This Can’t Be True! Writing Contest

As a child of the ’50s and ’60s I had experienced life from the perspective of the post war gloom in the slums of Liverpool, England and subsequently found myself being swept along the consumer boom time of the ’60s as a teenager. I was 16, there was lots of work, more money, great fashion, technology was making huge strides and I was even thinking I could buy a car…… I felt bullet-proof. The world was in the process of offering me a future that seemed limitless, and I wanted as much as I could get. Even the politics of that time felt like it would bring great things for working class kids like me, create a society that was fair and concerned, give anyone with a little motivation and half a brain opportunities to unshackle themselves from the cap tipping nonsense I had witnessed in my childhood.

My own family situation had led me to being virtually kicked out of school, embarking myself on a long list of employment opportunities, some of which only lasted half a day; I wanted more, was capable of more, I wasn’t stupid but didn’t understand what was going on in my life. At 18 I kind of grew up a little and had developed a conscience, I didn’t want other kids to go through what I experienced as a kid and decided my motivation and personal experience was best suited to community work. And, the politics of the day had created university courses for people like me who had come out of school with nothing in the way of certificates and I eventually found myself coming out of Manchester Polytechnic with a professional qualification, the world was good!

15 years later and living in Australia, I couldn’t make sense of why my society seemed to be increasing its level of social problems. We’d had more money, technology, social mobility, education, better housing and what appeared to be responsible politics, why was all this only creating more problems?

The darkness and frustration of the damaged lives I had been working with spilled over into my own personal life. I often went home frustrated and hurting. A cold beer and a dose of TV didn’t diminish my feelings of despair at the end of the day, in fact it felt like it was making it worse….well, the beer was ok, but the TV news just depressed me even more, so I stopped watching it. Within a few weeks or so I felt like I had moved to a new planet. I discovered old feelings of enjoyment and wasn’t so bloody pessimistic …according to my friends!

I wasn’t spending anywhere near as much of my brain space being negative or feeling helpless, in fact I still had the desire to help change my fellow man’s lot but now with a greater belief things could actually be achieved. I had become convinced the TV news was so concentrated on the negatives in our world, it was increasing my depression about the state of our society and almost shackling me to a belief that acceptance of the staus quo is the best (non) response.

This was now the ’90s, computers and the internet had recently arrived and I realized this incredible communication network allowed me to source ‘news’ from independent journalists, you know, those people that used to chase the truth and had integrity. Some of them still existed I found! I was gobsmacked and elated and felt like I’d found some new friends. Anyway, in one of my early forays into the world of technology provided information, I came upon a story by accident, one I almost ignored. It said that George Bush Snr’s father, Prescott Bush, had, throughout the second world war, sold aviation fuel to the Nazis.

Yeah right, I thought, this cannot possibly be true, there would have been a global uproar if that was the case. Something so big could not possibly have happened without the whole world knowing about it. However, I thought, if this was another of those ludicrous sensationalist nonsense articles, they have gone too far by targeting this powerful family, they will crucify the journo! And so, I searched for what I was sure must have been a court case brought about by the Bush family. It didn’t take much searching to find out there was no court case, the journo was right, the story was true!

Oh, Prescott had been apparently charged, but only after the war ended and he was only fined and that section of his business closed but no action was taken by the US Government for treason. Something he was clearly guilty of under the circumstances I would have thought. He had made a fortune supplying Hitler’s air force, planes that bombed and killed tens of thousands including US soldiers, it was hard to comprehend that this had actually happened. I didn’t know anyone who knew about it. What the hell!

One of the richest families in America, a family that had subsequently created a huge oil wealth and all funded by profits made by selling fuel to the enemy…. what! How can this have happened?

Still finding it hard to believe, I searched more and more and all evidence of the truth was readily available and on public record but only for those willing to take the time to look for it. This was my introduction to the world of well kept secrets or at least information that existed but needed one to actively search for it.

This had of course, caused me to ask myself many further questions. How much more information was out there that I know nothing about? Why is such information not splashed throughout the media? How can something so huge be almost unheard of ? What else don’t I know and why don’t I know it? I had caught the bug, I wanted to know, needed to know, felt I had a right to know. I had overcome my initial fear of computers by feeling compelled to know the truth about more and more of our world.

With every follow up search I made, the more new things came to light, things that angered me. The more I read the more I began to understand why what appeared to be great strides made by ourselves in the ’60s and ’70s had not actually produced a more stable and equitable society. Far from it.

At this point I found David Icke. I have to admit I was by now harboring a great sense of mistrust of all things American and David’s English accent did seem to give me a little comfort and after watching a YouTube video of one of his talks, the larger picture was put in perspective for me. Many of my dots were joined and I began to take a more serious look at our world, or more to the point, the parts of our world in which serious decisions are made, decisions that effect the whole planet. And I wanted to know who is making them, how and why?

And so, the fight was now on and I was not about to let ‘them’ win. I do not want my grand-kids and their kids to spend a whole life never knowing the freedoms to think and act without surveillance. I do not believe this species does not have the right to individualism and freedom of will and I will not go to my grave believing I did not try to help correct the gigantic injustices that have and are occurring everyday in our world at the hands of a very small number of selfish, arrogant, cold hearted, greedy, sick hypocrites.

Life can be far too beautiful to allow that to happen.