I’ve been waiting 40 years for someone like you.” Those were the first words Daniel Ellsberg spoke to me when we met last year. Dan and I felt an immediate kinship; we both knew what it meant to risk so much – and to be irrevocably changed – by revealing secret truths.
One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the knowledge that people continue to sit, just as you did, at those desks, in that unit, throughout the agency; who see what you saw and comply in silence, without resistance or complaint. They learn to live not just with untruths but with unnecessary untruths, dangerous untruths, corrosive untruths. It is a double tragedy: what begins as a survival strategy ends with the compromise of the human being it sought to preserve and the diminishing of the democracy meant to justify the sacrifice.
But unlike Dan Ellsberg, I didn’t have to wait 40 years to witness other citizens breaking that silence with documents. Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971; Chelsea Manning provided the Iraq and Afghan war logs and the Cablegate materials to WikiLeaks in 2010. I came forward in 2013. Now another person of courage and conscience has made available the extraordinary set of documents published in The Assassination Complex, the new book by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of the Intercept.
Dancing With Fools 
Snoops.
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Den, if you decide to drop dead, hope you have someone prepared to come here to tell us the sad news. Didn’t Laura come here after your heart attack, or bypass, and explain what was up with you?
Doubt you have an aneurysm. Don’t think one can push on their head and feel pain from one, but I really don’t know diddly about that, or about anything, pretty much, lol.
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Had a bunch of running today. First I had to drive to Dansville to vote on the school millage. Voted no again. They keep wanting to build a new school, and I keep resisting. It would push our property taxes up about $300 a year. We’re on a fixed income now, have to live on SS. When Bob is gone I’ll get his SS and lose mine, less money for me to live on.
Felt kind of guilty about this no vote though. I know we’re supposed to care about the kids growing up now, our future leaders and all that. *sigh*
Then to the bank for some cash, the library, drove to 20 miles south to Chelsea to get the recycling out of my trunk. Back to Stockbridge, hit the video store for dollar day and the mom & pop grocery store for a few items.
Gassed up my tractor and finished the mowing of the front. I could have remowed everything I mowed this past weekend, it grew, of course, but I resisted.
Hooked up my cart and got the pool filter and motor out of the barn and put it by the pool for Pete to hook for me. It felt better doing things today. I didn’t do much yesterday and ended up feeling guilty about that.
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Only 17 minutes on the sticks up to the CUB at least top of the hill. I went there to have a bit more money transferred to my Cougar card. Using that saves 10% here at the Hillside Cafe. Having chicken paella, orzo and mixed vegetables. Then a small salad.
Day 3: 47+17=64 minutes.
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No Den today.
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