APACHACUTI - A WORLD UPSIDE DOWN

- A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE ON HEALTH CARE 

By George-Luis Dewey - Editor@Libertysteward.com Revised from a Letter to Barack Obama in the first days of his presidency.Expanded upon at Llano Dulce on October 15, 2009Published on the anniversary of my father's birthday in his memory Oct 16, 2009.

 

I was privileged to be born in Peru, as an American Citizen, of parents who were US Citizens living and working abroad, on Feb. 13, 1947 at the British American Hospital in Mira Flores a Suburb of Lima. It was the same year that the CIA and Israel were founded and I have been a citizen of a country that has been in constant warfare against the world ever since. I have never known Peace in my Lifetime and it took me 62 years to realize it was because I was living in the time of Apachacuti. 

For the Inca People the time of Apachacuti was after the reign of the puppet Inca Pachacuti who reigned as a surrogate of the Spanish King Charles III. This last Inca rebellion took place at a time when foreign interests had taken over a sovereign people and propped up corrupt rulers to rule over the people. This rebellion was the final attempt of the Inca to restore his own sovereignty before his People and the Inca descendents of the Andes to this date remember it as the time of Apachacuti - A world upside down - the world as it has been ever since.

When I came to the United States for 9th grade to go to military school at Culver Indiana (it was 1962 and after Christmas break) I can remember as a young cadet in uniform on my way to Hammond Indiana on the train from Chicago and my grandmother’s home being offered a hit of acid by a strange man riding several seats behind me. It was my first hint of Apachacuti after what I can only describe as an idyllic childhood in Latin America. I knew something wasn’t right about that, so I turned him down, but years latter it seemed to me I had been targeted to be a member of the drug trade by someone in the government, who knew I had grown up overseas and wanted to groom me early on in my career. 

My Indian Inca nana from Peru and my Peruvian grandmother Catalina had always told me I had a guardian angel that would never leave me, if I did not abandon her in spirit, and at that moment I believe I began a lifelong intuitive connection with my protective ancestor who knew of the perilous crossing I would have to make. I did not turn down the acid because I was afraid, no - I was intellectually curious, but instinctively and intuitively guided to seek my own approach to knowledge and truth. It is sufficient to conclude that even back that far in my youth there was the presage of a dark hand of conspiracy at work behind the scenes of my life as I lived in strange and dangerous times. 

Grandma always said in her psychic and predictive manner: “If he ever survives, he’ll be a great man someday!” I think Grandma, in her own way of expressing herself, probably meant that in the end I would actually be successful at something.  Of course, that was after I proved that if you said the candle would burn me if I put my finger into the flame, then, I would just have to see how long I could endure the pain and still be unscathed, to prove that you were wrong and I still could do it in my own way. I suppose fire walkers have the same notion when they cross burning coals in bare feet. 

The first vision I had of intuitive import was the night we left Talara, Peru, at the age of almost 7, to journey to our new home in Cartagena, Colombia where my father had been transferred. We were leaving my Paternal homeland and going to a new country and were to travel by sea through the Panama canal. As this magnificent journey was beyond my young mind’s ability to understand it, intuitively my sixth sense took over and the night before we left I had a strange dream that has served me as an icon of my life, in the time of Apachacuti, ever since. 

I dreamt I was walking on top of a brick wall that was very high. I knew I could not look back or go back to safety, as there was nowhere to go, so I had to press on. The wall was so high that I could not see the bottom and there was no sky and there were no sides below - I could see neither, simply the course of the top of the wall and I had to have tremendous courage and keep walking onwards. Then the wall started to move and I felt a profound fear, but my spirit grandmother said: “You can do this, walk without fear, walk hijito, be brave, as you must continue no matter what.” And then I kept going and even when the bricks in the wall started to fall out beneath me and behind me as I walked I kept walking, and walking... until I awoke with my father shaking me as he stood over me saying: “Wake up son, we are leaving early as we have to catch the Pilot boat out to the Liner and we have to leave before sunrise to catch the tide. 

Talara had no port large enough for the ocean liner to come in, so we took a smaller vessel out to it in very rough seas. I didn’t realize it immediately, but I had my first intuitive dream that night. The journey to the big boat was very much like my perilous dream. To a young mind it was a wild and scary ride in bucking, wild stormy seas. And then when we got to the big boat there was no plank to walk across as the top deck was not on a par with the pilot boat and we would have to ascend 60 to 80 feet up a skinny thin ladder welded to the side of the liner. My Dad lifted me up on the edge of the rail of the pilot boat and told me: “ Grab the handrails with both hands, don’t let one hand go until you have your next grip and a good footing and for God’s sake don’t look down - and don’t stop until you get to the top Son - Go on you can do it I know you are a brave young man, I have to carry your brother and Mom has to carry the baby - go and don’t stop until you get there. Go!” 

Well that was the beginning of what I had seen in my Spirit Mind and the beginning of a long journey through Apachacuti in the real world of the next day. My dream in its fundamentals had been a clear presage of what was to come the very next day. I have had many such dreams over the course of my years and I believe I inherited that from my Italian Grandmother Catalina, because, as my whole family knows, she was very psychic and intuitive; although, because of her Christian indoctrination, also fearful and fanciful at times. Of course none of us dared laugh at her when she predicted earthquakes and they would happen every single time just as she had said. I bless her a thousand times for all the things she taught me, but mostly for the art of believing in myself, when caught in a web of deceit and fear. I follow the perilous wall of my quavering world intuitively seeking the path I was cast to travel in this life and, in the end, I emerge still whole in my spirit. 

I made it just fine to the top of the big boat and it turned out to be one of the most memorable journeys of my life. I was the only one in the boat not to get sea sick and was the faithful pilgrim to the pastry cart, a lone sentinel laying on the deck chair watching the pitching, bobbing, stormy seas and waiting for the strawberry tarts which were delicious! My family would turn green when I would go back to the cabin with several yummy pastries in my hands and whip cream all over my face.

I mention this early anecdote merely to set the tone for you in understanding what Apachacuti meant to the Inca at the end of its Empire in a time of Rebellion against the corrupt powers that had enslaved its great culture and civilization and what it meant to the mind of a young man who as a Peruvian-American would have to harmonize the two ends of the rainbow of my life. When I came to the United States it took me a long time to understand that foreign powers had taken over my country and ruled through corrupt public officials and the best Congress money could buy. It has been a miraculous metaphysical and deeply intellectual path for me to follow until I reach the place where I know I must lead. 

It is now that I stand on the cusp of that new reality as I know that there must have been a reason I was destined to survive so many times when it seemed my life would be absorbed into the chaos around me. I was silently respectful of my Grandmother’s prediction, of the course of my life and nature, until I became Greater than I was by the wisdom my better angels gave me in the course of time. I believe I stand with many Brothers and Sisters now on the Cusp of a New Awakening - the Dawn of the Age of Aquarius.  It will be a time when man can finally ascend into his place within the Circle of Wisdom and begin to live in harmony with each other and the natural world we have been given and, indeed perhaps, even with other intelligent species in the Universe.

This story I will tell you now is a reiteration of a letter I wrote on Heath Care to Barack Obama at the beginning of his administration - a letter he has yet to answer. It is but a chapter in the greater book of my life and passing through this dynamic and ever changing world I’ve lived in. The understanding of Apachacuti is necessary to explain, because it is were prophecy and personal perspective, by virtue of experience, intersect in my cosmology. 

I often wondered why I suffered such a terrible accident at the Christ Age of 33. I believe now I understand something about the crucifixion or the four directions of my spirit walk, that I did not comprehend then. Indeed it was the ability to be guided by intuition, rather than by the presumption of knowledge, that helped me see around the corners and piece together the puzzles of deception characterized by the legacy of corrupt officials and unseen spooks that decorate the landscape of the modern political world we live in. A world upside down ruled by the corrupt who have taken over the public trust and who manipulate and intimidate us to do their evil bidding. It took a look time to reason with misfortune and to attune my mind to the real understanding of what had happened to me during the time when my health and my life itself was most threatened. 

