Live in the Shed with Little Cricket: "Mt. Carmel"

28 years ago tomorrow, April 19, 1993, the FBI stood by as 76 American civilians, including more than two dozen children, burned to death with snipers trained on them near Waco, Texas after a 51-day standoff, initiated by the BATF over questionable allegations. President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno would then spend the next several years denying responsibility and allowing the FBI, which we now know had lied to the former AG about several important details regarding the incident, to conduct an investigation--on itself. If a private company ever produced the kinds of horrors that took place at the Mount Carmel Center back then, we can all imagine the legal and financial losses its leaders would suffer, and rightfully so, yet as we reflect upon the last three decades of American history, we are forced to grapple with the fact that the Federal Government and its agencies have only granted themselves more funding, more weapons, more personnel, and more power. The propaganda surrounding this story has been so relentless that many Americans today still believe that the Waco siege was justified, particularly because the people who were killed at Mt. Carmel, the Branch Davidians, have been painted with the broad brush of a "religious cult."

Now, I'm no saint. I don't go to church. And I'm certainly not affiliated with any sect of any religion. But no one deserves to die for what they believe, and it seems to me to take just as much faith to believe in the viability of an organization that claims the privilege to investigate its own deadly conduct than to believe in anything the Branch Davidians might have believed. In other words, the faith so many people seem to have in the US Federal Government after what it did to the people of Mt. Carmel strikes me as a religion all in its own. So I wrote a song about it. At best, those responsible for the events that took place on that day in 1993 were grossly negligent. At worst--well, you can decide for yourself. But regardless of how you feel about our system of government and the methods used by our law enforcement, it would be nearly impossible to argue that we should just forget about this story.

So without further ado, I present "Mt. Carmel," a song about the Waco siege: