A real human being (as opposed to a fake one, and there are many! Luka knows) gives his reasons for defending the truth:
Searching for the truth is
ugly, frightening and dangerous
— and the only worthwhile choiceBy John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net4-26-05
Maybe I’m already sufficiently hunkered down; safely ensconced in my leaky trailer; barricaded against the onslaughts to come; insulated from the contrived catastrophes that get worse with each new assault; prepared for the biological barrage our masters have scheduled for us to cull this feckless human herd and make their sinister existences even more profitable; as fortified as I can be against the imminent financial collapse about to engulf us all, at least for someone who earns his meager coins by hurling reckless adjectives at all these endless crimes against humanity.
After all, they haven’t come for me yet. But will they come next week?
Oh, I am so prudent. I remove the magnetic antiwar sticker from my trunk in certain rural parking lots so the rednecks won’t trash my car. Mmm, such courage. And sagacity. And always the darting eyes of man hazardously at large in an alien world. Who the hell are all these people, and why are practically all of them fast asleep?
Never have I heard so much talk as over the past few years about people wanting to escape from warmongering America. I get postcards from Costa Rica, cryptic e-mails from Thailand, letters about how nice it is in Denmark or Portugal or Brazil, all from people who have shucked that furtive sense of panic that still grips many people with actually functioning souls who remain uneasily in their decaying United States.
Once I wrote that we shouldn’t run off to foreign places, that the best of us should stay and fight for what is truly ours. But who can blame those of us who are intimidated by the widespread lack of support for values and actions that are truly humane. What’s the score now? About six people in the entire Congress who are apt to tell the unvarnished truth about anything? And not a single newspaper.
To not be afraid is to be stupid.
I have already received several notes from people who journeyed to Oklahoma City recently especially to see me. I had volunteered to go and participate in the group analysis of a previous disaster, now several incidents removed from the current affront to all things decent and holy, which is of course the continuing massacre of innocents in a faraway country whose oil America wishes to steal.
Some of you may remember that I canceled my appearance, essentially because of three things: extreme poverty; disenchantment with the overly respectful (and hence, IMHO, futile) way the organizers of the event planned to discuss this clear case of mass murder of American citizens by the American government. And, of course, fear of flying. I love to fly. But I wish to avoid having my orifices scrutinized by minimum wage Homeland Security goons.
More to the point in my recent field of vision were the hundreds of letters that have recently blessed me with tokens of appreciation for my efforts at describing how so-called humans can be so inhuman. We’re talking cold hard cash here, folks, and book orders. In between my scribbled rants that often show up in the most unexpected places, I eke out an austere living by selling my books, in which I have collected these very rants. I am always uneasy about asking for support, and always humbled by the sincere ways in which many people respond.
People (them again) always ask me, “How can you read all those horrible stories day after day and not be affected by them; how can you keep from slitting your wrists?” or something along those lines. It’s a question I don’t usually answer.
But when I try to, I think of that series of photos taken at a checkpoint in Iraq in which triggerhappy U.S. troops shot first and asked questions later, later to find six terrified and bleeding children in the car that rolled to a stop. I think of that little bleeding girl screaming over her butchered parents, and U.S. soldiers wearing masks to hide their identities from the photographer. That little girl is my boss. And the rage I feel at the people who put her in that position, I’m telling you, is simply more than you want to hear. Why do I do what I do, and how can I stand what I have to look at? I work for that little girl, and if you don’t too, then you have a problem with me.
Because if you don’t work for her, that means you’re an accomplice to mass murder (which as Americans, we all are), and that means I’m going to seriously kick your ass if I get the chance, although as you have rightly guessed by now, it will only be verbally and from a distance.
Likewise, I work for the souls of those kids in that Murrah building daycare center so righteously snuffed out by all those federal employees who were warned not to go to work that day. Which is why I got somewhat upset by the relatively inferential (as opposed to confrontational) intent of the organizers who had chronicled the irrefutable evidence that the OKC attack on humanity was not about a renegade pseudopatriot with a truck bomb, but about a government conducting an experiment on its population’s social alienation from reality. Which spectacularly continues, meaning the experiment was a success. […]
If you don’t know who is the little girl who is Kaminski’s boss, go here and scroll to the pictures of the first article: “Shooting in Tal Afar“.
