Friday, January 14, 2011

I Hate to Say, ‘I Told You So’ . . .

My mind is still reeling about last Saturday’s shooting in Tucson, in which 22 year-old Jared Lee Loughner took the lives of 6 people and wounded another 13.  Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is still in critical condition, we are told, though, thankfully, she continues to improve.  Today, part of me wants to say, “I told you so,” but another part of me just wants to crawl into a hole and hide.  Initial news reports Saturday afternoon were quick to tell us that Loughner, once he had been identified as a suspect, was a drug- and alcohol-abusing loner who published screeds about the treasonous American government, religion and mind control in his online social network accounts.  They were less forthcoming about the reasons why he did so, and without understanding these crucial facts, I fervently maintain that we are doomed to live with countless many more Jared Lee Loughners being groomed among us.  Therefore, with the sole interest in preventing more tragedies such as last Saturday’s, I boldly propose we look more carefully at the facts we have.

Loughner was troubled – of that, there can be no doubt.  But lost in the endless speculation about him – that he’s schizophrenic, that he’s a racist, that he hates the government, that he’s antisocial – is perhaps the most telling actual fact that has been discretely brushed aside by nearly every major and most minor news outlets regarding his motivation for acting as he did January 8th:  there are records in the possession of the police that demonstrate Loughner went to them for help after a former “friend” had posted an unflattering, fake profile of him on peekyou.com.  He was, obviously, ignored by them.  He was being terrorized, and police did nothing about it.  True – this news appears on the most mistrusted news station in the world, Fox news, but that should be enough to give anyone pause; perhaps our mistrust of Fox News is being manipulated so that we likewise doubt this fact as such.  We know for whose benefit Fox always acts; no thinking person trusts them for good reason, which makes it even more incredible that this station is the one that has broadcast the fact Loughner had gone to police for help because his identity had been stolen for nefarious reasons (to portray him as something other than that which he, himself, claimed to be).  In what imaginary parallel universe is Fox ever the sole distributor of facts?  You instantly want to dismiss it, but you ought not to, not least because police complaints are a matter of public record.  In those regarding Loughner, we see not only that he, himself, was the victim of a terror campaign, but that the rest of his family was as well.

For who knows how long Loughner’s identity had been co-opted, but it’s clear that, indeed, it was to some degree and for an as-yet unstated – though apparently nefarious – reason.  Should we take, then, at face value the reports that he was merely a drug- and alcohol- abusing bully?  At the very least, shouldn’t we consider that the all-too-familiar path to becoming a bully is the experience of having once been bullied?  Loughner’s father has allegedly said his son was out of control, but we don’t know if he understood what very well may have been happening to his son – whether or not he knew his son was merely reacting to being a target who was tortured and terrorized each and every day of his life for what appears to be quite some time.  In this covert war our government is still waging against liberals opposed to the military domination of other countries by it, it is highly unlikely it will ever be proved Loughner is the victim of government interference, and for someone unfamiliar with the covert warfare arsenal historically used by our military dictatorship against citizens of this country – among which is an arsenal of the most intrusively designed and insidiously deployed weapons, colloquially called, “mind control” weapons – it can be damned difficult for him or her to understand the malignant perversion which results from the deployment of these weapons against a target’s personality and personhood, the destruction of which is the end goal of them, even if that someone is a more than usually sympathetic parent.  (Turns out the New World Order is actually the same, old world order except with better – in the sense they are less detectable and therefore more indicative of our government’s guilt – weapons.)  If Loughner’s parents didn’t have a realistic understanding of what was happening to their son, why should we expect people who are paid to write scandalous stories to give us one?  Loughner wasn’t born a schizophrenic, or a government dissident, or a white supremacist.  Whether or not he actually became any of these things, has merely been repudiated as such, or was induced to do what he did last Saturday by insidious means of persuasion the average person has no idea our government has long had the ability to propagate in an individual’s mind is unclear at this point.  What I can tell you is that people interfered with by our government in this way are numerous, scared and hopeless.  They also tend to be one other thing:  naively brave.

