Michael Ruppert: By The Light Of A Burning Bridge

“Sometimes you get your best light from a burning bridge” – Don Henley, “My Thanksgiving”

August 16th 2006, 11:45 AM [PST] – CARACAS – It was about a week before I left the United States forever that I watched Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. tell Charlie Rose something all of us already know in our hearts. “Today,” he said, “the United States is hated around the world far worse than it was at the height of the Vietnam War.” I remember the Vietnam War. I will never forget it.

I opposed that war, and I still remember riots on the UCLA campus in May,1970 when four students were shot dead by National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio. I was a college student then, and I was 2S-deferred for the draft. A year later I would be re-classified 1A as the nation shifted to a lottery system. At least someone in my country was willing to risk his life in the face of injustice. It gave me hope. That kind of risk-taking was commonplace then, from the civil rights movement to the anti-war movement, to the American Indian Movement. American blood was shed regularly on American soil to resist American tyranny; from Watts, to Detroit, to Selma, to San Francisco to Memphis to Wounded Knee. It fertilized our lives and souls as it touched the ground. The willingness to endure physical suffering, material sacrifice, and jail for the sake of justice was a singular mark of the American character that earned respect as it infected the world.

What is the United States infecting the world with today?

Now it seems the American people won’t even risk their credit ratings, student loans, the next piece of ass, or a sideways glance from people who look at them like AIDS patients for daring to deviate from the corporate, media-instilled norm. We have come a long way backward. Rodney King’s “Can’t we all just get along” has become the modern day theme song for the surrender of America’s character, and the L.A. Rebellion of 1992 was probably the last flame of will to fight injustice in American history.

This new quiescence comes at a time when US crimes are far worse and more far-reaching than they were in 1970; certainly in the eyes of the world. In 2001 the US government both facilitated and executed the attacks of 9/11 against its own people, killing thousands of its citizens as an excuse to launch a neo-imperial conquest for energy. A few Americans held small rallies, organized some ineffective groups, bought a few hundred thousand books and DVDs, listened to a few radio programs and lectures, and then quietly lined up to have their bags, emails, credit histories, minds and bodies searched. Critical mass was never achieved as Executive Orders along with the Patriot and Homeland Security Acts shredded the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments to our Bill of Rights.

In my book Crossing the Rubicon I wrote that events that took place in the five years following those attacks would determine the course of human history for centuries to come. We now stand at the brink of that fateful anniversary.

After the 9-11 attacks the US government lied to create a war for oil in Iraq telling us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, almost-ready atom bombs, poison gas and deadly germs. We were told that he helped execute the 9/11 attacks. It was all lies, and no one has held the US accountable for the hundreds of thousands of deaths (murders) in Iraq and Afghanistan since then. Few have tried to hold the government accountable for 2,500 Americans who have died needlessly, and those who have, have been remarkably ineffective.

US presidential elections were stolen in 2000 and 2004 through rigged electronic voting software and intimidation. Not one drop of blood was spilled anywhere, even as the US Supreme Court rendered an illegal decision supporting the overthrow of the Constitution and trampling the rights of individual states.

I never thought I would call the 60s and 70s “the good old days”. I would cry tears of joy today to see just one campus overrun by a modern equivalent of the Students for a Democratic Society. I would cheer to see a general strike paralyze a city. It would be living proof that American character had not been submerged, drugged, weakened, and rendered anemic beyond revival.

My country is dead. Its people have surrendered to tyranny, and in so doing, they have become tyranny’s primary support group; its base constituency; its chief defender. Every day they offer their endorsement of tyranny by banking in its banks and spending their borrowed money with the corporations that run it. The great Neocon strategy of George H.W. Bush has triumphed. Convince the American people that they can’t live without the “good things”, then sit back and watch as they endorse the progressively more outrageous crimes you commit as you throw them bones with ever-less meat on them. All the while, lock them into debt. Destroy the middle class, the only political base that need be feared. Make them accept, because of their own shared guilt, ever-more repressive police state measures. Do whatever you want.

No amount of mind control spin can absolve any of us from acknowledging this ugly truth about the US and its crimes today. It lurks invisibly behind every corporate news broadcast, every commercially-made television show, every infomercial, every new magazine ad, and almost every new popular song that leads Americans deeper into ever-less-satisfying consumption, self-indulgence and debt. It stands grinning behind every report on the world’s rapacious financial markets and every new automobile, shampoo, or other product that promises to give the world larger and more potent sexual organs, bigger (more ridiculous) breasts, a better love life, and peace of mind.

