It’s the fall of1971. I’m 17 and a freshman in a small college. The war in Viet Nam is raging and I’m hoping for a lucky draft lottery number when I turn 18 so I don’t have to dodge bullets in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Until July of 1971 the government, in its infinite wisdom, had determined that at the age of 18 I was too young to vote but old enough to be cannon fodder for the Viet Cong. Over 50,000 young Americans have already been sent to their deaths in South East Asia and hundreds of thousands have… nay, millions have been permanently physically and psychologically scarred. That death count and the 1968 the massacre of over 500 unarmed villagers in the Vietnamese village of Mai Lai by US soldiers has left me and many of my generation with bad feelings about the war. The order by Nixon to invade Cambodia in 1970 further fans the flames. University students across the land are protesting the war, including at Kent State, Ohio where four unarmed students were shot dead and nine others were injured when Ohio National Guard troops unbelievably opened fire on a peaceful protest of unarmed students in May of 1970. The simmering pot on college campuses across the land rises to a full boil.
The assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Robert and Martin Luther King Jr. are still fresh in my mind. The question everyone asks - why - remains unanswered.
During the summer of 1971 Whats Going On by Marvin Gaye tops the charts, a song and a question that haunted me then and… haunts me now.
My dad, who served in WWII, is pro war. Mom tends to side with him. Both despise the peace/hippie movement.
The era is rife with memes; make love not war, flower power, don’t trust anyone over 30. But the one that sticks, the one that seems more relevant today than in 1971 is… question authority.
Coming to this school I had a lot of questions about the war and the authorities promoting it. Now I have misgivings about the school - a small private Bible College (my parents idea) - and its policies, especially a required flu shot vaccination half way through the first term.
In my case, the result of that vaccination was a severe case of pneumonia. As it turned out, my first brush with death didn’t occur in the jungles of Southeast Asia in a US government sponsored war, it occurred in a college dormitory due to a vaccine made by a US pharmaceutical corporation sponsored by the US government and… made mandatory by a misguided Bible college.
Because my symptoms were most acute at night, seeing me during the day, the school nurse, without running any tests, insisted I had nothing more than a cold and told me I didn’t need to skip any classes, that I would get over it soon. My roommate, who wasn’t getting much sleep because of my coughing, wheezing and gasping for breath all night, kept telling the nurse I was really sick and that I needed medical attention. There were, in fact, several nights when I wasn’t sure I was going to see another sunrise. His pleas fell on deaf ears. After a few grueling weeks I came to the conclusion that the school nurse was a moron and told my roommate as much. There it was. I had done it. I had called out a representative of the authoritarian pharmaceutical medical establishment as a mindless puppet. I had officially - in my mind at least - questioned authority. There, in my dorm bed, during the sickest time of my young life, I felt a lightness I had never experienced before, as if a burden had been lifted from my soul. In some small way I knew I was now a different person.
It wouldn’t be until a number of years later, well after I had turned to herbs - and yes, including cannabis - and nutrition as my primary source of medicine, that I realized how absurd it was that the scientific religion of pharmaceutical drugs - what I now call the legal drug cartels - had an outsized foothold on the campus of a Christian college.
Over the next month I opted to sleep-in, missing a lot of classes. Ever so slowly, I got better. During Christmas break I went home to visit family and see our family doctor who, after giving me a thorough check-up, informed me that my lungs were badly scarred and that I had suffered from a severe case of pneumonia. No surprise there.
Given the dark shadow that was being cast across campuses all around the US, and especially given my personal experience that first semester, I began paying much closer attention to affairs on campus the second semester. It’s interesting how having a near death experience, especially at the age of 17, can spark a desire to look at things from a new perspective. This desire was fostered by a new dorm mate who had much more worldly experience than this sheltered farm boy from Kansas - the two of us were drawn together like magnets. Because he was helping to open my eyes to the hypocrisy that was there for anyone who cared to seek it out, we soon became known as trouble makers on campus - both of us were often called into the office of the Dean of Men (who had an affair with a student) due to speaking out about injustice on campus and not conforming to the ridiculously strict rules laid down by that very conservative Christian college. Of all the hypocrisies I discovered there, the most concerning to me was the lack of compassion towards sick students. Looking back, I can now see how that was the beginning of my education about how hypocrisy is the bane of organized religion. As it pertains to this article, it was also the beginning of my journey to question authority in general, but especially the pharmaceutical based medical establishment. It was an early galvanizing point in my life that led me to understand that institutional religion and institutional medical science share common ground - dependency on doctrine, dogma and a hierarchical structure, the latter being used to impose the previous two.