I am speaking, of course, about the people who risk their lives trying to tell you about the heinous covert warfare your government has waged against you, one of whom may (or may not) actually be Jared Lee Loughner.  They don’t rant about the government because they hope to become famous (or infamous), or because they want to be regarded by you as crazy.  They are, generally speaking, thoughtful, passionate and – yes – distressed.  And they are increasingly children whose normal development has been corrupted.  In Loughner’s case, we heard about his arrest record, his bullying, his drug and alcohol abuse and his dropping out of community college, but we also heard very little about the aforementioned complaint to police.  That’s a shame because before Loughner was any of these things – if ever, indeed, he was the more reprehensible things – he was, himself, being bullied in the most treacherous way imaginable.  His trust had been elicited and then betrayed by someone who may never have had any intention of being his true friend, and, as a consequence, his reputation was crafted into that of the most repugnant and monstrous type of sociopath known – the white supremacist.  That reputation is what caused his alienation from (so-called) decent society – not the other way around – long before he ever thought of purchasing and using a gun against a member of the group of people that has given billions of dollars to defense contractors and security contractors to develop, distribute and use the type of weapons about which Loughner railed and of which he may very well have been a victim.  That this young man chose violence against others (as opposed to the self-inflicted violence which the young, bullied, gay men who killed themselves last fall chose) as a means to mitigate the threats he perceived around him is reprehensible and inexcusable; nevertheless, we must face the fact that normal people do not behave in these ways.  Troubled people behave in these ways.  Normal people must be driven to such desperate acts.  For as little as we know about Loughner, this is without doubt true of him, and this should be the first – and last – fact we hear about him until all other facts are known.  But it isn’t.  What we are hearing instead is the same tired mix of cliché and stereotype, which makes it extremely difficult for us to see that Jared Lee Loughner could very easily be any of our sons.  That’s because the one war you can never win is the one you don’t know that you’re in.

Rush Limbaugh, the most prolific user since Joseph Goebbels of ad hominem disparagements that can only be qualified as hate speech, blamed metal music, in predictably hypocritical fashion.  Mother Jones appears more sympathetic, merely condemning Loughner as mentally ill, a “schizophrenic,” the traditionally common and deliberate misdiagnosis made unprofessionally by health care contractors under the influence of the U.S. military, or untrained casual observers which are then, in cases of public outrage such as this, picked up by professional (that is to say, paid and not necessarily truthful) opinion makers.  TIME, CBS.com, The Atlantic and Forbes have done just that and offered very little critical thinking about the story being presented to the world regarding Loughner.  We are so anxious to take sides against one another in our debates about who the true Americans are and air our speculations over who are not true Americans, standing beside the bodies of the dead and wounded, we have not stopped to educate ourselves about the very real threats to all of us that the young man who foolishly went to police looking their help because he was aware that his identity had been taken over virtually for nefarious purposes was trying to tell us:  that he, like untold millions of Americans today was being interfered with by an entity with the power to destroy his (and through him, that of others) life.

If Loughner is yet another Manchurian candidate, he is but one of the many millions of actual Americans whose free will has been supplanted using one or more of the many, many weapons in the hands of the military, police and average Americans working with them that are designed to do just that.  As such, both his personality and behavior may very well have been corrupted by these people for their own ends for years and is in no way representative of Loughner’s true personality and behavior.  People such as Loughner are obviously the only ones who are intimately acquainted with how our military dictatorship oppresses its serfs using covert weapons, and I ask you now, to whom should we listen when they testify to their persecution, if we are not willing to listen to them?  Their testimony is all we have that can save us from becoming like them.  The people who wage covert war are not going to tell us this is what they are doing.  As a much-maligned target of this military dictatorship myself, I am inclined to give any first-hand witness of its godless misdeeds the benefit of the doubt because I, too, have been the victim of it.  It’s the least I can do for one who may very well be another tortured and terrorized soul, disturbed though Loughner without doubt is, because I know that people such as he have been robbed of the deepest, most fundamentally human parts of their psyches – the parts that make revelations such as this nearly impossible (I say “nearly impossible” because there is one way in which they are still possible; first commenter whose explanation of precisely how they still are that I receive gets a free copy of Eric Metaxas’s new biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Bonhoeffer:  Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. Here’s a hint.)