I left my last classes that spring day in 1970 after four students had been murdered, crying from both the emotional pain and the tear gas that wafted up the Janns Steps and onto the Quad at UCLA. I went to my job as an intern at the Los Angeles Police Department. After donning my khaki uniform without gun or badge I returned to UCLA to work at LAPD’s command post, ferrying dispatches and running errands for Deputy Chiefs, Commanders, and Captains as LAPD batons shed the blood of my fellow students. My life has always been full of ironies. Then, I believed that the system could be changed from the inside. Then, I believed that the United States could be changed from the inside.

Mistrusted by both sides there was no safe place for me to cry that day.

My shame today is that it took a set of circumstances where my life was in danger to make me make the right choice, a choice I would now like to say was totally a matter of conscience, but it was not. The truth is that I was prompted to do what I should have done long ago out of a well-justified desire to save my life.

In this life I have chosen not to die a martyr’s death. As I am learning every day, there are more difficult and demanding ways to write the final chapters of one’s life. I left the United States with one large suitcase, my laptop, and a backpack. I left behind my precious library, most of my clothing, my personal possessions, my guns, and a house full of furniture. I brought with me less than eight thousand dollars in cash and gold to start the final segment of my life.

My permanent exodus from the US was actually ordained thirty years –- to the month –- before I left for good on July 18th, 2006. It was thirty years ago that my then-fiancée, a career contract agent for the CIA, disclosed to me that “her people” were interested in giving a major boost to my career with LAPD if I would become involved with her “anti-terror” operations that involved “overlooking” (i.e. protecting) large drug shipments coming in while facilitating the movement of large quantities of firearms going out. I refused to compromise my ethics as a police officer and –- as I wrote on page 6 of Crossing the Rubicon – “that has determined the course of my life ever since.”

Like all humans I want to hold on to dreams for as long as possible, even long after I know they will never come true. I have tried and sacrificed with every fiber of my being to change my country, but the plain fact is that the United States of America cannot and will never be changed from within. I recall the words spoken to me by a senior FBI agent in Los Angeles in 1986: “Mike, the world doesn’t want to be saved.”

Stupid me. I still believe it does –- at least the parts of it that lie outside the US, Great Britain, and Israel; the real Axis of Evil.

Today the United States is the cause of ever-expanding wars (covert and overt), carnage, suffering, and political and economic exploitation –- even within its own borders against its own people –- that fill our corporate-issued headlines and TV shows. The US economy, the privately-owned Federal Reserve system, and the government which they operate like a franchise are the greatest enemies of the entire human race and especially the rapidly- deteriorating and fragile ecosystem which supports all life. U.S. citizens are slowly discovering that they are not immune because of their nationality. On our planet today, what happens to one must inevitably happen to all. Peak Oil and global warming will spare no nationality in the end.

The US economy, driven by a fiat currency, fractional reserve banking, debt-based financing –- and “doped” with the billions of dollars of drug profits laundered through its corporations and banks –- is a superheated pyramid scheme of infinite growth wherein 5% of the world’s population consumes 25% of the world’s energy and a totally disproportionate share of the world’s diminishing resources and commodities.

In their silence and acquiescence Americans have voted –- even if by abstention –- to stand on the shoulders of all drowning peoples in the vain hope that they will somehow be saved from a paradigm which they support and empower by obeying it; by endorsing it with their silence or knowingly impotent protests; by refusing to throw themselves against the gears of the machine. In this world, a protest which is allowed and encouraged, corralled into free-speech areas, and then policed by the ruling government only to be ignored by the media is, by definition, meaningless.

The US is a nation where the “non-negotiable” and unsustainable “American” way of life is propped up by global conflict, out-of-control military spending, massive and unsustainable debt, and an increasingly-aggressive fascist police state. It is a nation where all US citizens who do not resist and disconnect from this paradigm enjoy their ever-diminishing privileges with the guilty knowledge that somewhere else, hopefully in some “other” country, others are paying the price for it.

The world is now my country.