The accident led me to health care or the lack of it - indeed a lot of both. As it was the darkest time in my life, and currently a burning issue in the minds of most Americans, I felt compelled to write about it and tell you the story beginning in the middle of my life until the present. Up until this time, I wanted to keep my medical predicaments private, but the other day I looked at my self in the mirror and saw this old man looking back at me - a gray haired scary guy with old hippie hair and a couple of teeth missing - and I had a dang revelation! I’m an old hippie! Hossanah! I’m still alive and kicking and ornery as all get out and free as a bird in my soul, so what the hell do I care what anybody thinks about me! Heck Bob Dylan was spooky when he was young and Joan Baez is still stunningly beautiful in her gray hair! It's a different time and a different kind of "pretty" I'm looking at.  

The youthful sheen is gone, but it is the soul I see that’s still the same bright soul it always was and will never stop being even after we all turn to stone and then sand and blow in the wind  I must speak from my soul and my humanness if that is what I want people to extract from what I have to say to them in order to improve their lives and that is ALL that matters now and forever and has ever really mattered. 

My experience with the health care system over the years has been an intimate part of my spirit walk, my spiritual discipline and my evolution as a conscious member of an integral and sustainable society or as us hippies like to say “ A real trip man!”.

I originally wanted to be a doctor, but I did not believe I could respect a system that promoted it’s own largesse instead of the truth. In those days doctors rejected notions of organics and natural medicine and the dairy lobby in Congress had more clout along with the AMA than any other interest groups. I was passionate about natural foods, meditation and overcoming my fears about sex, drugs and rock and roll like the rest of my brothers and sisters. Although I did those things in a mixed order because I had such a straight and formal upbringing in Latin America. 

Rock and Roll was my first real love with a love for the guitar and with an obsession with Elvis Presley, of course. Then my next by mystery to discover was sex in the back of a pink Thunderbird convertible parked down at the quarry in South Miami with a judge’s wife who seduced me. Her husband had suffered an unmentionable wound in Korea and wasn’t able to give her what she wanted, so I became the subject of her amorous attention at the tender age of 16. I had to figure out a lot of that on my own since my folks never thought that was something I needed to know about any sooner than necessary.  I guess they understood something about hormones I had no clue about.  

I hadn’t stayed with military school, I just wasn’t cut out to kill people for a living. My folks had moved to the US in 1963, when my Dad got promoted to the Miami office, so I got to go to a typical American Public high school at Miami Palmetto for two years. And then, in my senior year in high school we moved back to South America to Bogota once again in 1964, so I got to go back to my old school Colegio Nueva Granada to finish my senior year in high school with all my old friends I had left years ago. Another full circle of experience was concluded there and I left high school in 1965 and flew to the US to go to college. 

Then it was drugs. My black friend Smokie introduced me to psychedelics in my junior year at Rollins in 1967 and I discovered marijuana, which I dearly loved smoking. I couldn’t believe I had lived all those years in Colombia and never discovered the stuff! 

Basically, what I am trying to say here is that I never do anything I am not passionate about and I never let the fear of not having money cow me into being a compliant little coopter. The War in Vietnam was threatening to roll out my Selective Service lottery number and, by then, I was passionately political.  I remember gambling that I could spend my college book money to go to Washington DC to attend the March on the Pentagon in 68. All the hippies and war protestors, a million strong, converged on the place to levitate the bloodsucker. I had to get a job at Howard’s Citgo Service Station that semester to salvage my college career. My Dad was mad as hell, but he stuck by his little protestor kid.  My best friends Donald "Daffy"James, the smartest guy on campus, and "Stacy" Margaronis, my Greek foreign student friend and I managed in 4 years to radicalize the majority of the students to join the civil rights movement and the anti-war effort.  When I came into the college as a freshman it was 65 percent fraternity and sorority and when I left it was 65 percent independent, at least until the college purged most of my professors for being too liberal.  I still admire each and every one of them for taking a stand and standing tall for their principles and not being a party to evil.

Anyway, I managed to graduate from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida in 1969 with a BA degree in History and Public Affairs and Latin American Area Studies. 

Shortly after my college experience I became a hippie practitioner of herbal medicine and for many years studied herbs, harvested them and shared them a long the path to further discovery. We traveled throughout the western states and lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico trading herbs with my old herbalist friend Ella down on Cerillos Road, Theo Roybal on Galisteo Street and the Osha Commune in Albuquerque. I sold them out of the back of my Ford truck as we virtually lived in the camper on the road a lot of the time. My brother Arturo was a member of the Osha Commune.  I never asked for money before I would give aid, but was grateful when I had any at all. Yes there are times when I find myself wishing I had a better head for material things, but somehow I knew the Great Spirit would provide, and in truth I never had a day I went without enough to get by and when I had to fast I looked at it as an opportunity to get healthier. Providence, Jethro Kloss and the I Ching were my Bible and they led me on a marvelous path of self-discovery. 

On September the 12th of 1972 I returned for a year to Colombia with the intent of growing herbs. I was caught in a crossfire between the paranoia and criminal politics inspired by Operation Intercept and had to flee the corrupt Colombian police and the mafia, because I was in the Sierra Nevada, and nobody could understand that I was not there looking for drugs to buy or sell, but to find medicines to cure others with. My supposed business partner, a northern Colombian cattle rancher, who wanted to grow vegetables and herbs for the island of San Andres market, got bogged down in a dispute with the land reform hungry Colombian Senate and had to fly to Bogota to save his family ranch from expropriation and I was stuck in Barranquilla waiting him out watching our funds dwindle daily. 

But as my fortunes would dictate in their strange way it was then that I became a student of Astrology and the metaphysical sciences, when after having my palm read by a gypsy in a local café, I struck up a wonderful friendship with Rafael Moreno del Rio, an insurance salesman and Rosicrucian brother, who had witnessed the reading and my avid interest in the gypsy lady. He in turn introduced me to my revered teacher Samuel Alvarado, an 80 year old professional pharmacist and astrologer in Barranquilla who instructed me in the study of Astrology. I paid his pension room and board for 6 months in trade for lessons. Samuelito was a very wise natural herbalist, a pharmacist in modern medicine and a metaphysician as well and passionate about all of those things. I considered our friendship a matter of destiny, as I believed I had been guided to that event by my good angels once again. 

That difficult political time of drug hysteria ruined a life long dream, and finally broke the bank, and sent us back to the US in defeat. The only thing I was able to salvage was a collection of 147 herbs collected from north, central and Latin American Indian tribes and local natural medicine. But even that I did not write about, because I feared that the commercialistic interests of greedy capitalists would wipe out the indigenous sanctuaries where most of the best herbs on earth still grow in the wild and as time has proved I was absolutely right. We returned to the US and we bought a boat named Noah’s Ark on the Miami River at Nuta’s Boat Yard and lived off the islands near Coconut Grove for 4 of the best years ever. I settled down to keep fighting the draft and finish securing my Conscientious Objectors status with a Quaker lawyer friend Robert Altschuler. It was a continuing miracle indeed as the $22,000 dollar boat only cost me $650 bucks. The neat people that had owned it, a Carpenter and his stewardess wife, sold it to me because they said they wanted a nice hippie couple like Alexandra and her son Eric and I, my mate at the time, to own it. Somebody who would enjoy it as much as they had…and we certainly did. We got a five dollar shower key from a tenant that was vacating his slip in the local marina, we lived off the islands during the first gas crisis, sold my truck and got a British mail bike and rode around town picking fruit and avocados for free, living out of dumpsters and trash piles picking up good finds and I did carpentry and astrology for a living. Alexandra pitched in everything she had and painted beautiful airbrushed T-Shirts and made stunning tie-dyes.  We trolled for barracuda and ate crayfish off the bottom of the bay and lot's of coconuts.  I had an alternative consciousness healing center astrology consulting service in town on the top floor of the I Ching Bookstore and counseled terminally ill people who would come looking for a better vision of God than that offered to them by straight ministers representing a failing establishment version of truth.

That brief explanation will set the backdrop to the rest of this document. It cannot cover a myriad of experiences in Latin America, including having met several Colombian Presidents at the height of a bi-partisan government in Colombia called the National Front. It was a failed Centrist experiment that rages as a civil war to this date 62 years later largely assisted by the corrupt War on Drugs and the US government that is really a war on innocent people. It is enough of a sketch of the kind of man I was in my youth to give you a backdrop of my early life . Suffice it to say that I have a lot of subjects to comment on and I am an educated man whose purpose it is, in this recantation, to explain some of the deep irony and contradictions I have experienced at the hands of the so-called “health care system” in my 62 years on this planet.

