A Welcome Victory for Jeff Luers

I was very pleased to see over at Bombs and Shields that Jeffrey “Free” Luers has been granted a reduction in his jail sentence by as much as 15 years.  Originally, Luers had been sentenced, at the age of 22 or 23, to his age in prison, more or less, for torching a few empty SUVs and not physically hurting anyone.  The sentence was obviously politically motivated, though it was also sort of typical in a land where almost any one person’s property is considered so much more valuable than another person’s life.

The sheer injustice of this sentence, this attempt to totally destroy 23 or so years of somebody’s life for a very inadequate reason, should have been a cause for outrage from people with many different political interests and beliefs.  Instead, many “progressives,” both liberals and leftists, refused even to talk about this subject because they disagreed with Free’s tactics or his priorities.  Which was completely beside the point.  Torching SUVs isn’t exactly my tactic and global warming isn’t my main/exclusive focus, either (I think a lot more people will suffer and die first from war, lack of access to healthcare, and poverty); however, I would never have used those differences as excuses for not speaking up against this injustice.  Sometimes people on the left can act very stoopid when they’re asked to help defend the rights or liberties of someone who isn’t exactly in their particular niche…  I also think that so many people are just chickenshit.  (Is it possible that we might see a little more courage all around when it comes to speaking up about this sort of miscarriage of justice and even acting against it now that the Bush regime and all that went with it have been discredited to some degree?  That would be nice, but I think that we’ll only see a little bit of that change in social climate, and only for a short time, unless bigger changes happen further down the road.  But I digress.)

Anyway…  It is nice to see a little good news in the news for a change.