An organizer’s dilemma

  What to do about the burning issue of our time?

 

I’ve been a political organizer since 1978 when I quit college to go to work for the United Farm Workers Union (UFW). After my training in California I was sent back to Florida, where I lived at the time, to organize Black and Hispanic fruit pickers.

An organizers primary job is to understand a particular issue well enough to be able to help the public grasp the concern so that they can react and help in some way to deal with the problem.

By nature I am a cautious person so going out on a limb is not my first inclination. I study things first, talk with others to get a reading on how they view the issue, then begin to form my own way of talking about it. Thus my hope is always to find a path to help move others (and myself) into reflection and ultimately action. But over the years I’ve learned that sometimes I have to step out no matter who is coming along with me if I think it is the right and timely thing to do.

The current controversy about covid, the jab, QR codes, mandates, lock-downs and growing social division has caused me many sleepless nights. I’ve been watching an inordinate number of videos (with doctors, scientists, patients, etc.), reading countless articles, watching protest videos from around the globe as increasing numbers reject the GreenPass mandates, and much more.

I’ve not taken any covid vaccines largely because I don’t trust Big Pharma. I’ve learned enough about how the system works – the boards and committees that ‘give approval’ for often untested vaccines are loaded with industry representatives who have serious conflicts of interest. The profits are enormous from new vaccines thus we see the demonization of proven off-patent medicines (like Ivermectin) that are cheap and thus a ‘threat’ to Big Pharma profits.

I don’t criticize anyone else for taking the vaccine or wearing a mask (my own wife Mary Beth reluctantly took the J & J jab). People do what they need to do. But at least I'd like to have a principled dialogue with people. I believe we all can learn from one another if we stay open.

That has turned out to be challenging at times – having honest and heartfelt discussions with friends and associates. Some people I know (from liberals to self-professed radicals) are unwilling to even have serious conversations.

Thus witnessing this current trend of clampdown on discussion and increasing government mandates has moved me to write this. I’ve made a list below of some experiences during my life that inform why I am generally suspicious of authority. I believe it is a survival technique.

I’ve learned to trust my heart, my mind, and my senses of smell and taste when it comes to various issues. Somethings just don’t smell or taste right to me. That leads me to undertake wider investigation. I am driven to learn, to understand, and to react as best I can.

 

• Growing up in a military family we often moved. In the winter of 1962 we went from England to South Dakota (Ellsworth AFB). We arrived in our family station wagon in the middle of a blizzard and from the back seat of the car I noticed what I call ‘shot gun shacks’ – old wooden houses with lots of holes in them. I shuddered to think how cold anyone might be living in those flimsy houses. I later learned they were Native people – Lakota. This began an intense process of investigation about Lakota (and other tribes) culture, history, and current conditions. In this process I learned how the US Army gave native people smallpox-laden blankets in order to kill those living on lands the government wanted. This was genocide.

• In 1963 I was 11 years old and in the lunchroom at my school when we were told that President John F. Kennedy had been killed. As I grew older I became an avid reader about independent  investigations of his assassination and have never swallowed the scripted story about Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone shooter. I’ve long believed the 'alternative story' that JFK was killed by the CIA and organized crime.

• A few years after JFK’s death I decided I wanted to be an FBI agent so I could fight against organized crime. I felt that I needed to get a jump on the career and sent away for an FBI correspondence course I found in some publication. It was from this that I learned about fingerprints and other such things. But the most important thing I learned was M.O. – Modus Operandi – every criminal has one – a way of repeating their same bad behavior over and over again. I eventually decided (while watching cops beat up civil rights and anti-war protesters on TV) that I could not participate in ‘law enforcement’ and later concluded my peace & justice work is all about fighting corporate organized crime. I often look for the MO.

• While in the Air Force (1971-1974) during the Vietnam War I read the ‘Pentagon Papers’ which was the inside history compiled by the Rand Corporation of the corruption and deceit by our government in selling the war to the public and to Congress. This left a huge mark on my soul.
  

 

• While working for the UFW (1978-1980) we spent much time standing outside grocery stores trying to get shoppers to boycott iceberg lettuce and grapes in solidarity with striking farm workers in California. We’d talk to the public about the terrible way farm workers were exploited by the corporate growers and the pesticides that the buyers of these products were consuming. It was tough sledding as most people didn’t want to hear about it.

• From 1980 to 1983 I organized in the Black community in urban Orlando, Florida around a slew of social justice issues. One day a Black man I knew quite well pulled me aside and thanked me for my work in his community. He told me, “Unlike many white people who come into our community you never tried to take from us.” But then he told me that I ought to go work where the real problem was. He said it was the white community that had their foot on the necks of Black people. He suggested I take on that challenge knowing that the only way to help the Black community was to change the white world. I agreed and thanked him.

• So it was then that I began to organize full-time in the peace community – mostly among liberal white folks. They were largely college educated people, middle to upper class, often heavily ‘invested’ in the stock market and the 'system' and in the main largely reluctant to get too radical. They were often concerned about their social status - what might people think of them if they got too politically frisky? I will always remember a talk I did in Daytona Beach in the mid-1980’s on nuclear weapons where a white middle class woman stood up and said as she walked toward the door, “You expect me to go to my bridge club and talk about all of this? If I did that I’d lose all of my friends”. I learned then that many liberals come to such meetings for ‘political entertainment’ but when it comes to putting your body on the line there were far too many social costs.

