Last night, I sat next to a new friend while waiting for a concert to begin. Tom told me about his history in radical non-violence, being arrested alongside the Berrigan brothers in a protest against nuclear weapons. I told him I was a conspiracy theorist, and asked if he was, too. No, he said. He doesn't believe that people can work together reliably enough to pull off a big, conspiratorial project.
So I asked him who killed JFK. He told me about working as a Congressional staffer in the 1980s, being privy to a committee that uncovered the role of our own CIA in assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK. He knew much more than I on these issues, and he said he was sure Congressional leaders knew the whole story. But, he said, they were afraid the nation wouldn't survive the revelation - that it would tear apart the fabric of our society. How much more dangerous, I remarked, that powerful sociopaths should get the message that they can assassinate a president with impunity! Tom just nodded.
We went on to talk about election theft, and again he had first-hand experiences to recount. He had worked for a Democratic Congressman from Chester County, PA who was confident he could win handily, except that in West Chester, the largest city, there was a serious campaign of ballot-box stuffing by local Republicans where they controlled the precincts. So he and some other staffers posed as Federal marshals, flashing plastic badges they bought in the dime store in order to put a scare into West Chester pollworkers. The ploy worked well enough, and their candidate was re-elected.
I took the opportunity to tell Tom that among my election integrity buddies, we assumed that election shenanigans were as old as the Republic, but that before 2000, stealing elections required a lot of hand work as well as trusted, local contacts in each precinct. It was one ballot at a time, and it was a game played by Republicans and Democrats alike. Since 2000, elections are stolen wholesale, with computer manipulations that move tens of thousands of votes at a time. And it's no longer a bi-partisan free-for-all; statistical evidence comparing polls to official results suggests that virtually all the election theft since 2000 has favored Republicans, and even within Republican primaries, election theft has favored the right wing. Tom nodded in agreement.
What were Tom's beliefs about 9/11? Well, once he'd seen what the Bush administration was capable of, once he realized the lies they were able to get away with, there was no barrier to believing they could have been involved planning the hijackings and building demolitions.
But Tom is not a conspiracy theorist. I wonder what a conspiracy theorist might think about the Kennedy assassinations, about election theft and 9/11 Truth.
For me, the moral of the story is that there are a lot of people out there who have learned to keep doubts to themselves concerning mainstream political reality. The newspapers and TV reports have circumscribed the limits of what are acceptable versions of the facts, as discussed in polite society. But we don't have to let them define our reality. Every time we let a friend know that we don't subscribe to the NYTimes' version of reality, we give our friend permission to broaden his consideration and explore alternative possibilities. We make the world a little safer for the truth.
When we dare to be the first to broach a delicate political subject, we help to weave a radical social fabric.
Lightly.
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