Monster

       Now, this was in the way back. Long time gone by it is since he fell down on his beggin’ knees.

     Down there in that dirt he could smell his own fear as it oozed out his body like a vapor from a swamp. He clamped hand to face vainly trying to protect himself from his own stench. The stink of fear, though, assaults not from the outside but the other way. What he smelled, his own sweat and leaked urine, were only markers of the fear. It, itself, was ravaging him from within.  Covering his nose and then even his eyes was no defense as his fear devoured him, fouling him with its paralyzing odor from the inside out.

     In those olden days when the monster used as weapon that beast fear and it set upon him – when the unleashed beast fed upon him—he was no longer like unto himself. He had become another, and this other he had devolved into trembled some at its lips. The stranger he had been frightened into becoming began to weep. And the jagged stones on the ground bit through the fabric of his pants into his knees.

     But then, even thru his despair, he remembered. Somehow in the throes of that stricken state he had been reduced into the man remembered the boy. And the boy’s eyes were blue. The same as were the eyes of the boy’s father. And this remembering, this re-knowing, made the eyes of the man on his knees reopen and rise from that dead place toward which they had been fast descending. Reanimate. Those eyes now gone back to life flashed fury. And they were the same eyes as in the boy and the boy’s father. 

     The man who was down on his knees in that dirt stood; eyes wide and ablaze with purpose, he knew again who he was. Why he was. And like his grandson and his son, his eyes were blue. It was this lineage, a connection thru the blood of one generation to the next to the next, that got him back up when he had counted himself beaten. Before succumbing to the monster, he had struggled mightily for his own sake because he knew like all free men know that to stand against tyranny for nothing other than one’s own right to live a free life is justification enough.

     Yet it took remembering that link to something greater than himself to raise back up he, who fighting merely for his own account, had given over to surrender. That link in the chain that hoisted him back to his feet was the image of his grandson’s sparkling eyes that appeared to him thru the tears and hooded lids of his own eyes. He would not lie down and let that precious boy fall prey to the monster.

     So, the kinship evidenced by those blue eyes—it might have been any number of family traits, in any number of other families. In the multitude of other patriots who stood their ground to resist the monster in that day a half century gone by. What strengthened some men was seeing their own copper-tinted skin reiterated in their children, giving those men purpose to stand for freedom so that the children of their children could also be free. 

     Women aplenty back in that crucial time aspired to be strong mothers to their daughters and sons by facing off against the monster.  They were examples to those children they cherished. Examples of the sacrifices a loving mother will make to perpetuate freedom and the primacy of the individual. Her legacy to her posterity. Those ordinary mothers, those warriors, those patriots risked ridicule from the herd of brainwashed mothers, ostracism from the cliques of non-thinking former friends, derisive labeling by the media, they resisted outright bribery by the monster in their heroic exertions to teach their fortunate daughters and sons to resist the tyranny of thought and behavior control. 

     The monster back then those fifty years gone by now that pummeled my grandfather to his knees was his own government. It nearly broke him, being endowed as it was in those days of such vast resources to assail him. The government launched against the citizenry a relentless campaign of inducing fear in them in order to cower the people into compliance with its despicable designs. A single among myriad examples was this: In a year when no greater number of persons died than in other years,  the government’s assault by television, loudspeaker, billboard, newspaper, social media, a huge cadre of doctors without ethics, and on and on strove to convince citizens an unprecedented wave of death was sweeping across the land.

     Abetted by the formidable array of mindless flying monkeys thrown into the assault by the likes of Facebook, Instagram, CNN and a chorus of others of that ilk, the government very nearly pulled off its gargantuan deception. The monster almost got away with its false preaching, the message of which was that its abhorrent actions were in favor of the health of the people. This was never so. Its actions and its onslaught of spectrum- wide propaganda were always only in the service of control, power, money. So it was with the monster.

     Not only did no larger number of persons die in that year than in any proximate other, but when normal average age of death in the U.S., comorbidities, and failure to administer known and effective treatments were factored in,  it turned out to be true that the survival rate of those infected by the virus,  which the monster and its monkeys screeched was so frightfully deadly, well, the actual survival rate of  adults outside the afore listed parameters turned out to be very nearly 100%. This scourge, this new Black Death the government intentionally and systematically crippled the economy, decimated small business, stripped citizens of their rights, and caused direct grave injury to health over held only a fraction of a single percent’s chance of killing. 

     The monster knew this all along and did not care. It’s tiny, fevered brain was intent on objectives far removed from the health and well- being of the citizenry.

     My grandfather knew these things. He was able to learn them from his own individual exertions and from other patriots who sought and found the truth. Even the monster’s propaganda campaign, of a magnitude unprecedented in all human history, could not obliterate the truths of that time. One of those truths was that children were virtually immune to death or, indeed, any serious harm from the virus. School boards and teachers’ unions and U.S. Senators and the nation’s chief executive and news editors and celebrities all wrung their hands and beseeched parents to strap a ludicrous piece of cloth over their children’s faces and have them all shot up with an experimental barely tested vaccine. All this great cohort of authority and influence insisted I and every one of the other kids of this nation be vaccinated –against something that was statistically impotent to do us harm.

     My, my. The fear, separation, isolation, curtailment of individual liberties the government and its aforementioned axis of flying monkeys assaulted the citizenry with, in the name of health, I say again –it was all, always only for the gain of control, the tightening of a grip on power and the increase in ill- gotten wealth for a certain few. My grandfather recognized this and fought it, but the monster beat him to his knees with its ferocious strength. The integrated propaganda machine of that time that warred against the people of this nation made hitler, goebbels and that gang of thugs look bush league by comparison.

     No wonder my grandfather faltered and fell to his bended knee. No wonder the tears found him and he cried his lament over the theft of his right to self-determination, stolen from him by his own government. No wonder the bile of his fear rose up, stinking, and almost took him. It was a time of state sanctioned, state originated lies and dark deceptions against the people – more widespread, exponentially better financed, more expertly and thoroughly deployed than even when those perverse actions were perpetrated in a previous time by the nazi.

     But my grandfather said to my father once, who said it to me. Just as fear and resignation threatened to consume him, he was able to remember a picture of a four -year -old me he kept at home on his writing desk. My eyes in the photo were blue. Like my father’s. Like his father’s.

Here was reason enough for that man, my grandfather, to get back to his feet and rejoin the fight against the monster.

     He and the other patriots of his day willed that their posterity should live to know and enjoy the rapturous individual liberty and SELF-determination that those other original heroes had bequeathed with their blood to their own descendants when they slew their own red jacketed monster in the way, way back on the hallowed grounds of Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, Kings Mountain, Cowpens……

                                                                             END