(Former Representative John Lewis, RIP)

John Lewis passed from this earth last night. He has been a part of my conscious life for a long time, and a man I admire even if he is no longer with us in being. With Dr. King, one of my heroes, Lewis was one of the “Big Six” civil rights leaders who lit up the 1960s of American life and change. Coming of age in that decade, he was an inspiration to our Boomer generation.
Of course, he was not a man with whom I had much in common, but I have to state that I will always admire someone who got out of bed each morning with the certain knowledge that the forces he opposed might kill him where he stood. They did that to Dr. King, and I appreciate courage and fortitude. He was the last of those angry young men who organized the fight against the Jim Crow South. I believe he should be remembered for what he stood for and what he did and what he accomplished in his 80 years of life.

His struggle as head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the mid 1960s was inspirational, and adopted by legions of suburban-raised college kids who took up his methods to protest the war in Southeast Asia. Most were peaceful, but some were not. Just like today. I went to several marches in that time period, mostly out of curiosity at the strange and growing public demonstration of opposition, but also with a certain amount of skin in the game. We faced the Draft, and the likelihood of service in the war whether we supported it or not.

Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dorn were part of the growing movement who went violent while in leadership of the Weather Underground. Later, it is reported that Bill wrote Barack Obama’s biography, and supported his rise through the Chicago political system to become President of the United States. Times may not repeat themselves, but they certainly do rhyme, don’t they?

Given the social unrest of this amazing year, John Lewis’s life has direct implication on events unfolding today. In his fight against injustice, Lewis took on an entrenched bureaucracy and made allies with others far away from the Edmund Pettus bridge. Police fractured his skull there in shutting down a peaceful march, but it did not stop him. He used the power of law and righteousness of abuse to triumph. He was a man with guts, and a broken skull would not stop him in his struggle for what was right as he saw it.

I find his legacy to be of great interest. The institutions he fought were powerful and implacable. He used the law to combat the injustice of the day, and he won. It took years, but he did it his way. I hope he rests in peace.

I have had to think of these unfolding events in the context of my life and career. I was happy that I was not drafted and the war was over when my time to graduate arrived. I was uncomfortable about how it ended, though, and joined the Navy as a gesture to my Dad’s generation and their service. It was rewarding and unexpected, and had the distinct advantage of opposing the evil that emanated from the old Soviet Union. In time, that passed as well, though of course the nature of all things changed. Nearing the end of my time as a minor government official, I was doing information operations planning as a Director of policy for something that was not well understood. That was not an infrequent occurrence in an odd career.

The primary issue started with the complexities of cyber activity, as the digital age penetrated all things. I remember attempting deconflict the actions of the three-letter agencies as being the primary goal of my little office. The walls of the stove-piped agencies were thick and almost impenetratable. There were situations where the agencies might individually plan to, say, take down satellite financial links supporting likely opponents. Other agencies might simultaneously be relying on those same links to connect human sources with other players who were being exploited and needed them to stay up. Plus, there were other tools to disrupt the opposition if we knew who they were and what they were doing. We didn’t have perfect knowledge, and the weapons we had were not particularly granular. The possibility of mischance was real.

Then, on the morning of 9/11 the scope suddenly changed to include campaigns to influence nation states and even major faiths engaged in violent conduct.

That dizzying and urgent work led to participation with the Joint Staff office codes in the Pentagon working the new Global War on Terror (GWOT) target list. The implications were significant. These days, having been on the fringe of planning to destabilize nations as a daily task, I can now see the strands of things that appear to be intended to do the same to us today.

There were the two examples that galvanized my attitude yesterday. Our response to the COVID epidemic is one of the strange streams of information. Yesterday, we were informed that a young man killed in a motorcycle accident was counted as a plague death. The authorities did not correct their numbers after the revelation. That small event, tragic though it might be, confirmed my suspicion that the numbers we are expected to believe may have some significant problems. I read that one of the states reported no deaths from heart attacks for the second quarter of the year. I don’t know where those deaths went, but forgive me if I have to suspect they all became associated with the plague, rather than coronary events.

We are expected to take it all as fact, and ignore the discrepancies.

It would explain a lot about what is going on, but I am a reasonable person even if I suspect there is some significant game playing going on. I am going to stay home when I can, and will wear a bandana as a mask if I need to interact with other citizens who think it is important.

I don’t want to get anyone upset, you know?

Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
http://www.vicsocotra.com