If That Was True, Then...

Right now we are going through a time of campaigning for an eventual national election involving many offices including the highest in the land. It's election season and this is important to many people both here and abroad for many different reasons. Of course there are the obvious reasons, at least for Americans, chief among those being the economy with the war in Afghanistan and conflict in Uganda and the giant, expensive and untrustworthy private security force in Iraq perhaps second. After that there are things like national healthcare, civil liberties and the government's increasing intrusion upon some of them, union politics, civil rights and redistricting for votes, the education crisis and the future of our children, immigration reform/ issues, Iran, Israel/ Palestine, the Arab Spring, issues brought forward by the Occupy Movement and more.

There are myriad things, important in a variety of ways to so many people and with the economy at the forefront of those issues so much else gets pushed to the side. That's to be expected. In less turbulent times when there are no wars those tertiary issues listed above and others like them would be the things more in the forefront in election season. It could be that people are part of the Occupy Movement or supporters of it and the general list of grievances they want to push.

We may care about healthcare reform either from a supporting position of the bill passed in 2010, opponents of it or people that have pieces they want kept, removed or expanded upon. We may care about the many civil rights abuses that often occur due to redistricting as has happened this year in some cases. The Israel/ Palestinian peace process may be high on our list of issues to address. The education of our children is no doubt one of the most important issues facing us today which so many of us are sleeping on and taking for granted and some have even called a national security issue as both China and Russia have been excelling rapidly in these areas.

Another issue may be the increasing intrusion of our own government upon our constitutional civil liberties. There are people concerned about the issue from progressives to independents to conservatives. There are some real concerns with the sweeping rules passed as a result of the Patriot Act. Some of these are good and necessary, especially in this day and age, and some not. Any society should always keep an eye on their government, and, while not getting caught up in conspiracy theories and paranoia, always wish to ensure areas of the government are not abusing the money or power allowed them. As adults and free citizens in a free society, it is our duty to be vigilant and take responsibility for the maintenance of our own rights, for if not us then whom?

When I was a teenager I got interested in, then involved in, the politics of race and civil rights here in the United States. As a minority who was born here, I had become more aware of my color once I hit adolescence as so many of us do. It's unfortunate, but the happy utopian color blind world of our childhood begins to give way to the realization of the adult world which at times can be more petty and childish than that of our children's.

At the time of my youth the anti-Apartheid movement was a large movement here in the States and really across the world. The struggles of Nelson Mandela and the oppression of other black people in South Africa were of concern to many including myself. I saw how hard it was for people of color here I could only imagine the kinds of things they had to live with there. But when I did, it made me want to speak up and do something to help them get free from the oppression they lived under. It was 1989-1990 and tensions here were hot.

Unfortunately for me I got involved with the wrong people and participated in planning and participating in a protest on a college campus that went from being planned as a peaceful one to one planned to be violent in the form of property destruction. Tough I am proud of the fact I was involved in fighting for civil rights and the abolishing of Apartheid in South Africa I am not proud of how I did it. Destruction of property as a way of protesting was the wrong choice, but I can't change the errant missteps of my youth now. I can write about them, however.

Despite the fact the protest was specifically planned so as not to harm anyone, it was wrong nonetheless. Either way, the protest happened and all kinds of strange things occurred around the protest and afterwards. In many ways the most odd things were what happened and were revealed afterwards as the story just became in many ways more surreal afterwards than during and leading up to the actual protest.

There were three people including myself that had been there for the planning. Though I was not privy to all the details for many reasons - most of which I wasn't to discover till afterwards - I was one of them. Following my arrest there were prosecutions and trials that were like a chain of dominoes I didn't design but could not stop once set into motion. One person involved was killed in an unrelated drug deal afterwards that went sour just before the arrests started. The other person was tried and promptly, and some might say tidily, acquitted on grounds of reasonable doubt.