With the passage of time, the degree of corporate oppression, the outrageousness of the cruelty, and the absurdity of the lies can only increase as dwindling resources diminish and desperation erupts. Ironically, the disappearing American middle class will still cheer at each new millionaire success story, even if they quietly understand that a hundred or a thousand of their kind had to disappear to create it. They chase illusions of hope rather than the real possibility of justice and change like lottery players with a one-in-a-billion chance of winning. They prefer that to hard work and sacrifice with much better odds where almost everybody can win something.

As the human race enters the first stages of inevitable collapse resulting from Peak Oil, it does so ass-backwards, in complete denial, and in the one way most certain to guarantee the greatest amount of suffering and death for future generations. It does so because, for a time at least, U.S. foreign, military, and economic policy holds the steering wheel of human destiny through dollar hegemony, military force, technology and globalization.

This control is inevitably weakening, and other hands in other countries are successfully struggling for an ever-increasing measure of influence. The Empire is dying from within, and like all wounded beasts, it is becoming more vicious and dangerous in the process; its lies more transparent.

A different world is possible. A better world is possible. It took the imminent threat of my own death at the hands of my government to make me fully admit to my innermost self what I have known for years. Having failed to change my country’s direction after 30 years of effort, I had to stop living in the problem and start living in the solution. If I did not, my soul would have died just as surely as my body would have died after the recent burglary that savaged our offices.

I do not know where I will spend the rest of my days. Maybe in Venezuela, maybe in Mexico with the Zapatistas, maybe in Bolivia, maybe in France, Germany, or even Russia. But because Venezuela has become the singular world leader in resisting US domination under the courageous, intelligent, and inspired leadership of Hugo Chavez, I want to begin the rest of my days here.

Being freer to speak, to learn, to experience and to witness real solutions being discovered and implemented by peoples willing to take risks and who understand the challenges, I will be better able to report usefully to FTW readers and the world in future books and articles. I am currently in a country where the people have changed and are changing their government; where the elected head of state has won six elections while George W. Bush has stolen two. Is it any wonder I feel better already?

One thing is certain about fascism and that is that its behavior and evolution are remarkably predictable. Five years ago I helped bring into world consciousness a forgotten quote from Benito Mussolini wherein he said that, “Fascism ought to more properly be called corporatism since it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Nothing better describes the state of the world today. The U.S. is a nation of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation. As such it has placed something different from and opposed to the welfare of human beings on the compass as its “true North”.

Fascism always becomes more vicious as it evolves. It never retreats, and as with drug addition, larger and larger doses of oppression and violence are always required to sustain its inevitable path towards self-destruction. As the great Cynthia McKinney said to me not long before her just-orchestrated ouster from the House of Representatives, “any fool can see it coming.”

KRISTALNACHT

The burglary that took place at the new FTW offices in Ashland, Oregon on Sunday, June 25th of this year was the equivalent of my Kristalnacht, a replay of the night in 1938 when Nazi storm troopers, aided by an increasingly cowed and cowardly citizenry, raided synagogues all over Germany and smashed every piece of glass and every window they could find. German Jews not in denial who could (literally) read the writing on the walls (Juden Raus!) fled for their lives in the short time remaining before The Holocaust. Those who denied the meaning of that very specific warning remained in Germany, and their fate was sealed.

As a man who owns his own mind I can and do vehemently oppose the Israeli government and its policies and still have no ill will at all towards any Jew anywhere. Israel is a country. Judaism is a religion. All men and women are free to worship their God or Gods as they see fit, and in so doing, to bring knowledge of the unknowable and their truths to a human table that is increasingly deprived of compassion, love, justice, balance, and mercy. These will always remain the common threads in all true spirituality. Truly what is needed now is some spirit.

Those who do know history are not destined to repeat it.

DETAILS

As for the burglary itself, there will be another time and another place, when I can and will say more about what happened. Certain important events have yet to unfold, and I’m holding other key facts until the time is right. There are facts about the timing of the burglary that may eventually connect to events here in Venezuela. But for now, suffice it to say that it was the final outrage in almost three decades of attempts to silence my voice and the eight-year-old voice of From The Wilderness.

It is almost certain that the burglary was perpetrated, at minimum, based upon inside information provided by recently fired or resigned FTW staff members. There is – or was – only one television program I cared about, HBO’s Deadwood. It was common knowledge in FTW’s new offices that I was obsessed with the show, and on June 25th I was certain to be home watching one of the first episodes of the new season I had been anticipating for a year. As everyone knew, I worked late and had irregular hours every other day of the week. I may never find out if Al Swearingen got the best of George Hearst, but in retrospect, it’s a small price to pay for my new freedom.