The story of what happened to me when I suffered my accident at the age of 33 begins in San Diego, California, on Sept 7th 1981 during Jimmy Carter’s Presidency. I was the Chief Shop Steward of National Steel and Shipbuilding for the Carpenters and Boat Wrights Local Union and I had top seniority in a 2000 man shipyard, although I was thirty days from being vested and had been newly elected. I was an idealistic college guy who felt motivated to learn some real skills from blue collar workers. I had no experience in shipbuilding per se other than having scrapping and painting my boat on the lee of the island, but my early education had given me the math background and carpentry skills I had learned from my Dad that I needed as basics and I took off. My boss let me know I was hired before the trial period of 90 days was over. 

I started as a Layout man in the Mold Loft (essentially the mathematical dimensioning department which makes the master tools for the entire process of shipbuilding) otherwise known as patternmaking. I was promoted to Loftsman and within a short time I was made shop steward by a unanimous vote of the membership. I bought a home in desperation thinking I would lose the chance if the interest rates went any higher under Carter and my home sale closed at 22 points after initiating the loan process at 13 points. My payments were horrendous. I settled down to attain the goal of home ownership and to work hard. But my happiness was short lived.

I was coming back from Ensendada, Mexico the night of labor day weekend because the hotels were filled up and I couldn't find a room. I had intended to stay the weekend with my nurse friend, but she had to cancel at the last minute.  Anyway I decided to head back home and  drive at night.  I was on my motorcycle at 3:30 AM on the new coastal highway when I ran into a boulder going 75 miles an hour at Punto Salinas.  Some bandits had rolled it off the cliff, in the belly of a curve in the road, hoping to stop a car or a bus and then to fleece the bodies for booty. I hit it instead and was thrown 300 ft landing in the middle of the road paralyzed below the waist.  

I was whisked out of Mexico by a miracle man who came to my rescue and who drove me to the border. Yes, I had insurance, but it didn’t do me any good because, although I was forced to buy it at the border upon entry to Mexico, it only covered liability for any Mexican involved in the accident and didn’t do anything for the American who was forced to buy it.   And that was not the only problem. If I had not made it to the border and had been intercepted by the police I would have been thrown in jail and bled to death, because in Mexico they force you to pay and then release you to a hospital, but only if yours kin comes to save you. As it turned out, the Mexican police claimed I hit a bridge and tried to charge me for it. My father actually had to go into a Mexican court of law and argue the truth - that a bus had hit it two weeks prior and I was nowhere near the bridge at that time.

When we reached the border I was placed in an ambulance after they suspected us of a ruse to import drugs. The man who picked me up in a hippie VW Bus with flowers painted all around it was dressed in white and wore sandals and looked just like the blond Jesus I had seen countless times before on the walls of Catholic Cathedrals. He had blue compassionate eyes and no leather on his body. Go figure. 

He came out of nowhere looking like a brother from Woodstock right out of my past and out of the darkness I heard him speak. I had said “Dear Lord please don’t let me die…“, when I realized where I was in the road. Then I heard him say “ Don’t worry I saw everything that happened - I’m coming to help you, I“ll take you where ever you need to go.“ I heard the VW engine start up and he pulled it around to where I was sitting in the middle of the road looking back in the direction I had come from. 

I could not feel or move my legs and it felt like everything below my waist was a bowl of quivering jello. He took me to help and disappeared as mysteriously as he had appeared. They could find no trace of him or the van on the border guard's computer two days latter. My father thought I was having a drug reaction or was delirious when I told him about it, but grew strangely pensive after he talked to the border guards who were as freaked out as he was by the man’s ability to vanish off a government computer, but not from their memories.

 

Prior to the accident, two weeks before, I read an extensive article in the San Diego paper about the need to arrive at a trauma center within “the golden hour” time period, otherwise statistically you will die. I was an hour and 30 minutes finally getting to help. I immediately told the ambulance driver to take me to San Diego Trauma Center. I pleaded with them to listen to me as my injuries were very severe. They laughed at me and said they were going to take me to the hospital they were contracted with - Bay General. No person should ever be transported to a hospital they don‘t want to go to. They went so far as to tell me to shut up, that I was delirious and wasn’t going to tell them what to do. But when I arrived at Bay General and was in triage the doctors who surrounded me went white-faced when the cut open my riding suit and like a chorus they all said “take him to UCSD Stat! They looked like they were looking at a dead man.

I struggled to stay conscious and told them that if I died I was going to come back and haunt each of them for damn sure. I remember arriving at UCSD and suddenly being told by the attending Physicians I had less than a 50-50 chance, that they would do anything they could to save me, but that I might wake up very different from when I went under - but if that’s ok, then sign here. I told them to do whatever they had to do that I wanted to live.

I was admitted as a 2 percent chance of survival as was determined independently by San Francisco Trauma Unit who evaluated my case later.

I was given more transfusions than anyone had ever had before. The most blood given historically at the time to any transfusion patient was 6 times the total volume of the blood in the body.  I had 18 times my total blood volume replaced. I may, or may not, have been contaminated with bad blood, as even 28 years later it is still not definitively diagnosed! One thing is for sure I can thank the 10,000 donors that gave it to me from the bottom of my heart. You ask yourself how is that possible - read on.

I will not detail the 4 operations that followed the 10.5 hour marathon surgery on that first day. The next day was 11 hours trying to find a bleeder. I had a large portion of my intestines removed and they made me a new bladder. I had two diversions, both intestinal and bladder (colostomy and a bladder ostomy), for a long, long time. Three years later the bladder ostomy was reversed, but I have the colostomy to date 28 years later and it really doesn't bother me anymore.  

I was not allowed to eat food or drink water for two months. I had no bowel sounds and I existed on morphine and intravenous feeding. I had to cut off the hard drugs, as I would end up addicted, and I went cold turkey with the pain.  I told them not to give it to me even if I begged them for it.   Then they gave me Melaril and Elavil and other psycho-tropics that really began to mess me up hopelessly.

I laid in the bed with seven fractures of the pelvis wired up with titanium rods and my leg in traction listening to the screams of the burn victims in the adjacent ward, not knowing if I would live or die. I could taste water in my dreams, but could not touch it. I lived on intravenous feedings. The doctors told me I was blessed not to be a dairy drinker, because I had massive infections throughout my body competing to kill me. They said if I had milk protein in my body they could not have stopped the infections, as they would have spread and been only fed by the dairy products. Apparently, they teach a year long course in the bacteriology of milk culture in medical school, as it is the perfect medium for the growth of bacteria.  All those years of preoccupation with health paid off in a strange way. 

The doctors that saved me were meatball surgeons, who just happened to be at UCSD the night they wheeled me in, and had all been to Vietnam together. There were 7 of them I owe my life to.  That was strange since I spent most of my time for 7 years protesting that dead stink of a war. They said they had never seen any one with wounds like mine live to talk about it, because my wounds were worse than guys who had stepped on landmines. The only saving grace was that I still had my legs.  My bladder was unsalvageable in the normal condition, as it had been cut 7 inches across it, and a lot of the tissue had gone necrotic.  It was flattened onto one side of my body by the tremendous impact of the crash, but I still had my privates, thank the Great Spirit for that.  However, my prostate was ripped from its normal location and the had to stitch that back on.  

They said they had never given anyone so many antibiotics as they had given me,  indeed that is why I had no bowel sounds, and it took so long to hear that gurgle of life in my gut that means you’re alive, because the intestinal bacteria had finally reestablished itself. Without friendly bacteria you cannot digest food of any kind.  If you want a good laugh the next time you fart realize it’s your body saying “yippie I’m alive!” So weird…

I could not walk with out a walker.  The doctors did not think I would regain my ability to walk at all. They said if I got to a cane it would be a miracle and told me to be grateful if I got that far. I looked liked someone who had survived Auschwitz.   I never realized how terrifyingly close I was to death until I saw that picture.  I have always been a bloody optimistic person who deeply believes that whoever we call God loves me and I know my good angels must have had some reason for me to survive this.  I went through so much sadness and loss of everything I had come to identify with as my normal life and was catapulted into a realm where it seemed everything and everybody I would have thought would help me walked away from me and left me with a deficit I could never repair.  

