People that know me have seen me crusade for a second investigation into 9/11. I generally come off as arrogant about the issue, as if its my way or the highway. I have done my research. I feel I'm entitled to that bit of ego. But what many of you may not know is where that comes from.
I do enjoy a good controversy. My favorite movies growing up were always the ones about the little guy, dishing it to Big Brother. Nothing but a simple truth and a great cause that he (or she) stood in solitude, while trying not to get run over by the machine that would bury that truth.
Movies as old as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Scandal Sheet...to more modern ones like Absence of Malice and Erin Brokovich. But the one that really got me. The one that made me say, "Yeah, I want to do that for a living!" was Gregory Peck playing an undercover reporter trying to root out anti-semitism in 1940's Connecticut. "A Gentleman's Agreement" was a show I didn't even see coming. It hit me square between the eyes and told me a story I didn't even know was important to me. For it was completely unjust! We of course were told about the Anti-Semitism of the Nazis in school and what that led to, but to see it on our soil... Even after the war! Well, this was important work! I wanted to do this work!
I went to school the following week and told my English teacher (who was also in charge of journalism) I wanted to do my own story for the school paper. She told me I had to be part of the newspaper staff and asked did I even know the first thing about journalism? I didn't but told her I would take care of that before the end of the day.
That day for lunch I went to the school counselors office, dropped a metal shop class I had for the second part of the year and added Journalism I.
I then took a copy of that registry back to my English teacher and let her know I was ready to write that article (as the second semester was only two weeks away). She shook her head and smiled and asked me why it meant so much to me? I answered "because I just want to make a difference".
See our school had no lights on its football field and I had already stumbled onto the reason why. Long standing football coach Dangerfield had no interest in coaching night games, yet most parents couldn't make it to games that were happening at 4:00, literally right after school ended and an hour before most self-respecting adults would even be off of work, let alone to their kid's game. Surely it would be better for receipts for the school too. They'd sell more tickets with later games, attendance would be higher. More of the student body would be likely to come. . . But I digress.
Yes, putting lights on our football field wasn't a big deal in comparison with these bigger stories I mention above, but I do feel I made a difference.
That story ran in the Spring of 1987. By 1990 Brighton High School no longer played football games in the afternoon. They were played under the Friday night lights.
Maybe it was just time. But I'd like to think, I had at least a small hand in that happening.
So... 9/11. I had a larger point to make here and 9/11 wasn't even it. It was a vehicle I was going to use to drive you to my point. Because if 9/11 didn't go down the way the government told us it did, who is going to tell you different? The media? Right. They are as few as a handful of corporate mouthpieces nowadays and those little guys I talked about above, taking on the mammoth machines with their little piece of the truth. Even where good reporters exist, the majority of them have been silenced by the machines they are now slaves to. That is why the "Fake-News" media is such an easy argument to level against the Corporate News Network and its ilk. When they have been caught in the past faking stories in front of green screens and coaching bad dramatic performances out of paid actors ("they took the babies out of the incubators and laid them on the floor..."), those little guys have had to buck the system and start on the outside and find their audience however they could. Public access television was an early answer to this, later it became the internet reporters and the organizations that grew up around them.
These "conspiracy theorists" as the mainstream media would tell you have emerged from the shadows to actually gain access to the White House Press Room under the current administration, whether you are talking the Huffington Post and Politico, or World Net Daily and Infowars, the landscape has definitely changed as to where the public might be able to get their news.
As someone who went to school to learn his craft, I dismissed these "clowns" initially, like most have as political grand-standers. Yellow Journalism dogs with their sensational stories written just to get you to tune in. . . Until I realized at the core of their stories, many of these independents were still getting it done right. The who, what, when, where, why and how were all being addressed and sourced. One only had to follow the article to the sources addressed to find a deeper rabbit hole. . . Oh my God!
When I had the epiphany that this was real journalism and the yellow journalism was the left-right paradigm that they were trying to entrap me into each day, infuriating me with stories about how the dirty Democrats did this, why those scoundrel Republicans did that! Holy shit! And 9 out of 10 people follow this stuff like it even matters?!?!
The real news was right under my nose the whole time.
So was 9/11 an inside job? You bet your sweet ass it was! And 3,000 of my fellow Americans died that day in a conspiracy that maybe leads back to the Saudis, or the Israelis or even factions within our own government. I don't know the answers. That is why I crusade for a second independent investigation! 3,000 of my deceased countrymen deserve to know the truth of what they died for!
But again, I'm not here to get hung up in that argument. Some stories run even deeper. I watched a movie tonight. An amazing movie that again, like Gregory Peck... I didn't see coming.
With a clear anti-Christian bias in the media, I have ignored this movie thinking the story behind it (which I ignored as well, when it originally came out) was going to be trumped up bullshit, just to slander the Catholic Church.
The movie I speak of is "Spotlight" and the scandal I speak of is one that has run so much deeper than 9/11. It doesn't merely go back 10-15 years. It goes back hundreds.
For hundreds of years the Catholic Church buried its Priests "indiscretions" with child molestation as if it wasn't happening and with the shame of the victim and the victim's family, it was easy enough just to write the priest off as a "bad apple" and move him to another parish where the cycle could repeat.
I didn't want this story to be true, but now that I have seen this movie, it was truly an important piece of work. Not just the movie. But again, the work of these journalists. And if I have a point to leave you with its this: Even as the Boston Globe put its case together against the Goliath sized Catholic Church, it wasn't even their own journalists that made the story happen. It was those "crazy, one-horse conspiracy theorists" at the small town papers. It was these town cryers that forced the courts to release sealed documents that finally blew the lid off the case. See this movie. Its awesome. But don't forget, anyone that can come up with a who, what, when, where, why and how, with a source to back them, deserves your attention. Because the truth is often hidden in plain sight. Its up to us to listen for it.