The burglary followed on the heels of my humiliation of the perpetrator of a feeble and stupidly executed sexual blackmail plot that began when a newly-hired staff writer (with a clean record and a Master’s degree in English) began a torrid (and not very discrete) sexual affair with my long-term IT manager. The IT manager was, at the time, involved in a committed relationship with a woman in Los Angeles. The same female employee also made simultaneous direct sexual advances to my Operations Manager who is married. These included her showing naked photographs of herself to both men in our offices, something which they kept from me until later.

Eventually the sexual intrigue resulted in an altercation between the three which wound up on my doorstep late on a Sunday night in April. It seems no one involved in the altercation was capable of telling the whole truth. It was also clear that my IT manager – who was known for his appetites – had fallen hopelessly in the grasp of an attractive sexual smorgasbord that was fulfilling his every wish. This is what he said to people in phone conversations who later told me about them. He reportedly described her as a “sexual demon”. He lied to his girlfriend. He lied to me when he told me that he had ended the relationship. Then he lied to his friend, the Operations Manager, about it. I could no longer trust him, and this was of enormous concern to me.

After all of the previous attempts to sink FTW over the years I was well-prepared when the same woman started making advances to me. How dumb did they think I was? I concealed a tape recorder in my office as she directed me, after regular office hours, to pornographic web sites and continually tried to tempt me with scanty outfits, G-strings and hints of sexual delights including descriptions of her private parts. She was doing all this at a time when she made 103 cell phone calls in one month to my IT Manager on a cell phone that FTW was paying for. I got the bills. Most of the calls were made during business hours. The second month’s bill was just as bad when it arrived after she had been fired.

My IT Manager had been my most trusted employee and a close friend. I may never be able to forgive his betrayal even if the Siren’s song had overwhelmed him. In previous years FTW computers had been sabotaged, our web site had been hacked, and several attempts had been made to financially sabotage our operations. Being fully aware that he was likely revealing our most sensitive proprietary information, including account access codes, I had but two choices.

I could fire the young woman. But if I did so she would be angry outside the company and still have the IT Manager as helpless as Ulysses’ crew in her vindictive grasp. Or, I could keep her close, play along with her games, prepare myself against the blackmail I knew would come, and try to find out what kind of damage she was intent on doing and head it off. When she could not compromise me sexually, she turned the IT Manager against me, and he gave sudden notice. That was damaging enough. His last day of work was to be June 1st. I decided immediately that that would be her last day of work too, and so it was.

As June 1 approached I baited her with actions I knew would force her to show her hand. She did on May 29th and that’s when I let it be known how I had protected myself. She immediately went – no doubt with the guidance of our IT Manager – to a ridiculous pseudo-journalist who has been hounding FTW and other 9-11 activists for years. In a previous sabotage attempt in 2005 this same pseudo-journalist had been directly connected to the FBI by a tape recording.

Her allegations of sexual harassment against me fell flat on their faces, and she was publicly humiliated. She had also been showing highly erratic emotional behavior consistent with drug use in her last two weeks of work. On the day she was terminated she and the IT manager frantically rushed to erase large quantities of data from her office computer. This was witnessed by the entire office staff. Fortunately for us, the erasures were only made with one-pass deletions, and most of what they were trying to hide remains recoverable.

This was on my mind when I came into the office at 7:30 AM on June 26th and saw all seven of our computers dismantled and smashed in a vacant portion of our building. As luck would have it, the right hard drives were not damaged beyond recovery.

But other facts started to indicate government involvement. As soon as I discovered the burglary I ran next door to the offices of the US Forest Service which shares the same building (rented from a California property management company). A female Ranger who was raising the flag out front seemed unusually nervous even before I got to her. I asked if they had surveillance cameras covering the front of the building and our only parking lot. Reacting as though I was scaring her to death, she hastily replied, “No”. I couldn’t help but feel she already knew about the burglary.