My family stuck by me but, there was little support for them in that unfortunate role and they lived on the other side of the country. I am glad I did not see all the disappointment coming my way as I may not have been able to continue.  Indeed, my problems were only beginning. 

I did have a premonition of what was to come.  As a practicing astrologer I saw my transits and consulted another astrologer, who chose to talk around what he saw. I knew that was his way of confirming my inner sense that a great change in my life was just around the corner.  I had a dream that I should buy a little Toyota tan station wagon, but when I went to trade in the bike at the local car dealer he wasn’t there.  Labor Day weekend was in a couple of days and I had made a date with a nurse friend to ride our bikes down to Ensenada for the weekend.  She ended up not being able to go, but was on duty in the trauma room when they wheeled me in to UCSD - closed circle huh? 

Yeah, it was weird stuff to the uninitiated, but I was actually used to my intuitive side by then and I just didn’t realize my better angels were going to send an even greater challenge to ramp me up to a higher level of consciousness. I actually ended up buying the tan Toyota station wagon after I recovered enough to be able to drive. I had written a statement to my spiritual masters in my diary about my readiness to meet whatever they would call upon me to fulfill and thanking them for the blessings of my life up to that time. It was not on the bike when my Dad went to Mexico to retrieve it.

Upon hearing of the accident my father flew to San Diego from Florida and within a few days my mother was there as well. My father who was truly the best father any man on earth could have ever aspired to have as a parent told the hospital to give me whatever I needed and he would pay for it.  But I had good insurance from the shipyard and was fortunate to have used it correctly. According to the policy terms agreed to by my union, if I went through Emergency all costs were paid; but if I went through Admissions I would have been responsible for 60 percent of over $180,000.  My blood transfusion bills were $ 80,000 alone.  I would have been completed bankrupted immediately if that had happened - I was glad I demanded going to the emergency room at the right hospital. Sadly, it still didn’t help to have been educated. Our heath care system is riddled with fine print which can kill you.

I had Kaiser Permanente Insurance A + coverage. But in the end I lost that moving out of state. That occurred years later, but as you will see it was not exactly by choice. You need to understand that even when you have good insurance and good job and what you might envision as a bright future all of that can be taken away from you in the blink of an eye, as happened to me.

My father and mother rented out my house to a Navy Captain and his family and he rented it for about a year and a half until I was able to move back in again. I went to Miami to live with my family after I was released from the hospital. In Florida I was convalescing and, although I was out of the hospital, I was severely limited in what I could do physically and healing was arduously slow.  I was doped up with psycho-tropics which had made me a virtual schizophrenic. (I read the labels - no, I was not diagnosed as such.)  Remember you are reading about a guy who knows a lot about natural medicine - enough to know that the chemical junk I was ingesting was doing perhaps more damage than it was fixing. Thousands of seniors are doped up like this in retirement homes routinely with drugs facilitated by the Federal Government to keep them stupid and tractable. It is a crime to addle someone’s mind in order to shelter yourself from their pain.

I was also being doped up with tons of tetracycline, Tylenol and Ibuprophen to the detriment of my liver and my kidneys, but unbeknownst to me, that irreparable damage was being done to me, because I was being treated under a protocol dictated by the Federal government to hospitals for the specific outpatient treatment of Indigent persons.

Over the next few years, as I struggled to get my health under control, I was thrown into the hospital in several states for extreme dehydration and shock close to death from a recurring infection to my testicle, which had suffered an impact in the accident. Each time, it would swell up to the size of a grapefruit, I would become nauseous, clammy, dehydrated and in shock and be unable to stop barfing even though there was nothing but bile in my stomach. Eleven times I can remember I was hospitalized for the same problem. I discovered, after it was too late, that if I had had a relatively minor micro surgery (money had to be spent), I could have been spared all that agony. It was not until years later when I lived in New Mexico that I was given surgery by a doctor at University of New Mexico who risked his career to help me. He was dismissed for having done so and today teaches at Texas Medical Institute.

Imagine, you are there near death in shock - dehydrated - and you finally have the dumb luck or deep blessing of asking the right question. In frustration I turned to him and asked: “Is there any alternative treatment other than giving me drugs and releasing me - this is going know where! “ His answer really shocked me as it was the first time I ever knew I was being treated under a protocol and not as a patient.  His answer was “ Definitely - we can remove the problem and you will get better.  But that will require spending money on you which this hospital doesn’t want to do for indigent patients.  However, since you specifically requested an alternative therapy and I didn’t volunteer the information to you, I am now legally able to intervene and answer your question.  However, we are going to have to do this right away or the hospital management will surely not allow it once they get wind of my scheduling you for surgery.  We can do it tonight, if you will consent to the surgery, and we’ll deal with them in the morning.” He performed the surgery in the emergency room and lost his job for having defied the hospital management.  I never have had a recurrence and get by with one testicle just fine.  But the tragedy of the whole affair is that I sustained irreversible damage to my kidneys and damage to my liver from all the tetracycline and Ibuprophen and Tylenol they prescribed for me in order to get me out of the hospital and to keep from properly treating me and spending any money on an indigent person.  And I lost a really good doctor who was a decent human being.  I consider what they did to me to be nothing less than genocidal when you consider the protocol they followed. Thank you Congress once again…I am sure people have paid with their lives because of these policies.

Now let us go back and pick up where I digressed.  I finally left my family to try to return to California and salvage my home.  I had to wait out the lease until it was vacant, so for a while I lived with a friend.  During that time I was a mess.  I used a walker and moved like a slug.  I was taking so many of the psycho-tropics that I was only able to speak three or four words before stumbling and trying to get the rest out.  Finally my room mate said he was going to have to ask me to leave if I didn’t stop taking the drugs because they were destroying my mind. Strangely, I had no self-awareness of this predicament and how my debility was affecting others.  

I decided to ditch the drugs when he suggested maybe I should smoke some pot that it might help me get over the nausea and pain and help me get an appetite and maybe even a little sleep.  With the 7 fractures of the pelvis and one fracture still open sleep was precious minutes not hours. I made him swear to keep me supplied in pot and I would quit taking the government drugs.  I took a container with several hundred pills and flushed it down the john.  From that day on I began to make slow steady progress back to some kind of my old self again.  I still did not know of the destructive effects of the drugs I had been prescribed, but I made my own decision to heal myself with what I believed in, albeit illegal, and, in so doing, placed myself in peril of risking my freedom and maybe a fate worse than the one I was already a prisoner of.

I would go to the airport and watch the skydivers and my cousin flying his glider.  I would sit on boulders to teach my body new levels of pain tolerance occasionally pulling bits of shattered bones out of my ass which the doctors said might poke through in time.  I vowed to my self to overcome the worst torture and to bear it and overcome it.  I ate health foods and took the best care of myself that I knew how to do.  The doctors marveled at my progress and when I went through my succeeding surgeries at Kaiser I would flush the pain meds down the toilet and get in my wheelchair and go to the stairwell where I would smoke the pot my friend smuggled in for me.  The nurses all winked at me when they went down the stairwell. They knew what was going on and they were on my side.  They never once ratted me out…God bless them.  The doctors would send them into my room to study what I was taking, because they knew I wasn’t eating the hospital food. Whatever I was doing was really showing how well it worked and they wanted to learn from me what I was eating and using for supplements.  After a year and a half I walked into my doctors office and stood on my head with no hands.  I still couldn’t really walk without crutches, but I was beginning to regain mental and physical control. My doctor was stunned.  He called in all the nurses and asked them all if they ever thought I would make it that far.  My body was beginning to find its own way back and my mind was beginning to clear.

After I tried to return to National Steel and Shipbuilding the company doctor said I could not go back to my normal routine and they and my Union walked away from me and the company let me go.  I was abandoned by the very people I had trusted professionally.  Now, with no job, no company benefits or assistance and a closing window of opportunity to salvage the house, I had to come up with a better plan.

I moved back into my house and enrolled in the Dept. of Vocation Rehabilitation in San Diego and secured a counselor named Sheila M. (last name abbreviated to not necessarily protect the guilty).  I trusted her and paid dearly for it.  Ronald Reagan was now President and the prevailing philosophy was that disabled people should just stop sponging off the system and go get a job.  Nobody wanted to advocate for victims at the expense of a shrinking piece of the Federal pie and it was all about getting the "deadbeats" off the street and into a job or jail where they could stimulate the economy.  I can clearly see the indelible imprint of Federal programs and policies that took aim at my life and went on destroying everything I cared about.

