The world offers a wide range of opportunities and possibilities for the future. These opportunities allow people to pursue ambitious goals and dreams, but it seems like as the range of possible dreams gets bigger people are also feeling more hopeless than ever. Reality that makes promises for the future always seems to oppose those promises, until people just snap under the anger and frustration that they bottle up inside them. Andrew Joseph Stack III must have also snapped under such pressure when he decided to crash his plane into the I.R.S. office in Austin, Texas after setting his house on fire. The extremely destructive way in which Stack expressed his anger makes me think that his action was not from a spur-of-the-moment anger, but was an act of impulsive violence that was caused by a series of disenchantments about life.

Stack had financial setbacks that made him lose his retirement plan and a grudge against taxes for limiting his entrepreneurship possibilities. He also used to pursue music, which he gave up on after he got married. In other words, he was a man who had to watch his dreams and plans for the future escape his reach because of his financial situation. But according to his friends and family, he was not the type of person who expressed his anger easily. He probably piled his anger and frustrations inside of him until he could not endure them. Crashing a plane into an office was obviously wrong, but I also pity him for being a person who could not bear the disillusionments of life. Reality was probably telling Stack that a dream is just a dream, whether his dream was to become an entrepreneur, retire early, or become a musician.

Dreams are one of the things that make life worth living, but they also give us hope that often seems unreachable in our less-than-idealistic reality. The futility of trying to grab the hope that is right in front of them only drowns people in helplessness. But I am not saying that we should not dream. I am simply surprised that the dreams that fill people’s lives with passion and hope can also kill people. Aspirations that make people want to keep on living come with a price, the price of having to endure the harsh reality that always seems to hinder them from achieving their aspirations. Ironically, that price is sometimes losing your mind, the mind that lived on because it had a dream.

But is this dual identity always the case? Do dreams always bring some kind of pain? If pain is indeed inevitable, how do we know what kind of aspirations are worth enduring the pain? Or are all dreams worth it? Can we always hope that a seemingly dead-end life will get better? Or should we always keep in the back of our mind the notion, that at a certain point, we might find in ourselves with the impulse to crash a plane into a building?

Related Sources/Articles

Man Crashes Plane into Texas I.R.S. Office, The New York Times

For Texas Pilot, Rage Simmered with Few Hints, The New York Times