If I didn’t know that there were no surveillance cameras on a government building then how could the burglars have been so confident? The street our offices are on is a long “no outlet” street, and the only place to park late at night is directly in front of FTW’s front door. My next step was to look for any one of the three small and run-down motor homes belonging to poor people who always parked right in front of our offices at night. It was a rent-free place for them to sleep, and it had a great view. Maybe they had seen something. All three were gone. One of them had been parking diagonally across the street every day since the day we moved in, and I had (correctly, I believe) pegged that one as government surveillance.

These witnesses would have been invaluable because they would have seen whoever came to the office in the quiet business park that was always abandoned after sunset. After I left the states, allegations were floated that I had smashed my computers myself. But who could have missed my Blue and Gold, 1996 Ford Bronco? It stands out like a sore thumb. And I could hardly have walked a block or two with a sledge hammer over my shoulder without risking being noticed.

There are between eight and twelve screws that need to be removed to take the cover off of each of our computers. There were seven computers, and every one had their covers removed before being smashed. This was not a one-man job. Someone with computer savvy was involved. Four interior doors were also smashed with multiple sledge hammer blows. I estimated between three and five blows per door. Each computer had been disconnected from its monitor and peripherals. That was three to six connections per computer. This feat would have taken one person hours, and it would have been physically exhausting.

All the evidence showed that one person was waiting to dismantle each computer as it was brought into the vacant office (where there was plenty of room to swing the hammers) by another person who was doing the disconnecting, while a third person went ahead with the sledgehammer to open the doors to which the fired female employee never had the keys, from which to make copies before she was fired. I suspect that a minimum of two sledge hammers were used.

One door to a storage area which held no computers at all was needlessly smashed. That was wasted time and effort. Likely one or more of the burglars didn’t know where the computers were. Or maybe they just had a little too much crystal meth in their system and needed to burn off some energy.

There was, however, one other way that the burglars could have gained entry to the interior of the building. That is through a back door which is accessible only through a high-security parking lot controlled by the Forest Service which covers the entire back side of the building. No one else can get to the back doors. The burglars could have been waiting inside the Forest Service offices for me to leave. This would have left no telltale cars out front and would have provided an easy, secure escape route in the event that I or a police car pulled up out front unexpectedly. No one would ever have been seen entering via the front door, the only way FTW employees could get in.

About a week after the burglary I noticed the Ashland Police Department towing away one of the mobile squatters. The one mobile home that had been there every night up until the burglary has never been seen again. The third just vanished the night of the burglary.

Also, about a week after the burglary, my Operations Manager, who we have since discovered was apparently in the process of destroying our paper financial records, disclosed that the fired female employee was a multi-year close friend of a convicted methamphetamine manufacturer and dealer who had served five years in prison. That was the last straw, and it was then I started realizing that it was time to go.

Convicted drug dealers are usually on parole. They have little or no rights and can be violated and sent back to prison at any time. Whether it’s federal or state parole, they’ll do anything the government wants them to in order to curry favor, including the commission of crimes “under color of authority”. The COINTELPRO records of the FBI from the 60s and 70s against civil rights and anti-war activists; against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement; show clearly how these convicted felons were used as ideal plausibly deniable weapons of infiltration and mass destruction by the US government against enemies of the state.

THE END OF HISTORY

In 2001 a high school classmate who had served in the US Army and worked for the National Security Agency, led FTW into a financial trap promising a major investment to re-publish suppressed books documenting US government corruption. After FTW had invested thousands of dollars in layout and committed to spending more for printing, the investor disappeared leaving us with a huge loss.

In 2001 and 2002 a series of previously-unknown computer viruses completely destroyed our office computers.

In 2003 an outside storage area of the building where our offices were, was burglarized.

In late 2003 our then General Manager, Michael Leon, suddenly abandoned his job and fled to New Zealand. That nearly put us out of business. We have since learned that he was, at minimum, a key material witness in a huge federal Ponzi scheme prosecution, US v. Osaki. (I had absolutely no connection to the case). In 2005 information surfaced in federal court that he had provided the FBI with information, and I have –- based on other information –- concluded that he was an active FBI informant while working for FTW.

Throughout 2004 and 2005 a series of successive employees (one of whom was a retired FBI agent presenting herself as a victimized whistleblower) engaged in ruthless sabotage which came closer to sinking us than anything ever had. Other links to the FBI were well-documented. FTW struggled for survival, and I successfully fought back, ultimately winning a case in Small Claims Court wherein I proved deliberate sabotage and won a small judgment. That nine-month effort ended just two months before we moved to Oregon.