The first thing on my agenda was to try and save my house from foreclosure. Does the name Countrywide Mortgage ring a bell?  I didn't have to wait for the Collapse at the end of the G.W. Bush Era, all that happened to me years prior in the early eighties.  I was strapped to a house in the poor neighborhood of Chula Vista where Countrywide had sold me an grossly overvalued home at a horrendous interest rate.  My payments in the early eighties were $890 a month.  My vocational rehabilitation officer was the first to knife me in the back.  She started out by taking a bilingual college educated man and hiring him out to “the best we can do right now” as a used car lot manager.  I was teamed up with Enzo I. (last name abbreviated) an Italian immigrant to the US who only spoke broken English and some Spanish.  She down graded my skills to get me a job with a man she had private business dealings with, as she was co-owner in a DMV title processing company that did all his financial and DMV paperwork. She was bound by law not to have conflicts of interest with any of her clients, but that didn’t bother Shiela she was high on Reaganomics!  She told me I had secured a Salary Job with a 5 year contract in writing.  That criteria was the basis for Housing and Urban Development to reassess my mortgage and refinance my house for 30 years, which would have saved my home from foreclosure. She had not done that in fact. Mexico suffered a devaluation of the currency and Enzo’s brother came to town hat in hand asking for a job. Enzo gave him my management job and demoted me to salesman the very day HUD called me on the ONE TIME CALL EACH CASE GETS TO SEE IF THEY HAVE ALL THEIR DUCKS IN A ROW and accused me of lying when I said I had a salary job. They told me “we just called the car lot and they say you are not the manager just a salesperson and we require a salary job with a five year commitment.” 

I was ruined and the person I had trusted to help rehabilitate me was responsible. Now my only option was to scramble to try and get another job. Vocational Rehab, realizing that Sheila M. had violated her contract terms and committed fraud against a client, assigned someone else to my case and repeatedly denied me any access to her in my attempts to find out what had happened. During that time I was told to find another job and in desperation I went to an interview at General Dynamics Convair for an engineering Loftsman position which, although in the aircraft sector, was a job I had done successfully in shipbuilding.  I went on crutches to find employment and fell on my face on the sidewalk on the way to the interview.  I knew it was a bad omen, but I went anyway with an new bruise on my chin, because it was the only job offer I had in two weeks of scrambling to save the house.  I got the job, although they claimed that they could not pay me the $13.70 an hour that I made in my last employment at National Steel, so I hired in at only $6.25/hr. They claimed it was all they could pay someone who was disabled.  I couldn't save the house, but at least I had some kind of a job offer.  

I was in shock and dismay. I was beat down about as far as I could go with the strength I had left, so I took the job and Vocational Rehab quickly closed my case and told me I had no further rights under the guidelines of the program. They were in a hurry to dump my case, since they realized their counselor had legally wronged me.  That allowed Sheila M. to hide and left me with no other option other than to sue a struggling program, which in order to pay me, would have taken money out of the budget for the poorest most needy people in an era of shrinking budgets.  I had been to training sessions in the same room with brothers and sisters who were double amputees, quads and worse off than I and I couldn’t bear the idea of vindicating myself legally at their expense.  I was frantic - there was no time to look back, although I wish I had sued the living hell out of her and her whole department.  I tried several lawyers who refused to help me for lack of funds.  It seems they were high on Reaganomics also, and didn’t want to help anyone who could not afford to pay them or help such persons sue the government.  There were just too many overwhelming things caving in on me to be able to address just one with any clarity or funds.

This opened a new chapter of hell, as I was trapped in a job with an employer that did not like union workers.  Early on they identified me as an ex-union shop steward.  Then to make matters worse the next batch of new hires had all worked under my charge in the shipyard, which had laid them off.  In the few years I was there I was repeatedly denied pay increases, and when I did get them they were always the minimum contract raise, while everyone else got more money.  It was obvious they were singling out the guy who had been the shop steward and who had been a leader in his previous workplace.  I was being discriminated against, as they even went so far as to make up a sign out sheet for the use of the bathroom, so they could track and dramatize how long it took me to use the bathroom.  Apparently disabled guys took too long to use the john!  Then on top of that they would send other workers friendly to management in to peek through the cracks of the crapper and give them a report of what I was doing in there.  

They used me to train all the new employees who hired in after the shipyard went through the layoff. They paid me significantly less and kept giving them raises.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was working in a closed shop association, not a real union.  General Dynamics was a government employer so the Engineers and Architects Association I was forced to join in order to work there was really a mere off shoot of management and was in truth a closed shop.  The shop “steward” proved to the company I was matching job for job the production record of the top R and D man they were paying $80,000 / yr. The management even wrote me a letter when I asked for a pay raise stating that they were within their rights to pay a disabled person any rate they chose no matter what his performance was.  It seems I had been made into an example of the new philosophy of corporate management in the new era of Reaganomics.  And in the end, after I complained more aggressively to management, someone put a noose over my table as a warning.  When I went to the Department of Labor they told me that it was a government workplace with security clearances and they could not introduce a neutral party to observe a complaint because of security clearances, even for a disabled person.  They told me that General Dynamics had a sorry legacy of such abuses and they were very brash about it and knew how safely insulated from Public scrutiny they were.  They went so far as to advise me to leave. When they threatened my life I took a strait edge off my table and chopped down the noose hung from the rafter over my table.  I let everyone in the room know I’d cut their heads off if they did anything like that to me again. I was becoming just like them.   I wanted to fight them, but I didn’t know who had done it.

Having my life threatened was the last straw.  It wasn’t my imagination either, since it was shortly after a man in the company in Space Systems Division on the other side of town had been killed by a mysterious propane explosion in his garage when he came home from work one day.  Scuttlebutt around the plant was that it was murder.  Someone had gone into the garage and removed the cover plate from the water heater in the garage and then created a gas leak in the line on the way into the building on the inside of the garage. With the door closed, the pilot light on, and the air in the room absolutely still, until, unsuspecting, he opened the door and pushed the gas cloud into the pilot light causing it to explode.  He died three days later in agony and more than one person in the plant knew it was not an accident.  I had good reason to fear these people.  I believe he was going to spill the beans about the shuttle explosion of the Challenger and other gross mistakes the company had made.  These embarassments were all about a larger pattern of corruption. On the heels of the $5,000 dollar toilet seats they had made for the Air Force, that wouldn’t have endeared them to the taxpayer or the government.  Apparently they couldn’t let that happen.

At that point I stopped shadowboxing the Apocalypse and working in the Devil’s own workshop to try to better myself. If I stayed there I would have become just like the hypocrites I was surrounded with.  I was already infected with a rage and my blood boiled with anger out of a desire to survive it all.  I walked out with my boss in tears carrying my books to my car begging me not to quit. His best little widget maker was leaving him and he didn't have anyone else to do all that work for him anymore.  The next day he was demoted from head of the dept to just another worker down in the computer room working on the Cruise Missle - ALCM - down in the Secret Project.  

I was finally a free man and I had identified the government as my singular enemy in all of this.  All of the laws that impacted me - all of the policies were crafted by congressmen and senators - every last one of them.  But sadly my trials weren’t over yet.  

During that time at General Dynamics, it had been suggested that if I could not get promoted on the basis of my skills and abilities, then I should consider going for more education and then asking for a promotion.  I had enrolled in San Diego Evening College after the company, on the behest of my boss, who felt guilty about my situation, granted me a leadership scholarship. (This was singularly his choice, not theirs.)  I had excelled in quality assurance improvement programs within what they called Quality Circles and it was an award for excellence.  But the conflict of interest showed itself after my boss actually became an instructor at the college and required extra courses from me pertaining to my job.  By that time I had secured a Student Loan and, although I came within thirty credits (by New Mexico standards) of an MBA-JD masters degree, all of that was lost when I was forced out of my job and it became a $10,000 debt to me over time.  Years later the G. W. Bush administration converted that debt into a lien against my property even though the loan was supposedly forgiven by the Federal government.  $8000 of that amount is penalties and interest.  That lien still haunts me to this day!

