How to make a bomb

“Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

— Abraham Lincoln, address

to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., Jan. 27, 1838

There are few options for the powerless, but options exist. What you need to know is that there are pressure points, places to touch the world to make it buckle. You find the right seam, the appropriate fissure, and you can crack the universe.

For a certain persistence of the imagination, no talent is required. You can do this thing; the only question is whether you will. You can find out addresses, the names of trusted aides, schedules, a list of household and gardening materials that might be easily obtained, methods of obtaining restricted and obscure resources. Download the Onion Router, find the right chat room, lurk and be patient.

You can find the instructions. You can build the device. You can print out the labels and strap the package with tape. That much is within your ken.

What is harder is to find the will. You must be strong.

You must make yourself impervious to moral suasion, to the pain and suffering of your oppressor. You must understand what they are. How cowardly. How they lie. How grotesque and satisfied and incapable of conceiving any alternative to their comfortable parasitic existence they have become. You must remember how they are and how they have cheated you your whole life. How they built their fortunes on the snapped backs of your kind. How they take for granted what you can never have. How they steal your heritage and try to make you feel shame for living your life according to your own light.

You must remember that sacrifices must be made, that nothing is without cost. That there has always been a struggle between those who control the world and those forced to live under their tyranny. You must remember that there are no innocents, that any and all collateral damage will be justified in the end if your goals are advanced. Because your cause is righteous, vouchsafed by powers both omnipotent and incapable of acting but through martyrs.

You must remember that their blood pleases your gods. The blood of the bystander pleases your gods. The blood of their incidental employees pleases your gods. The blood of their children pleases your gods. Your gods like blood. They will redeem yours in paradise.

You must remember how right and clever you are, and that you possess knowledge others are too meek or silly to credit or consider. Or else they know corruption, yet choose it

over what is honorable. Remember that they are bad people and that they raise their children to continue their wrongdoing.

Remember they are the evil ones, no matter how good with words and numbers they seem; their eloquence is proof only of their treachery. Know that only your heart knows what is true and what is wicked and that you have within you installed a perfect magistrate to whom you need only to listen. Hear what it tells you when you are still. It is your duty.

Understand they are Other. Whether through volition or some horrible mutation (it matters not how) they have divorced themselves from humanity. They are murderers and thieves and spreaders of lies. They are cowards surrounded by thugs, They are vermin, polluters of all that is wholesome and pure. They are the ones who blur the lines, who don’t respect the natural separations, the firewalls that demarcate what a thing is and isn’t.

Thay are the ugliness. They are the enervating mob that demands the honest and hardworking take care of them.

They are the future. Unless the righteous find a lever with which they might move the world.

You must remember to be humble, for you are but an instrument.

You must take pains to prepare

yourself, to understand that there will almost certainly be harsh consequences for doing that which ought to be done. You must understand that there will be retribution, that no matter how careful you have been there is always a camera or a witness, some code or signature they can backtrack. The empire will always strike back, they

have informants and armies. They will find you.

It is likely they will kick in your door at night. They might shoot you down like a dog or haul you into their courts and hold you out as a villain. They will find you guilty and lock you up in a 7-by 12-foot supermax cell or strap you onto a hospital gurney and pump

cold poison into your heart. Remember: Remember: You are the master of your fate. You are the captain of your soul.

Remember: You will not be forgotten.

You will have acted, when others saw the necessity of acting but caviled at the cost. You will

have acted, like all those heroes— Gavrilo Princip, Charlie Guiteau and Nathuram Godse. You will be tweeted about. You will have your own Wikipedia page.

So go ahead and mail it. Punk.