Remember the "Farm Crisis"?

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Stress-induced deaths are often viewed as murder in farm country, especially among farmers whose despair and anger have led them into the arms of organized right-wing anti-government groups like the Freemen and the Christian Identity movement.  Not long ago I traveled to western Oklahoma and met with a group of farmers who have become involved in the Freemen/Identity movement.  The meeting demonstrated not only their belief that the government is to blame for their loss, but also the politics that evolve from that belief.

"They murdered her," says Sam Conners (not his real name).  The room goes silent as the gray-haired 60-year-old stares out the window of his soon-to-be-foreclosed farmhouse.  In his left hand he holds a photograph of his wife, who died of a heart attack in 1990.  "She fought 'em as long as she could," he continues, "but she finally gave out.  Even when she was lying there in a coma and I was visiting her every day--bringing my 9-year-old boy to see his mamma every day--they wouldn't cut me no slack.  All they cared about was getting me off my land so they could take it.  But I tell you now, I'm never gonna give up.  They'll have to carry me off feet first and they probably will."

The other men in the room sit quietly as they listen to Conners' story, their eyes alternating between their dirty work boots and the angry farmer.  The conversation comes to a sudden halt with a click from a tape recorder.  Conners looks clumsy as he tries to change the small tape in the microcassette recorder.  His thick, earth-stained fingers seem poorly designed for the delicate task.  "I apologize for recording you," he says to me.  "We just have to be careful."

With their low-tech safeguard back in place, one of the other men begins to speak.  Tim, a California farmer who looks to be in his early 30s, describes his plight: another farm, another foreclosure, more anti-government sentiment.  Only this time, the story is filled with the unmistakable religious overtones of the Christian Identity movement: one world government, Satan's Jewish bankers, the Federal Reserve, a fabricated Holocaust, a coming holy war.  "This kind of injustice is going on all over the country," says Tim.  "It's what happened to the folks in Montana [referring to the Freemen and their 83-day standoff with the FBI] and it's what happened to me.  That's why LeRoy [Schweitzer, a local leader of the Freemen] was arrested.  He was teaching people how to keep their farms and ranches.  He was showing them that the government isn't constitutional.  They foreclose on us so they can control the food supply.  What they want to do is control the Christians."

As far back as 1989, Wallace--then director of an organization called Rural Mental Health for Oklahoma--was beginning to see disturbing connections between rural despair and the growth of hate groups.  In his testimony before a congressional committee examining rural development, Wallace warned that "many debt-ridden farm families are more suspicious of government, as their self-worth, their sense of belonging, their hope for the future deteriorates... These families are torn by divorce, domestic violence, alcoholism.  There is a loss of relationships of these communities to the state and federal government... Farm-dependent rural areas are suffering what I could call community depression.  We have communities that are made up now of collectively depressed individuals, and the symptoms of that community depression are similar to what you would find in someone who has a long-term chronic depression."

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