Now, I was unemployed seeking disability payments.  I lost all my stock plan and retirement benefits and my grip on a long term career.  I was saddled with an impossible tax debt, because I failed to file a form in the year 1982 prior to April 15, stating that I was disabled.  I was such a mental vegetable at that point I couldn’t have reasoned out what needed to be done if I tried.  My parents, who at that point, still had power of attorney for me had never had a wage job and knew nothing about what needed to be done.  Had I filed it in time my tax could have been negotiated.  When I asked Congressman Duncan Hunter to help me he was of absolutely no use.  It was more politically correct for him to deny help to a disabled person than to reform an unfair tax policy that garnered him the booty he needed to be a powerful congressman.  He told me penalties and interest would continue to accrue and I would have to pay it someday.  When the IRS called me to confirm that, I told them that I would fight them if they ever came to my house to collect, so they said they were going to put me in a taxpayers protection category to deal with me later, whenever the day came that I ever made any money.  Needless to say, after losing my house to foreclosure, all my belongings, my meager savings and my health I was more than angry.  I sold everything, including my stock, and cashed in my savings and retirement and in a profound rage I left California fearing the company might still try to kill me and follow through with their death threats to avoid possible litigation.  I headed for the north woods to try and save my self spiritually at least from all of this destruction and ruin.

I have been a political person all my life. I marched with Southern Christian Leadership Confrence in the movement for civil rights, was one of the 96 most wanted campus radicals in the US against the Vietnam war - they feared me, because I was strictly non-violent and no matter how many times they tried, they could not provoke me to violence.  Back in the heyday of my hippie experience I was at Woodstock and the First Rainbow Gathering at Strawberry Lake in Colorado.  I worked in the hospital tent as one of two hippie doctors.  I remember putting 64 stitches in a dumb truckers head, after drunk on a case a bear and lusting after naked hippie girls, he dove into 3 inches of water and cracked his head open. They brought him to the Hospital Tent draped over the back of a horse. We were 10 miles on foot from the nearest highway so Dr Tom and I just munched on some peyote buttons and had him back up on his feet and chanting Hare Krishna in an hour or so.  Dr. Tom was from Cottonwood, Arizona, and travelled around in a hippie bus with the Traveling Medicine Show.  I had a bag of herbs and some forceps.  We didn’t have any pain medication, so we poured straight Peppermint Soap, (thank you Dr. Bronner), into the wound to give him a pain threshold and make him pass out, so we could stitch him up.  You might say I have an appreciation for how far some people have to go to let a little light into their world.  Revelation comes hard. 

I mentioned I was at the March on the Pentagon in 1968 - I’m the guy in the very front row at the feet of the soldiers wearing a Navy pea coat and a beret.  I was sitting cross legged, arms linked on either side to the person next to me, directly in front of the cameras of all the major networks right at the feet of the paratroopers, when the US Marshalls cut the power and lights and pushed the soldiers into our ranks in a classic V formation driving us over the porch of the Pentagon.   I never moved a muscle until some very brave person dragged me to safety and pushed me over the wall to safety.  I stood my ground then, and always will, when it comes to the love I have for my country and my principles.  I authored and sent a 10,000 signature petition to Lyndon Johnson and to the United Nations Individuals Against the Crime of Silence and organized the largest anti-war march Orlando had ever seen.  I never gave in to cynicism, violence or fear. 

Why do I mention this?  Because it got me sidelined into Cointelpro, which many years later got resuscitated by the G.W. Bush administration and got my name on the International Terrorist Watch List.

A few years ago my father passed away and I went to Florida on a bereavement flight and the airline gave me the third degree, as I was triple A rated as a security risk.  The airline official warned me not to fly international, since if I chose to go anywhere out of the country, I could be whisked away by a foreign police agency and disappeared.  He said: “Someone with your exact name is on the International Terrorist Watch List, although you are AAA rated on our domestic no-fly list, which demands full scrutiny.” Damn!, I guess this pacifist hippie scared the hell out of the spooks huh?  Thanks a lot Federal Government once again.  I cannot prove it, but I think it has actually effected the degree and quality of health care I am allowed to access.  I know for sure it has had an oppressive effect on the spirit of a man who never ever wanted anything but peace and justice for his country and who has never ever been violent in this pursuit.  I believe what scares them is that I cannot be duped into volunteering to be victimized further.

I have tried to focus on enough storyline to be comprehensive and to keep every aspect of this recantation focused on health care pertinent issues. A person doesn’t only get better in the hospital. the curative process isn't only what you get in the way of medicine and treatment, it can have a lot to do with your own education and the things you can do for yourself.  The government agencies and programs, laws and protocols, as well as the inflexible art of politicization, sidelines, culls and diminishes many patients, if they don’t just kill them outright. 

I now have the same sense of commitment to reforming the healthcare system and this government today that I did then and I have had to assume a degree of risk in writing this down.  But I am no longer a creature of fear - I have a right to be here and I have a right to survive and have a clean healthy world to live in.  I am not afraid to fight for that now and I know, if I don’t, I will have failed to live up to my calling.  I know there are plenty of people in power who would not hesitate to crush others unfairly in favor of their own agendas.

Having been in New Mexico for 21 years since that time it may seem odd to you that I am still not sure of my diagnosis. I deferred this part of the discussion until later in this discussion, since most of it took place in this unfortunate State.

I started out going to the University of New Mexico on the advice of my doctors when I left California. They told me that I should go to a teaching hospital, because no other hospital would have the expertise to deal with a complicated Internal Medicine case like mine in a mostly rural backward State like New Mexico.  I was told that no regular doctor, without extensive trauma experience, would be able to operate on me successfully, if that was ever required.  It was ironically a safety measure that led me to UNM.  The first problem I ran into here was that the system is not set up to handle complicated outpatients like me.  Since I was an indigent, they fought giving me any care tooth and nail.  The first thing they do wrong with cases such as mine is to assign you to a student intern who is a family practice doctor. That’s General Practice, not a specialist.  Most of the time you don’t even see a doctor you see their nurse practitioner.  I never did get a family practice doctor probably because I came in through the emergency room.  I felt they were wasting my time when they were obviously oblivious to all the mistreatment I was getting under the protocols that limited my care.  After waiting several months to finally see a family practice doctor she cancelled the appointment.  Finally, just frustrated, I sat down with my urologist, who I did get to see via my numerous previous hospitalizations.  I explained to him that I did not feel I had adequate care.  I felt I need a doctor with a skill level considerably greater the that of a GP.  He said that after seeing a GP they would probably tell me the same thing and refer me to one, but that he would try to arrange it.  

I finally got to see Doctor Thomas E. the top internal medicine specialist at UNM - their top instructor.  Dr. E. agreed to try and diagnose what was wrong with my liver and kidneys and, over a period of time, the facts emerged (finally confirmed by a real doctor) that the damage to my liver and kidneys had probably been the result of all the routine drugs given to outpatients instead of comprehensive care or possibly something else.  My situation was far more complicated, in his opinion, than my current diagnosis.  Prior to this I had been told that I had Hepatitis C, possibly from the transfusions.  Dr. E. told me he was going to run some more tests and we would sit down and talk.  It was the last time I got to speak to him and that final conversation put the capstone on my suspicions.

According to the Dr. the hospital had put me into a classification of Immunodeficiency Disease where several possible liver ailments are lumped into that category largely for purposes of dealing with indigent claims. Because the hospital does not want to offer expensive specific care you may or may not actually have the disease you think you have, but you are classified as being in that category and only allowed to be treated as an outpatient to the extent of the protocol.  Under the Protocol designed, not to offer care, but to limit the degree of care to poor people, you are only stabilized and released with a prescription for medication.  Prior to this time the patient got stabilization treatment and was facilitated drugs, if needed, and then discharged as an outpatient.  But during the time I was seeing him they just sent the desperately poor out to die if they couldn't afford their meds.  I mean what good is a script if you can’t fill it for a lack of money.  Some doctors gave samples on their own, but were not encouraged to do so.  According to Dr. E. I was in such a category and the hospital did not want to allow him to treat me in any specific manner, even though his latest conclusion was that I may not have any of the liver ailments they have me diagnosed with.  He thought that I possibly have a problem I caught living in South America years ago.  