Then came the events I just described in Ashland. To the end of my days I will never forget the indescribable beauty of the Rogue Valley in the brief time I was allowed to live there. I will always remember the wonderful, spiritual and courageous friends who came to our aid in time of need and who still remain close friends and supporters of FTW.

But at 55, as I looked at the smashed computers and realized that I had humiliated the government one too many times, I understood two things. I was too old to go on fighting these increasingly ugly and dangerous battles. And there was nothing left in the United States worth fighting for. The next battle would surely mean death for me. Additionally, according to their own figures, and after an independent review by a Los Angeles area law firm specializing in royalty rights, Rubicon’s publisher, New Society, appears to have defrauded me out of between $38,000 and $58,000 dollars of royalties.

I made my decision on July 1st. It really wasn’t difficult.

A NEW BEGINNING

Since my departure Carolyn Baker, Michael Kane, Stan Goff, Jamey Hecht and the remaining FTW office staff consisting of Brendan, Spencer and Luke have been performing heroically. A brave and honorable Ashland attorney has valiantly stepped in with complete power of attorney over my affairs. My agent and publicist Ken Levine has been steadfast and true. It was he who helped to get me out of the country in secret. In the coming weeks some of these wonderful people will provide our subscribers with their accounts of my last days in the US. There were many poignant moments in the way we put together and executed a plan to get me out of the country in just 18 days, even as I noticed renewed and ominous surveillance around the office.

To all those who will assert – and I’m sure they will – that all of these things happened because I’m some kind of deranged maniac who pisses everyone off, I ask how I could possibly have earned and retained the loyalty of these wonderful people and all of our subscribers for all these years.

FTW is going to be bigger and better. I will continue to write and offer editorial guidance, but my days of running the business are over. Carolyn Baker, Mike Kane and Stan Goff are giants in their own rights, and they need room to blossom and carry on the FTW tradition with their own unique styles and personalities. Since leaving the US I have been offering occasional editorial guidance, but I have come to realize that FTW’s writers need very little of this. They have the map and are reading it well. Listen to them.

FTW needs your help now. We need donations. We need sales. Very soon we will have a new DVD which will show you my last two public appearances ever in the United States. It will be my farewell message to all of you even as I say hello in a new form. After FTW’s current, considerable expenses and staff are paid, some of that badly-needed money will find its way to me in Venezuela where I sorely need it.

I have said time and again that the only thing that matters to me is effecting real change in the political landscape. Revolution is not a dinner party. The economy and government of the United States of America are my enemies and the enemies of the entire human race and even of the American people themselves. They must be weakened, defeated and replaced by something which places the welfare of human beings ahead of profits and share value.

With these words I have committed a crime in the eyes of US law. There is no turning back. The bridge is burned. But I will reply with the words of the Declaration of Independence which state:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it,…

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations… evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, their duty, to throw off such Government.

In 1776 there was no concept of any limitation in terms of resources, space or possibilities. We live in a fundamentally different era today, and so therefore, I would add to these truths the following:

We must also recognize that Happiness cannot be defined solely within the mind and the will of individuals alone, without regard to the availability of the same potential for all mankind and all life placed here by the Creator. One human being, or group of human beings, cannot possess a disproportionate share, deprive others, and justly call this Happiness. True Happiness and Peace result from harmony between peoples, the planet and all life forms without which no life is possible. These can only be achieved in a world where men and women in all places realize the need for Balance, Equity, Harmony and Justice and that only these will ensure equal and fair Rights for subsequent generations and the sustainability of the planet itself.

In many lectures I have uttered another one of my trademarked lines: The human race is now being presented by a dispassionate universe with one test; either evolve or perish. I, for one, have chosen to evolve.

Now that I am in the world and not a “country”, my prayer is that my future adventures for as long as I live will connect me with other world-changers so that we can support and empower each other and all peoples. I am already finding out that there are more people who clearly see these challenges than I ever suspected.

But I am also under no illusions about the increased danger this will bring. Even though life is very difficult now as I live on the cheap and struggle to become halfway fluent in Spanish, I wake up each morning with something I haven’t felt in a long time – hope, real hope.

I promise to send some home.

**The opinions expressed here are not necessarily or entirely those of From The Wilderness as a corporation.**

ENDS

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