The Costs of Heroism
The price that Sam Husseini and other heroes and heroines have paid.
As my readers know, I am Sam Husseini’s friend. My followers and subscribers are nearing a thousand, and most of them signed up because I am on Sam’s blogroll. My work is something different, and I often get Sam’s readers who sign up for my site, to drop it in days, as it is not what they signed up for. I understand.
For those following Sam’s work, they know that his manhandling at the State Department, for asking questions of Blinken, gave Sam a concussion that he may be a long time in recovering from. I hope that Sam gets a nice fat settlement, in a case that prevents that kind of treatment from being meted out to any journalist ever again in the USA. Sam would argue that his injuries are trivial when compared to the hundreds of his murdered fellow journalists in Gaza. But Sam is paying a heavy price for his attempts to hold American officials accountable, which is what freedom of the press, theoretically protected by the First Amendment, is all about. Sam does not see what he is doing as exercising a right, but a duty. I have been privileged to have encountered many like Sam. They all paid steep prices for their heroic actions, and am going to summarize a bunch of them in this post, along with some other heroes (and heroines) that I have encountered in my studies.
Dennis Lee: Dennis is the 800-pound gorilla of my life. Dennis should be dead dozens of times over. His journey makes Indiana Jones look like Walter Mitty. I don’t know of anybody else on Earth like Dennis. We gave the people who run the world some interesting days at the office. Dennis is still at it, incredibly, at nearly 80 years old.
Dennis’s wife Alison: She saved Dennis’s life several times, and paid for the rigors of her journey with a shortened life.
Mr. Professor: He and I rescued Dennis from spending the rest of his life behind bars, and the ordeal in my home town wrecked and shortened his life, which was the greatest sorrow of my journey.
Gary Wean: Gary was an old-school policeman who believed that just laws, fairly enforced, made societies better. His advice was critical in my springing Dennis from jail. His encounters with the corruption in our society are legendary, and finding out the truth of the JFK hit (and JFK knew that he was risking his life), at least as far as Oswald’s involvement went, was a minor footnote to his incredible journey. Gary survived a murder attempt and had his retirement savings stolen by the gangsters who ran Ventura County.
Brian O’Leary: As heroic icons go, being an astronaut is near the top of that scale, and Brian was asked/ordered to go to Mars, as the first human officially asked to visit another planet. Brian’s early days of political activism, of advising a presidential candidate, wrecked his first marriage, in a preview of what his heroism would cost him. But when Brian began poking into the paranormal and hosted a UFO conference, he had a life-shortening incident, likely courtesy of the American military, after he refused their “offer.” Brian became the Paul Revere of Free Energy. When Brian left his soft berth in the establishment, he scrambled for the rest of his life, and bankruptcy just came with the territory. He had a stalker/heckler when he spoke publicly, who followed him around the world, and other fun.
Ralph McGehee: Like Dennis, Ralph nearly did not survive his moment of awakening, when he finally figured out what his employer, the CIA, was all about. When he finally retired from the CIA and wrote his book, he had to engage in a two-year legal battle with the CIA to publish it, and his troubles were just beginning. He endured endless harassment from the CIA and its enlisted goons, which led to injuries. I had to help protect him at one point, as Ralph tried to quietly live out his last years.
Chris Black is one of the few attorneys that I have heard of who truly merits the hero’s label. He took on the American Empire repeatedly, had his life threatened by the CIA, made Paul Kagame’s hit list, and even miraculously prevailed in one of the USA’s kangaroo-court tribunals. Taking that case ruined his life, wrecked his marriage, he nearly died of malaria, etc.
Bill Ryan has had more than his fair share of heroic adventure as he explored the fringes, and still does.
Ed Herman would not have called himself a hero, safely ensconced in the ivory towers of academia, but merely dissenting from the propaganda barrage is heroic. Many authors would have stopped when their publishing company was put out of business to prevent the publication of their book, but it only inspired Ed. Ed has long been in my pantheon, and what a great man he was.
Noam Chomsky: Noam and I do not see eye-to-eye on a number of issues, but I began my media studies at his scholarly knees. He will go down in history as the USA’s greatest dissident intellectual, and Noam paid quite a price for his dissidence. His towering intellectual stature saved him from prison and other grim fates, but he courted them. He is the only living human who can be credibly compared to Einstein.
Howard Zinn was clubbed over the head by a cop when he joined a protest as a teenager, but Howard was just getting started. He was a giant among American intellectuals and paid an onerous price for his dissidence, such as losing his job and getting endless harassment from his employers. He was one of the few soldiers who admitted that he bombed the wrong people.
Rodney Stich: He was cut from the same cloth as Gary, but was less conspiratorial in his outlook. But he still got kangarooed into prison in California, courtesy of the CIA and friends.
Washington, D.C., activists and journalists: Eugene Mallove, Danny Casolaro, and Paul Wilcher were all journalists (Mallove was more of a science writer, but he founded his own magazine) who poked their noses into Washington, D.C., and likely paid with their lives.
Kara Dansky was canceled out of her career as a human-rights attorney when she spoke out on the trans issue. She recently wrote that she may well be murdered by a trans activist (AKA “insane man who pretends that he is a woman”). She does not plan on it, but realizes that it is a risk that she has accepted.
I doubt that any of them set out to be heroes and heroines, and they usually did not consider themselves that way. They were people of conscience who did something about it, which is heroic in our world, as not many people do that.
My life was wrecked in my free-energy pursuit. Getting bankrupted was the easy part. Many friendships that I thought would survive anything crumbled during my journey. I have no relationship with my immediate family, as part of the price of my journey.
I do not ask anybody to be heroic in what I am doing, not like those people listed above. I seek disillusioned idealists who can learn to sing the song of abundance, which will attract others like them. I am not asking them to sing to their social circles, as all that they will get back, with extremely few exceptions, will be indifference, denial, fear, and ostracism. I have seen it all, and I have seen careers and relationships end when people did that. The social-circle approach will not work for this. The effort has to aim far higher than that.
If I can amass and train enough of those singers, making the biggest event in the human journey come to pass will be easy. That is my game, not searching for heroes, but encountering them is always a blessing, like finding beacons in the darkness.