In fact when I was in Colombia after eating smoked pork from an Indian hovel near the Kogi reservation in the Sierra Nevada we had come down with what the local Dr. in Santa Marta described as Hepatitis.  Undaunted we fasted for 14 days drinking any water we could hold down and taking B-12 shots at the local pharmacy.  Then we ate fruit with raw honey and broke our grueling fast with two lobsters, peas and cold potato salad.  I can still taste it - ummmm!  When we went back to the local doctor he took another blood test and said he could find no trace of Hepatitis and that it must had been a lab error.  I never thought too much more about it and it never made it into my medical record since it came from my memory and there was no sustaining local paperwork.  When I told the doctors here about it all of them, except Dr. E, dismissed it as a negligible fact.  

.Anyway, Dr. E. stated that he had proposed treatment to the hospital on my behalf and had been denied. Then he really shocked me by telling me that he had tended his resignation at the hospital after having been denied. He had given the hospital six months to reconsider.  If they did not allow me to be treated he was going to leave the practice of medicine for good.  After that he became a hospice doctor and now only attends the suffering of the terminally ill as of the last time I checked. They lost an imminent physician and I lost a doctor with real integrity and there I was still stuck with an impossible legacy of malpractice, misdiagnosis, denial of service and steadily on my way out.  My problem, at this point, is that I have absolutely no faith in the system or any way to fix it and I still don’t have any way to trust my doctors or make any other progress other than through personally self-motivated efforts to make progress in my health care.  And I have no accurate diagnosis.

I felt I could not go back to UNM because they had a patently unprofessional attitude and I considered them criminals.  I did not purchase bladder medication for a year and two months, rather I rationed what I had.  I stopped going to my urologist since I didn’t trust him either.  When Dr. E. quit he never even stood up for him and the community lost a really good man with a heart and a conscience.  Dr. G., on the other hand, aware that E. didn’t believe I really had Hep C, proceeded to try and get me in on some special trials for Hep C medication with some Italian Doctors in Residence up on the 4th floor of the building he was in.  I was suspicious of someone who could be aware that I may not have Hep C at all and yet try to get me to be part of trials for a medication designed to cure what I may not even have!  How twisted is that!  I guess, if I recovered miraculously, they could cite that in their stats and show what a brilliant medicine they had come up with.

Remember this - I didn’t figure all of this out in a day. It took weeks, months, even years to put the meat on my suspicions and only after having enough real encounters with doctors to know that I was being wronged greatly. I could have died anywhere within that process and never even realized what had happened, which would have been pretty damn convenient for them.

Finally this year I was forced to go back to a new urologist, who replaced the old one that retired, in order to get a renewal for my script for Bactrim, which I use occasionally for post surgical UTI’s which can catch up to me if I’m not careful, as it could wipe out what’s left of my kidney function.  Although I went back for that reason alone, I continue to hold their so-called professionalism at arms length with an ever present dubious attitude for lack of any confidence in these people.  

I sought out the help of a naturopathic MD who had been a facial reconstruction surgeon in Kuwait and had refused to take the anthrax vaccine during his last two months of duty. 

I am currently taking tests recommended by him as I have so much more confidence in a man with principles than the straight conformist allopathic hacks I’ve been dealing with in the past.  I hope that somewhere between these two soundings, that I will find a course of treatment I can continue to follow that will eventually lead me to improvement.

When you show up for your appointment with a militant attitude wearing camo hunting clothes, as I did back when these problems got to a peak, those Doctors sitting on a moral fence, who still have a shred of conscience, have a moral perk to fix the problem.  They were the only clothes I had without holes in them and I wasn’t really trying to send a message.  And after that period during the Bush administration I didn’t wonder anymore why the security people in the hospital go out of their way to wear fascist black to give the patients an ever present message of fear and intimidation.  I still remember a man next to me in triage once, during my many visits, crying out for help.  I heard myself and all the things I had said on numerous occasions when they let me lay there barfing my guts out uncontrollably until they got good and ready to come and help me.  I remember feeling my blood run cold when the security people came in and threw him back out into the street - I am sure he died.

Furthermore, I have had the opportunity, largely by chance, to stumble on the fact that medical supplies for ostomy care that cost $32 a box at a health cooperative in South Carolina were being charged at $ 267 a box at UNM.  So, while they think nothing of denying care to poor people, in as many couched and hypocritical ways, they are also bald faced thieves when it comes to hyping the price of health care products for outpatients in order to pay themselves back.  I happened to look over the shoulder of a cost accountant working in a temporary office room across from the Outpatient Pharmacy on the 3rd floor of the hospital.  By golly the receipt she was processing had my name on it.  Small world, but you can’t hide the truth from one destined to find it and I have an uncanny ability to do that, even when people try to hide the truth from me. Give me enough time and my good angels will fill me in with the unblemished truth.

Most of what happened under the Bush administration was all about what benefit’s the hospital at the expense of the People.  The new PHERA ACT (Emergency Medical Protocols in case of Bio Terrorism or Plague) is simply terrifying in its implications.  It is a violation of the Constitution, which will clearly be suspended when it is invoked.  The People are not served when gangsters and banksters rule us all and all of our possibilities.

I have essentially lost 28 years of my life, a full turn of Saturn around the Sun, by digging in to become a rebellious survivor.  I lost all ambition to try to have a career - I didn’t see much point to it, as I felt certain they would cheat me out of whatever I earned anyway, if they didn’t take it all away for a bogus tax debt.  It was constantly tedious and time consuming enough for me to continue to wrestle with all my health routines and challenges.  Get this - I tried repeatedly to straighten out my taxes, but I was told that I could not get in front of Tax Judge until the IRS tried to collect and with that hanging over my head I just didn’t see any point to even trying to have a job.  Surely, I now know I was right, when after 4 recessions in my lifetime, I finally see the government scuttle our economy and ruin the retirement of the largest richest generation in human history.  All this right at the time the boomers like me will need help the most.  I will not tolerate anyone who does not prosecute these people to the fullest extent of the law.

By the way, I changed my voting status of many years from Green to Democrat when the Democratic Party proved it had enough class to nominate Barack Obama.  I actually had faith that this man might be different.  Now, of course, the honeymoon is over and the personality cult was always something Mao Tse Tung did better and it is for babies anyway.  I think Bi Partisanship is a disease and I don’t think much of centrists that ultimately only argue for a false value system and continuing class society.  

My parents were Republicans all their lives and I was blessed with a fine family, but I do not respect the attitude that people have, who claim to be conservatives, and yet feel entitled to more possibilities than those granted to others in a single life time.  I would love to have the opportunity to show Barack Obama more of my little world - I think he is a truly fine gentleman, but I think he is being hamstrung by the elitists in both parties and the military and spook establishment.  I do think he’s rather a helicopter kid, part of that generation raised sheltered from us rebellious types: hippies, malcontents and nonconformists.  It’s very sad he thinks a good time is sitting down for a beer and a cigarette, but then let me blow some pot smoke in his face legally and live and let live, then I might just be a little less critical about him choosing to knock himself out his own way, savvy?  

Perhaps it’s just the sucker in me that wants desperately to believe in something again.  All I can say is, if he is the sincere man I believe him to be, then nobody better ever harm a hair on his head - I still haven’t recovered from John, Bobby and Martin Luther, Jimmy Hendrix, Janice Joplin and John Lennon and I shutter to think of my response to those who would wish ill on him in any way.  I’ll use health care and war as his litmus for real change - if he turns out to be just another shuckster, then watch out all bets are off - all of them have to go for us to finally be free.

We must stop people who are using America to work their own agenda over the People’s right to self determination.  I not only want to know who donates money to secret Cayman Island bank accounts, I want to know how much went for charity and how much went to other accounts including those of the solicitor and if it was invested back into drug cartels, gun running or assassins to get rid of their enemies.  I want an IRS that doesn’t come after little suckers, while it gives a pass to its buddies in the CIA, DEA, etc. so they can invest in money pools outside the USA that are immune to social and economic stresses here at home.  That is a policy of treason. This is my last and their last chance for us to trust each other ever again.  I believe you my fellow citizens care about this as much as I do or I wouldn’t put myself on the line by writing this article and giving anyone the last chance to screw up my life any more.  I hope and pray you are all the human beings I think you are and in that spirit I wish you all the best and pledge my best efforts to assist in any way I can to serve my country in an honest manner.

