"Something Is Frighteningly Wrong With The American People Now."

Speech by Diane Harvey
merak@sedona.net
June 21, 2001

What is it that all of us involved in environmental and activist issues have in common? It isn't just the wretched fact of being bombarded with sickening unknown substances wherever we turn, by unknown persons, for unknown reasons. We have learned a little about what is being done to  us and why. But this is not comforting either, because most of what we experience directly is just the tail of the technological dragon.

What really brings us together is something much deeper even than this.  And that is, that all of us see the disappearance, before our eyes, of all influence on our own future, and on the future of our children andgrandchildren. On the surface, we are brought together by an
investigation into what must be the most complex and expensive secret operation ever
perpetrated on an unsuspecting population. So, beneath this set of outrageous monumental techno-crimes, is the much larger specter of an absolutely out-of-control runaway government.

"They", whoever they are, are dragging us, wherever they are going, by force. We aren't being asked for our cooperation, or for our votes.  This means that the very word ''government" is now effectively meaningless. WHAT government? Where is it? Who is it? Can we say we know the first thing about who is in fact actually running our country? No. And this what lies at the very bottom of all of our very justifiable fears.

On any practical and meaningful level, we are no longer citizens of a Republic at all. The sham of our supposed leaders, pretending to conduct a free and democratic society in our name, is a despicable insult to our intelligence.

This is a very terrible fact we are looking in the eye here. And it leads us directly to the other important part of the eerie historical moment we are living in. Which is that, not only do we have no idea who is making the decisions for us now, we don't even have a population that cares.

There is something frighteningly wrong with the American people right now. A mysterious fog has settled down over people's minds. Something beyond run-of-the-mill human apathy has overtaken this society. People have lost something so fundamental to human life that we can hardly believe it,  even though we see its effects constantly. We can describe what we see, but we can barely grapple with the meaning of it. This is something new under
the sun, and it is very strange.

But it is real, and we know it. People are disconnected from basic reality at a level that actually seems impossible.

The fact that our government has gone off without us into dark secret places is a great crisis for our nation. But if our country were populated by alert, responsible and indignant citizens, this would not be happening.

"It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."- Justice Robert H. Jackson

It has taken a long time to entirely sever so many human beings from their own consciences. It has taken decades of slow, careful, deliberate numbing on many fronts. To send most of a nation into a kind of life-long sleeping sickness of the mind has required methodical planning, and the enthusiastic cooperation of the people themselves. This peculiar condition of mass
entrancement we are grappling with now was no accident. A hundred years ago it would not have been possible to radically alter the environment itself right under the noses of the public without them noticing.

This basic point is extremely significant to our effort. We are trying to awaken people who, quite often and very decisively, do not want to know what is happening to them, or to their country. Most of our fellow citizens are literally in a self-induced trance state. They have actually unconsciously decided not to comprehend what they are seeing and hearing. They have renounced common sense, in order not to be disturbed. It takes a tremendous effort, intelligence, skillful timing and the right approach even to make a dent in this epidemic of willful ignorance.

There have been hidden influences acting behind the scenes in this country for a very long time. What we are looking at in our generation is the result in the present of a very long history of corruption and secret influences. The roots of the present evil are old and deep. Even in hisday, Henry David Thoreau looked around very carefully and said: "How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."

Far too soon after the glorious beginnings of our nation, the American people began to display a tendency to let things go on without their involvement, and in this we haven't been different from other people in other nations. Relatively few people have ever felt responsible for trying to fix what was wrong with the power structure of their time. In essence, relatively few have ever wanted to understand or to undertake the responsibilities for human freedom. Self-government by any people has had a very short shelf life in human history so far, for reasons that are sadly obvious to us today. Thomas Paine understood this, when he warned:
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it."

This history we are so habituated to, of a politically apathetic and disinterested population, has added up to a cost most people never foresaw. The price we have paid without noticing has become all too clear. Our country, as it lives in our imaginations, no longer has any existence in the real world. Unfortunately, the perennial themes of letting things go, generation after generation, has culminated in a government that has now entirely disappeared out from under us. Whatever and whoever it is, it is holed up somewhere out of sight. We are left holding the bag of misdirection: empty words, empty gestures, and empty appearances. We are here because we have eyes that can still see, and ears that can still
hear. We have hearts that are still open and minds that still think. And above all else, we still hear and obey the dictates of conscience.