• Around this same time bottled water began to become ‘popular’. It was sort of a social status thing to walk around with some new brand name bottle of water. It was then that I thought someday these capitalists are going to have us buying gas masks so we can get clean air.

 

• On June 12, 1982 after watching C-SPAN coverage of the massive protest in New York City against nuclear weapons, the network switched to a right-wing conference featuring Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham, the head of Star Wars (Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative). In the Q & A someone asked about the protest going on in NYC and he said, “We are moving into space. They don’t have a clue. Let them keep doing what they are doing.” It was in that moment that I began researching the space issue and began taking people to the Kennedy Space Center to protest military space launches. Our first protest only had eight of us there. People were slow to respond. By 1987 we had well over 5,000 for a protest against the first-flight test of the Trident missile at the same spot. That taught me that it takes time for folks to come around. They want to see who else is getting involved before they stick their toe in the water. Again it’s in large part a sociological phenomenon.

• In 1999 (during Bill Clinton’s time in the White House) the US-NATO launched a war on Yugoslavia in order to break that Communist nation up into smaller countries enabling the capitalist block to take control of the region. I tried to get people to protest this war (where the US-NATO dropped depleted uranium bombs) but a Democrat was in office so most liberals I was working with didn’t want to publicly stand against their preferred political leadership.

• On 9-11 I was in the waiting room at the dentist office and watched the media coverage of planes crashing into the twin towers in New York on the TV. I could smell and taste this false flag event. My mind flashed back to the Pentagon Papers and other times in US history where our nation was led into a war. When I got home I pulled out my world atlas and began to study that little known country called Afghanistan.
  

 

• In 2014 I was one of the few Americans in the peace movement that immediately began writing and commenting about the US orchestrated coup d’état (by Obama, Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Victoria Nuland) in Ukraine. I was sometimes called a commie and a fool – even by some people on the ‘left’. 

• I went to Ukraine in 2016 and then to Russia and the Donbass after that to learn for myself what was really going on in the region. During the Trump years I didn’t buy the ‘Russia-gate’ bullshit pedaled by the corporate media and the leadership of the Democrat party.

• Once the covid plandemic began I tried sharing some information with one long-time friend and they told me to ‘Fuck off’. At that point the right-left ‘divide and conquer’ was well underway in the US and around the globe. Some of my closest friends and peace associates (who ordinarily complain about corporate endless resource wars) suddenly were touting the line from New York Times (remember shock and awe in 2003?), Washington Post, CNN, NPR, BBC, MSNBC (particularly Rachel Maddow) and more. Some of them mocked me and have called me ‘anti-vaxer’ (which I am not) and ‘horse paste ingester’. I’d try to share what I learned from doctors, scientists and about people who had died from the covid vaccine but most people didn’t want to hear it.

• Soon after covid vaccines became available I was at a local bakery in Bath (which had to recently close due to the lock-downs) and I noticed a man and woman my age bragging how they just got the jab. They felt so safe now as they ordered GMO-free pastries at the shop. That moment jumped out at me after recently watching a short video clip of Bill Gates and his wife describe how they were injecting little African kids in the arm with ‘GMO-based vaccines’.
  

• I have five sisters. One of them, just a bit older than me, lives in Iowa and recently came down with covid. She has not taken the jab. She got a prescription for Ivermectin (which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015)  from a courageous doctor. Without that treatment (which is being used all over the world, particularly in poor countries that can’t afford the expensive Big Pharma vaccines) her life could be on the line.

• I honor all those who dare raise uncomfortable questions about this covid bio-weapon that I believe was first created at the Fort Detrick US Army ‘Futures Command’ lab in Maryland. Anthony Fauci sold the ‘gain-of-function’ technology to China’s Wuhan laboratory where it was likely leaked - accidentally or not.  (Gain-of-function refers to experiments that intentionally modify a pathogen to create the ability to cause or worsen disease, enhance transmissibility, and/or create novel strains with potential to cause global spread in humans.) 

 

• I honor those (on the right or the left) who show courage and challenge the profit-centered Big Pharma industry.

• I honor Robert F. Kennedy Jr who has dared to challenge the ‘official line’ and daily takes hits from people who claim to be ‘progressive’ but don't appear able to see the writing on the wall. RFK Jr urges people to read the last chapter of his new book about Fauci where he clearly exposes the CIA, the military industrial complex and Big Pharma for working together to create this plandemic while making massive profit and destroying democracy.

 

• I honor those who continue to publish articles and videos that question the mainstream corporate covid narrative and routinely get their posts removed from social media in the ‘land of the free and home of the brave’. Where is the ACLU on this growing mass surveillance program now underway with QR codes, mandates and lock-downs? How can this nation (and much of the world) consider themselves democratic anymore?

• I end with a quote from the great philosopher (and New York Yankee baseball catcher) Yogi Berra who said, “You can take ‘em to the ballgame, but you can’t make ‘em go in.” 

That has become my organizing philosophy. I’ll keep trying….

Bruce