Aside from the drug deal involved murder, the rest mentioned thus far is pretty standard in terms of protests involving property destruction and there's a link at the bottom of this article that has much more information. Once it was over I decided not to be involved any more. I knew probably while I was involved that I would not do anything else and even wanted to back out, but was young and weak and the peer pressure from one of the other people particularly to stay in got to me. That's no one's fault but my own.

One odd thing that happened was when a person on the college campus where the protest occurred that knew me and the others involved, stopped me one day at a party and pulled me aside. He started asking me about the other two and said people were talking about what had happened in that one incident and speculating the three of us were involved. He then warned me to stay away from them both because the rumors on campus were that they both were law enforcement and/or intelligence and that I was very likely already in more trouble than I thought. At the time I just sort of dismissed it as that person being overly suspicious and slightly paranoid.

I didn't know anyone else besides the two of them that was involved in any politics aside from people that talked about issues they cared about and voted that way. I didn't even know any politicians. I met a couple of people on the campus where it happened, but they were just concerned students - not radicals like the other two were or were purporting to be.

I mention that because the other person involved in the one incident went through a trial - a state trial - the one previously discussed. Unlike myself, a tertiary person in the grand scheme of what happened, he not only planned most of the protest, he actually did the damage. Yet when the time came the federal government just inexplicably dropped all charges against him. It happened out of nowhere and I have documented proof at the link below and specifically here: (http://www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com/prosecute.html).

I was charged and convicted on both the federal and state level concurrently. Why would they choose to prosecute the lesser guy guns blazing - they admitted I was the lesser guy - and just forget about him completely? They gave no explanation and really didn't even try. The federal government isn't usually so forgiving when it comes to such matters. They sure weren't with me. Years later when another incident involving harassment related to what people had heard I did back then occurred, I wrote about it and started the web site referenced both in and below this article. I did this to get my side out as people were hearing bits, pieces many of which were perverted and twisted beyond the point of bearing any resemblance to the truth. The falsehoods had simply become too much.

Out of the blue one day the other person wrote me and asked that I remove his name from my site. I thought this odd as there were plenty of articles about what happened back in 1990 online mentioning both our names. So I asked him why. And he was apparently about to enroll in college again (he had attended others since what happened at that campus). As our names were already out there I decided that made no sense, so to get rid of him I said that if he wrote a letter admitting that I did not do the actual property destruction itself, I would do that.

I figured that he would not, as his whole defense at his trial was based on the premise he did not do it and could not therefore really even have known. Yet to my astonishment he wrote me back and agreed! There is a link to that email off of this page on my web site:

http://www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com/questions.html

I couldn't believe it. If he wasn't there and was not involved in the planning as he had claimed, how could he know? Lol. Yet here he was admitting my innocence with regards to actually having done the property destruction which so many had speculated I had done in the years since.

How could he admit out loud to knowing that? I knew something was not right then. Why would he be so cavalier about admitting this? Why after thirteen years of no contact after his whole legal battle would he so quickly assent to doing this? As I said there was plenty of articles online and elsewhere, yet he wanted his name taken off of my site. Something didn't sit right.

Either way, the pieces are there on the site, and people can view them as they see fit. But, I think many will see the strange occurrences in an interesting light. If there was truth to what the person that warned me about him in 1990 after the protest said, that would mean the entire trial was fake. That is illegal and that would definitely be a broach of many areas of the law and of many people's civil liberties. It would surely be an example of government corruption and overreach in this case just to cover their own butts. It would show that even before the Patriot Act strange things were happening with law enforcement - at the federal level - deciding it was way above the law - granting itself immunity from being prosecuted by itself. If that's true anyone with knowledge should come forward and set the record straight.

Either way for me in this election year it is a sure reminder of why it is important to stay aware of what our government does and who is involved at what level. We never know what certain folks are doing with the power and money we've given them when they operate in places we are not looking. Though I have no idea what candidates I support this year as of yet, I know the things that are important to me and restoring the honesty and trustworthiness to government is one of those things. It is up to us through the system to keep them in check. We can start with our votes.

To read about my inspiration for this article go to www.lawsuitagainstuconn.com.