If I were to offer a formula for the preservation of a notion of private ownership and responsible government from here on in, then I would stop talking about lower class, middle class and the wealthy.  I would simply change the formula and reform the value system it has traditionally maintained.  Money has no conscience or country.  It only knows the mandate of ever escalating profits with no finite limit.  People must grow to understand that we have created a standard of greed that believes in unlimited possibilities in a world of limited resources and in a failing environment that must be respected.  At the heart of any earthly system there are limitations.  To know your strengths you must know your limits.  

As a Green Party constitutionalist, before I became a Democrat to support Obama, I envisioned a different three tiered society.  I believe certain issues join us all at the hip whether we like it or not.  At the base level of society we need a Wellness Tier.  No one should go hungry, unsheltered, cold or untreated for their health issues. This level is the Commons most Democrats like to invoke.  That means that everyone should have a basic stipend and call it socialism if you wish - I call it realistic.  In complex economic systems everyone must have enough to contribute back into the economy or the general health of the system begins to systemically fail.  

The next level should be the Betters or what you call middle class.  They pay a tax based on consumption.  Items on the market are taxed based on two simple criteria - either they are fundamentally creative products that add wellness or they are a detriment to the environment and destructive in their nature.  Obviously the destructive products and services pay the greater tax based on consumption, such as the tax on cigarettes and booze.  The creative or healing products that contribute to sustainability parameters pay less.  

At the top are the Best or the Rich.  They pay an income tax based on the level of their wealth and the level of energy use and waste they subsequently generate by their enterprise and lifestyle.  

I would nationalize the banks and issue a currency managed and owned by the government.  I would consolidate all sustainable energy sources, all power sources of any kind and our advanced scientific projects and issue a new age currency based on their value and productivity in the shape of a 10 watt inter connectible solar cell called the erg dollar.  It's purpose would be not only symbolic but functionally useful in third world countries.  You could actually use it as currency or string it together as a solar panel and put it on your roof.  After all it’s silly to listen to these buffoons talk about fiscal responsibility, when we the citizens do not own our own currency: it’s issued and run by a private sector Federal Reserve, managed by thugs and gangsters and enforced by police thugs at the point of a gun.  Bankers get to borrow a dollar and loan out five to the rest of us suckers and we the citizens think that’s just dandy.  What a bunch of consummate dummies they think we are while they stuff their pockets with money, live in gated communities, and let the rest of us flail and starve.  If you think my idea is fanciful and rather out there, exactly what do you consider the current monetary system to be?  Sane?  Reasonable? Logical?  Fair?  I think not!

Also, if you want other countries to trust us, stop letting Israel, a theocracy, macro-manage US foreign policy.  Why do they get to have 400 nuclear weapons? Why do they get to practice terrorism and call it self-defense and are content to encourage us to go after our own citizens for "terrorism"  when they get to butcher people and keep them in gulags.  I am not against Jews or anyone else, but I am foremost an American Citizen and believe in the individual sovereignty of my country and it’s right to democratic representation un tampered with by the Military Industrial Complex or the CIA or a violent theocracy.  Any country, that seriously believes, at the heart of it's dogma, that they have a real estate contract with God who promised them that someday they would own the land of their neighbors, is patently nuts.  That’s just as nuts as the Arabs view that they are going to go to heaven for killing infidels and get 29 virgins as a bloody reward from their God!   

Separation of Church and State pertains to US foreign policy, as well as domestic law.  I wouldn’t extent trade concessions to any country that did not respect our basic Bill of Rights in their own governments.  

We must go after the 4,000 Federal cases pending against major US Corporations Bush expunged with the mysterious collapse of Building 7.  He emerged as an unquestioned hero of the business community when he buried that prosecution on the heels of the Arthur Anderson, Global Crossing, Enron etc. scandal letting the Bernie Madoffs of the world continue their plundering with impunity.  Foreign investors aren’t as profoundly un-educated and patently stupid as the average American - they know they cannot trust us to manage money anymore and no amount of propping up corrupt banks is going to fix that.

I don’t expect the government to fix any of my personal problems, but at least make it possible, so that people like me can access redress of our grievances by fixing the process, so that it doesn’t prohibit our ability to progress.  Tax benefits are of no use to people like me who have given up even trying to fix impossible chaos like this story illustrates.  Tax deductions do nothing for people like me.  I cannot be a member of a non-profit because I have a tax debt.  There’s just no incentive to do anything but continue to go it alone and to not even try an address the impossible burden of all of this. The tax establishment carries guns and acts like a bunch of gangsters and that only helps other gangsters. 

The War on Drugs is a War on People mostly indigent or Indigenous and only empowers a gangster fascist mob called “Law Enforcement” and they get more violent and pig headed with every passing year.  Recently a friend got picked up in Mountainair for going 9 miles over the speed limit, charged with a felony for speeding, thrown in a private ICE prison in Estancia, held incommunicado for 12 days without so much as a phone call and he got laughed at when he demanded his rights. This happened after Barack Obama got into office, so apparently not too much has changed there.  They kept him in a cold room and never let him sleep and they laughed at him and told him that if they classed him as a suspicious person under the terrorism law they could hold him as long as they wanted.  With that kind of law enforcement how can you expect anyone to trust the government or the people in charge of public officials?  Once you’ve been burned like that by the government and it’s henchmen you don’t tend to forget.  

New Mexico and Socorro specifically is loaded with public officials who are profoundly corrupt. The property tax people here stole a million dollars of our property tax monies and the local corrupt DA isn’t even willing to prosecute the elderly lady in charge, because she’s only one in the local clique of corruption.  The judge that “decided” the case is married to the woman in question and the State Police wouldn‘t even return my calls when I tried to investigate the case further.  Most of our public officials are involved in gang activity with the Mexican drug cartel.  Legalization would go a long way to getting them off their soapbox and would add a lot of cash back into the legal economy.  It would also allow abuse to be properly defined as a behavioral problem and a health issue, not a criminal enterprise.  So much needs to be set straight and mucking around trying to please centrists, while precious time is being lost, is not going to be good enough.  They all have one eye on the market, are blind to it's greed and excess and could give a tinker's damn about the civic fabric of this country.

If the tax people want the 700 dollars I originally owed them I would pay it, but I will not allow them to extort money from me unfairly ever again.  I never wanted to be a gangster in a suit and a tie and I am so glad I listened to the better part of my nature and the soul I know is still with me.  To salvage that vision may have required an unrealistic lifestyle and a lot of fortress mentality, but I’ve never really been happy living like this.  I would have liked to be able to buy books, travel, visit my family, have a wife and children, hell not have to have been celibate for 18 years out of fear, respect and misinformation, and to have had a chance at a decent career that could leave some living good after I am gone.  I know all these things are lost and shall never be and, in fact, tragically, I am preparing myself to see everything get even worse unless somebody that can effect CHANGE actually has the courage, will and wisdom to do something different.  Also, remember I am not guilty of having done nothing.  I taught myself to write a website and bought an expensive internet connection for my rural cabin since I couldn’t get a landline at my house in 14 years.  Qwest quoted me $58,000 to put a telephone line to my house after deregulation changed their policy I told them to stick it.  I did these things to run for Congress as a Write-In Green Party candidate against John Arthur Smith and Steve Pearce, both of whom thought the Patriot Act, the Rave Act and the War in Iraq was a great idea.  I ran in 2002 commited to speaking out about the real issues of the day, if not for any other reason than to leave no doubt that I said the honorable thing at the right time and for the right reason.   All my efforts to date since that time have been to promote civil and human rights, protect the Bill of Rights and to forward the cause of integral and sustainable politics.  I have been visited by Homeland Security twice that I know of just for being an activist and a citizen independent media journalist.  No one can accuse me of not standing up to tyranny even at peril of my life and no matter how others may choose to behave I will always love my country and fight for the Constitution no matter what the price.  So may the Great Spirit guide you on your way and help you be the spiritual healers you will all need to be to surmount this time.  I know I’m just a troublesome little cucaracha, but I am as real as it gets. Let’s fix this thing people. We should pass Single Payer National Health Care and not ever have to go back and fix it again, we don’t have the time or the money to mess around any more and foremost we must remember the human cost being paid daily by our brothers and sisters. Together we can walk out of the time of Apachacuti!