Today, in terms of its adherents and devotees, science, especially modern pharmaceutical based medical science, has become the religion de jour, easily surpassing all other religions in scope and authority. The current lockdown bears this out - modern medical science has been telling all other religious folks they can no longer attend the churches of their choice due to the “pandemic”. Yup, the tables have most definitely been turned. What is the only entity on earth with sufficient power and influence to lockdown the entire planet? It’s not the US, China, or Russia. None of them could pull this off. In the way that the superstitious fear of an invisible eternal hellfire and brimstone is used to coerce people into becoming Christians, the superstitious fear of an invisible virus - one that the ‘world wide church of pharmaceutical medicine’ has proclaimed to be a pandemic, yet has killed no more than a bad flu year - is being used to coerce us into believing that we should all relinquish our constitutional rights and bow to the gods of pharmaceutical medical “science”. Or is it the almighty dollar?
Why the fear mongering? Why take away our rights to worship freely, breath freely, speak freely and move about freely? Because the vaccines offer one of the biggest payoffs in the history of capitalism. To make sure everyone is sufficiently scared to line up for those vaccines, Oz, working behind the curtain, must have the fear lever constantly engaged.
Although a case could have been made for malpractice against that Bible college, I opted to not pursue that. I now regret that because for the next 35 years I was plagued by bouts of bronchitis, which I never had before the vaccination.
I didn’t return to that college for my sophomore year. As for that religion - I decided that if Jesus didn’t require a grand edifice in which to worship, nor a fancy campus in which to spread his teachings, neither did I. So I parted ways with the institutional aspects of that religion.
Fast forward to the present moment and the current dilemma we all find ourselves in - dealing with the consequences of the corona virus.
The vaccines are coming. Will I be getting one? I think you know the answer to that. Come the fall of 2021 it’ll be 50 years since I’ve had a flu shot. The new, never-before-used-in-the-human-population mRNA vaccines for the elusive SARS CoV-2 terrify me. This virus for a virus that has yet to be isolated and purified. Do unicorns exist? Someone thought they found a tail hair and someone else thought found an eyelash and someone else thought they found a tooth. None of that means unicorns exist. Today, pharmaceutical science is trying to convince us that because they have found some snippets of RNA (exomes - exudates from our own cells - the bodies way of ridding itself of toxins) that they have found SARS CoV-2. Actually, this is what is known as an epidemiological observation. Any scientist worth his salt will tell you that epidemiological observation does not equal causation. Equating epidemiological observation with causation is fake science masquerading as real science. In short, it’s voodoo science and that is what we are now being told by the authorities.
Question authority. If you’re still on the fence, I’m confident I’ll change your mind by the end of this series of articles.
Coming up next… An answer the question that Marvin Gaye posses in his song Whats Going On.
Great article! I was 2 years ahead of you at a small Baptist college, and clearly remember Kent State as a freshman of 18. I also remember getting the flu freshman year, but no flu shot required. It was also the year I stopped religion after dealing with their version and forced chapel twice a week. And getting in trouble for going to class barefoot in cutoff jeans. And trouble for making a beer can pyramid in my dorm room. There were other trips to the Dean of Women as well. I also learned to hide my escapades better. I remember the girl next door who quit eating and didn’t leave her room for weeks. I tried to help her and talked to the nurse more than once, with no assistance. She left at Christmas and did not return. I dated one boy who ended up in Nam, but never heard the outcome.
It was a sad and scary time for all of us, and turned me into an anti-authority nut as well. I’m still fighting every day and turn 71 tomorrow. The herb you mentioned has always been helpful to me. In fact, based on my learning about the many cannabinoid receptors in our body, I believe the fact that mine were all attached naturally kept me from needing any fake poison shot or treatment for a fake illness. 😉 May my natural immune system carry me forward, and I look forward to your series of articles.