for doomsday
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) is one of the the country premiere proponents of preparedness against doom. Deep in the West Virginia woods, in a small cabin powered by the sun and the wind, a bespectacled, white-haired man is giving a video tour of his basement, describing techniques for the long-term preservation of food in case of “an emergency.”“We don’t really think of those today, because it’s so convenient to go to the supermarket,” he cautions. “But you know, you’re planning because the supermarket may not always be there.”
The electrical grid could fail tomorrow, he frequently warns. Food would disappear from the shelves. Water would no longer flow from the pipes. Money might become worthless. People could turn on each other, and millions would die.
Such concerns are typical among “survivalists,” a loose national movement of individuals who advocate self-sufficiency in the face of natural or man-made disasters, gathering online or in person to discuss the best ways to prepare for the worst.
What is atypical is that the owner of this cabin is Roscoe Bartlett, the longtime Republican congressman from Maryland. Over the past two decades, he has developed a following as one of the country’s premier proponents of preparedness against impending doom, even urging the more than 80 percent of Americans who live in urban areas to relocate.
“There are a number of events that could create a situation in the cities where civil unrest would be a very high probability,” Bartlett predicts in “Urban Danger,” a documentary that features the cabin tour. “And I think that those who can and those who understand need to take advantage of the opportunity when these winds of strife are not blowing, to move their families.”
Bartlett, 86, is a patent-holding scientist, an engineer and a farmer. He has also become one of the country’s most endangered Republicans.
Maryland Democrats redrew his reliably red congressional district this year to include a swath of blue-leaning Montgomery County, leading analysts to call the second-oldest member of the House an underdog in his November reelection bid against financier John Delaney (D).
But the possibility of electoral defeat does not appear to have changed Bartlett’s focus — to alert Americans to a future fraught with danger. On Sept. 30, barely a month before Election Day, he will be in Spokane, Wash., more than 2,000 miles away from his district, serving as the keynote speaker at the second annual Sustainable Preparedness Expo.
Bartlett, who declined a one-on-one interview, recently sat around a Capitol Hill conference room table with a group of like-minded experts to unveil legislation that calls for “every citizen to develop an individual emergency plan to prepare for the absence of government assistance for extended periods” and for communities to become capable of providing 20 percent of their own power, food and water if necessary.
The electric grid, everyone agreed, is vulnerable to natural disasters and terrorist attacks. “This is possibly the most serious threat the United States faces right now, because we are so utterly unprepared for it,” said Richard Andres, a senior fellow at National Defense University.
The grid could be crippled at least four different ways, Bartlett says: terrorist assaults on power substations, a cyberattack, a massive solar storm and an electromagnetic pulse attack.
Bartlett has for decades warned of the harm of an EMP attack — a nuclear detonation in the atmosphere that could fry computers and anything with an electric circuit — in his writings, in legislation and in late-night speeches on the House floor, though experts differ on the seriousness of the threat. Some agree the dangers are real, while others say such an attack is unlikely and the potential effects remain uncertain.
At a Go Green Energy Expo organized by his office in Frederick last month, Bartlett mentioned “One Second After” and asked, “How many of you have read the book?” He asked the same question at the recent Capitol Hill event.
The 2009 novel imagines an EMP attack on the United States, focusing on efforts to survive by residents of a North Carolina mountain town. “One Second After” was written by William R. Forstchen, who is also known for co-writing counterfactual historical novels with former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).
Forstchen paid tribute to Bartlett as “a true public servant” in the book’s acknowledgments, and Bartlett returned the praise, inserting a statement into the Congressional Record in 2009 advising Americans to read it.
Bartlett became interested in preparedness during the Cold War, when people and businesses commonly built bunkers in case of a nuclear attack. Yet, it seemed that no one was thinking about the next step.
“When you came out of the fallout shelter, what then?” Bartlett wondered.
Bartlett’s warnings aren’t necessarily tinged with fear; the scientist seems to view self-reliance as a puzzle to be solved, just as he appears to take a special pride in showing off the efficiencies of his “off-grid” West Virginia cabin.
“It’s just plain fun, when you’re looking at the challenge: What do I have to do so I’m independent of the system?” Bartlett asks in “Urban Danger.”
Bartlett bought his property in the Monongahela National Forest in 1980. It cost about $1,000 to build the cabin, he says in the documentary, with much of the materials brought in by cart because the road was so rough.
The main attraction in the kitchen is a wood-burning cookstove, which also heats the house and its water. There is also a small propane stove, for use “as long as propane is available,” and a hand-operated pump that brings water up from an underground spring.
“Whatever level you’re concentrating on, being as self-sufficient as you can, as quickly as you can, is going to be the right thing to do,” he says.
In “America’s Cities,” a separate documentary with similar themes, Bartlett approvingly cites the financial adviser and author Howard Ruff — an influential figure among survivalists — who counseled that “the most important investment you can make” is to have a year’s supply of food for your family, and “the second-most important investment” is a thousand-dollar stash of silver coins and jewelry to bargain with in an emergency.
“This is great advice for anybody,” Bartlett says. “And maybe you can’t buy a year’s supply of food. All the Lord expects you to do is what you can do.”
Bartlett is a devout Seventh-day Adventist and an active member of his congregation in Frederick. When he enrolled at Columbia Union College, he planned to become a minister. He chose to become a scientist instead but earned an undergraduate degree in theology.
Like Bartlett, many of the people in the two documentaries are Adventists. Bartlett’s office confirmed that the films’ producers connected with the lawmaker because of their shared faith. (The producer of “Urban Danger” declined to comment on his relationship with Bartlett, and the director of “America’s Cities” did not respond to requests for comment.)
The idea that the end of the world is near, and that people will be judged, is a key tenet of Adventist beliefs. “It’s right at the core,” said Ronald Numbers, a University of Wisconsin professor who has written books on the faith’s history.
But Numbers estimated that only a small percentage of Adventists prepare for end times by moving to remote locations and storing food.
For Bartlett, the lifestyle his cabin affords him is ideal, regardless of whether disaster strikes.
“I have no television, and you can’t really get radio there very well. . . . We just don’t turn it on,” Bartlett says of his cabin in “America’s Cities.” “I enjoy being isolated. And I ask myself, you know, if the world fell apart I wouldn’t know it here, would I?”
http://bangordailynews.com/2012/08/20/politics/survivalist-congressman-is-ready-for-doomsday/
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