Each of us knows that this is nothing special, but merely living as we were created to live. But it becomes a very special way to live when the majority of our fellow beings renounce all responsibility for their own lives at the most dangerous moment in history. When so many other people refuse to see and hear and understand, then the Accidental Activist is born.

There isn't one of us who could ever have imagined spending so much time and energy this way. We are activists by default, because the majority of people have renounced their responsibilities as citizens. We become self-appointed voices of our national conscience because we have no other self-respecting choice. Each of us has accepted the single pertinent fact: If not me, then who? When Democracy actually exists, it is not necessary to
have credentials or affiliates or titles other than that of concernedcitizen. As Ralph Nadar pointed out: "A couple of thousand years ago in
Athens, a man could get up in the morning, wander around the city, and inquire into matters affecting his well-being and that of his fellow
citizens.
No one asked him 'Who are you with?'"

Has the majority of our population always been unwilling to notice what is
inconvenient to notice? Has the majority inevitably left it to the few to demand justice for all? We can see that it has, and in this way we are re-enacting an old pattern.

But there are many worse aspects to our present predicament than those who  lived before us had to contend with. What we are obliged to tackle, merely by being aware of it at all, is the lethal combination of concealed power, secret technology and an unprecedented level of materialism that powerfully induces mass sleeping sickness.

We have a de facto clandestine government, practicing without a license. The long arm of the military is growing in the dark, reaching out to affect every living thing on earth without the slightest oversight or agreement from the profoundly affected. People have, on the whole, traded normal awareness for highly destructive substitutes, and the evidence of their
senses for the short-lived comforts of being undisturbed by reality.
What is there then to hope for, in looking at so many kinds of dark forces arrayed against us?

There are hopeful elements in this picture, despite appearances to the contrary. One great hope is in the fact that we have no leaders. Goodgovernment in our country has so far relied heavily on the existence of occasional great leaders. Since such people are always rare, in a very real sense this has been a serious weakness inherent in the practical working out of the democratic ideal. Great leaders have come and gone, but the citizenry, the supposed bedrock of a freedom-loving people, has not been sufficiently involved in national life.

Yet things are so bad now that more and more people are being forced to realize that they have been tricked and abandoned by the wayside. We are not rare specimens, but part of a significant number of people who see things going disastrously off the rails in various ways. In every country human beings are looking around and wondering why they should put up
with having no say at all in their own world. We might be surprised at how many of us there are, still divided by different issues, yet united in the basic understanding of what we are looking at.
 
But the price of such dedication to the original principles of active citizenship is extraordinarily high these days. When so many are so afraid to exercise their basic rights and duties, those who choose to do so are forced to pay dearly for their efforts in behalf of all. Simply by
taking our own Constitution seriously, we make ourselves outcasts.

"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in their struggle for independence."

- Charles A. Beard

It is a hard business to endure being seen as a dangerous and tedious eccentric when you know you are merely awake. It is harder than we could have imagined, to spend so much time, energy and money trying to make up for what an entire nation ought to be doing along with us. And it is hardest of all to suffer, as many have, painful discord in relationships with family and friends. What is more agonizing than being obliged on occasion to choose between truth and justice for all, and a comforting personal relationship? We do not romanticize the difficulties of
serving a great cause - we have experienced the hardships far too acutely for that.  But we have in common that what we know has swept up our personal hopes, wishes, and dreams into another and far larger field of life.

We are living now in a larger world of extreme human necessity. Our source of nourishment is the spirit of freedom itself. Because what is slowly but surely coming into being, through all our efforts, is the renewal of the original energy that created this country in the first place. The
deepest truth in all of this is that we are serving the sacred purposes of life itself at a critical and momentous time in human history. And for this opportunity, despite all our difficulties, and despite the forces arrayed against us.

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This speech by Diane Harvey was delivered through the kind auspices of
David Peterson, at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, on
June 24, 2001