The very same day of the attack, commentators on the wall of one of my more provocative FaceBook ‘friends’ were squaring off:  those defending Sarah Palin’s call to target (and reload as often as necessary) even nominal liberals such as Gabrielle Giffords, and those who were rightfully condemning her for her incitements to violence.  One fellow wrote, “If we could only get all of the bleeding heart liberals to rest their case the world would be a much more reasoned place to live. But no! Sadley (sic) we must all listen to and read constantly the moronic rantings (sic) and blatherings (sic) from a sad little group who just had their asses handed to them in the change of power in the House of Reps; this week. And if we the people will hold those we put in office accountable and vote even more of the liberal socialist out of office then maybe we can all breath (sic) a little easier knowing that morons and idiots that think the government (sic) owes them and those that think like them a higher standerd (sic) of living than they have earned off the hard working backs and out of the tax paying pockets of everyone else,” to which I responded, “I remember deciding when I was about 5 or 6 that it was stupid to waste ergs judging people I didn't know because, well, I didn't know them and what use were judgments about them, then? And since I couldn't meet every single person in the world, it was a supreme waste of energy that could be expended more profitably than forming baseless opinions about people, to make those baseless opinions in the first place.”  Now, I’ve had sporgery before on FaceBook, and perhaps the profile alleged to have posted this comment is not actually the author of them, but as any FaceBook user knows, despite its Rights and Responsibilities agreement that every FaceBook user is obliged to agree to when he or she creates an account, FaceBook sanctions threatening, obscene and disparaging right-wing opinion makers far, far, far less than its moderators (need to) delete comments from those who take more rational positions than, for example, the first in this example.  These are the types of comments being thrown around (and much worse) there, in this war against liberals, and they betray a mindset of domination that in no way represents the ideals of truth and freedom, common humanity, a Christian or other ethic, never mind a patriotic one.  This is the philosophy of the brute ‘social Darwinist’ who believes in nothing but his power to dominate others in the sturm and drang of life.  This is the mindset of the fascist; me against you, no such thing as community (again, Christian or other), or shared, public government.  Surely, the only person that ultimately matters is the one in front of you, but none of these alleged right- (and, sadly, many alleged left-)wing combatants seems to understand this.  Not surprisingly, this fellow’s response was to qualify my post as a rant, just as Loughner’s posts about our military dictatorship have been characterized.  I don’t know if the author of these comments is a fan of Rush Limbaugh’s, or not, but he seems to use the same thoughtless, paint-with-broad-black-brushstrokes tactics as the master manipulator does, who, in one fashion or another, leads all the talking heads with his vitriol.

We may never know truly who Jared Lee Loughner is, and that is the only certainty we should, by today, understand that we have because that certain uncertainty – like the fake white supremacist posing as Jared Lee Loughner on peekyou.com – is exactly the reason for which your government has designed these covert weapons:  to keep you ignorant of what more and more of the persecuted here in America know to be true about our military dictatorship.  Our sympathies today are with those who were shot, the only apparent victims of this tragic event, but I challenge you who claim to be people of faith to think very carefully about what happens to those of us who are persecuted by our government because of our willfully foreshortened scope of vision, and include in your prayers for the victims of last Saturday’s attack Jared Lee Loughner and his pained and confused family as well.

There’s really not much more that needs to be said than this - except, perhaps, that you can expect many, many, many more Sirhan Sirhans and Jared Lee Loughners in the days and weeks to come, unless you who believe you have a right to live free of military interference by your government on the most basic level of your existence stand with those of us who know we most certainly do not possess that right in America today, and you challenge this fascist dictatorship in which we all live.

Boy – do I hate to say, ‘I told you so.’  These essays just keep getting harder and harder to write despite their apparently necessary redundancy.
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