We Can’t Let the Light Go Out

“Men do not learn when they believe they already know.”     —Barbara Ward

I added that quote to the signature line of my email long ago. I am still unsure about who Barbara Ward actually is or was: an author (probably), an artist, a diplomat. Who can say? Her words are the point: how can we let anything new into our minds if the gatekeeper rejects half of what knocks because “the paperwork is not in order”?

A little more than four years ago, I stumbled onto the Twitter feed of Sarah Ruth Ashcraft (certainly a name chosen for a specific reason) via a retweet by someone I follow. What I read in Sarah’s timeline made my mind click and whir, stutter and restart. Who was this person and how could what she was alleging possibly be true? The gatekeeper in my brain wanted to turn her away, but I said No and started following her account. Before I could turn around, I had learned more than I ever wanted to know (or dreamed was even real) about Satanic Ritual Abuse. Sarah’s feed was the door into a world I very much wish did not exist, but I’ve seen too much evidence from here, there, and everywhere to be able to put it in a box labeled Untrue (and ironically, when I thought back to disparate things I had read over the years, I realized that all this was not exactly new to me).

A book about Charles Manson; the untimely death of Nobel laureate Kary Mullis; an article on how Covid testing works that I just happened to catch before the link flew by in my Twitter feed; the tear-filled testimonies of nurses who watched patients die because they were knowingly given the wrong treatments; a documentary and a book about John F. Kennedy’s assassination; nearly 18 years of research into vaccines; a book on viruses; a 600-page tome on the lie that HIV causes AIDS; and sentence after sentence in books like Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, of all places! All of these have been like stones on a path through a dark wood, and there were times that I wanted to run back the way I came, but I could see the light ahead.

I still can.

So I keep on; I read and research and pray and do my teeny, tiny part to keep the darkness at bay. I’ve emailed, shared on social media, been shadowbanned, censored, abandoned by friends, and told I was crazy. I refused to put on the mask and will never roll up my sleeve. I’ve been kicked out of stores, and have learned to live without services I had been told were essential. None of that matters. I will use my voice while I can, because too many have had their voices (and more) ripped away.

“It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again. Morning always grows out of the darkness, though maybe not for the people who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind.”

― Rosemary Sutcliff, The Lantern Bearers