[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t turns out I’ve been a long, long time writing about mountebanks, liars in office, batterers, rapists, child molesters and other social vermin for whom this country has nearly always been a safe haven. And how close to heartbreaking it is to realize that in over forty years little has changed that might be considered salutary.
The societal spirochetes now nest comfortably in the highest offices of our land, our halls of justice, our churches, our police department, our schools. Over the years they’ve grown more than ever immune to our hypocritical leave-it-to-God supplications, bolder, more unconscionable, more in-your-face-arrogant—daily celebrating their successes with more murders, more corruption, more traitors in cassocks parading themselves on local TV.
Under their insidious influence what once was generally considered abhorrent is today normal. Amorality is the new morality. Everything is acceptable, depending on how freshly wrapped. And by whom!
The particularly horrifying truth hit me between the eyes this week as casually I perused some bound volumes of the STAR, created in the mid-eighties—when it had seemed to me that too many of our people were imprisoned in the gloom of ignorance; when much of what they had the right to know about state affairs was calculatedly denied them—for the sole purpose of “bringing the truth to light!”
Pursuit of the STAR’s goal had never been without risk, notwithstanding our advertised constitutional protections. How could it be otherwise when the nation’s law makers have nearly always been its chief law breakers, albeit in the dark? I have personally been threatened in diverse ways by our country’s most powerful, trusted citizens who had sworn to protect your right and mine to free speech and free association.
The STAR has been described by at least one prime minister as “a cancer on the body politic that must be excised out of existence.” Oh yes! Others have sought with the backing of public office to shut the paper down in the weeks preceding elections. As tough as has become the publishing industry, one government in particular did its utmost to make things still more difficult for the STAR to continue bringing the truth to light. Still we persevere.
All of the so-called hot-button issues now conveniently making headlines for rebels in need of a cause had over the years featured consistently as lead stories in the STAR. Some occupied the paper’s front page, to the declared discomfort of particularly short-sighted tourist boards: eight- and ten-year-old babies producing babies, unreported by those whose duty it was to report such crimes to the police. On at least three unforgettable occasions this newspaper exclusively covered instances when child molesters appeared before the courts, only to be left off the hook and ordered to “keep the peace for three months!”—whatever that meant. Who knows what happened to their little victims?
The STAR also reported in detail the local tradition that encourages the buying off (by the accused) of careless parents whose children, some not yet teens, had been raped and otherwise sexually ravaged.
We also wrote critically about yesteryear administrations that discerned little wrong with destroying the environment, randomly cutting down trees, redirecting the sea tides, and the murdering of unsuspecting endangered turtles as they deposited their eggs on our beaches in the dark of night.
And yes we wrote about official corruption, for which the STAR was attacked even by God’s special agents from their varnished pulpits. As I say, somehow we’ve survived. And stayed sane—until this week when it really hit home that there was much truth in Santayana’s “the more things change . . .” Oh, but recovery was swift. My sadness was soon replaced by the uplifting realization that within the pages of the STAR lie all the evidence that the plague now upon us was created and nurtured by our own collective hand; that we are paying the price for our continuing selfishness, our self-numbed sense of right and wrong—our realized collective ambition to buck the natural order of things, to turn off the light of truth. Nothing to gloat over, true. But it’s a great feeling to know we did what we set out to do and never permitted the enemies of truth to have their way. Indisputably, for a very long time we’ve been living a lie, with all the concomitant consequences, and in the coming weeks the STAR will provide the horrifying evidence!
