“What dismays me, however, is that I see more action on the part of the system then on the part of the people”, Kevin Galalae
Days 29-34 updates on Kevin Galalae’s Vatican Hunger Strike –
Hunger Strike At The Vatican: Kevin Galalae Needs Your Help
Activist Kevin Galalae: Vatican Hunger Strike Update (VIDEOS)
Activist Kevin Galalae: Vatican Hunger Strike Update (Part Two)
Activist Kevin Galalae: Vatican Hunger Strike Update (Part Three)
Vatican Hunger Strike Timeline
Day 29 (May, 18)
It is day 29 of my hunger strike and I have reached that precious state of being that straddles the material and the spiritual worlds. I describe it as being physically weakened, mentally strengthened and spiritually in a state of grace. It is a delicate balance that is as beautiful and fragile as a blooming orchid.
My health is great today and I have no pains and aches to report whatsoever. I am light on my feet and as limber as a cat due to my diminishing weight. And speaking of my weight, I have lost another 100 grams since yesterday, which puts me at 76.7 Kg or 169 pounds and 1 ounce. This brings my total weight loss to date to 15.8 Kg or 34 pounds and 13 ounces. My body has therefore shrunk by 17.1 % and has done so by losing an average of 564 grams or 19.9 ounces a day.
I walked the 8 Km to St. Peter’s and back for my daily prayer in record time and had the deepest meditation yet during my prayer. The square was relatively quiet and bathed in sunlight. Afterwards I spent a few minutes sun gazing and recharging my batteries, so to say.
The Vatican and the UN are working at a frenetic pace behind the scenes to change course. Pope Francis met with the heads of UN agencies here in Rome on May 9, which is no coincidence and a direct result of my hunger strike. The Vatican announced a few days ago that it will change its policy on the family and the UN announced around the same time that it will rewrite its Millennium Development Goals. This is diplomatic speak for ‘we have hit a wall and are changing course’. Guess what people, that wall is us!
What dismays me, however, is that I see more action on the part of the system then on the part of the people. To change this I will now make concrete suggestions to those of you who are paying attention and want to help and be effective. It has become painfully obvious to me that we are just threading water and getting nowhere.
Let us channel our efforts towards constructive ends as follows:
Share my daily updates to five of your connections directly on their timeline rather than in groups and ask them to do the same. This is the only way to get this viral. If you just post once on your own timeline it will stay in our small circle of supporters and the circle will not expand.
Send my daily updates to the Vatican press. Here they are again:
VATICAN PRESS OFFICE and VATICAN RADIO
Vatican Radio: indiano@vatiradio.va; vati230@vatiradio.va; informatica@vatiradio.va
Programa Espanol: espanol@vatiradio.va
Hispano Americano: hispano@vatiradio.va
Relaciones para América Latina y el Caribe:latam@vatiradio.va
Programa Brasileiro:brasil@vatiradio.va
Programa Português: porto@vatiradio.va
French programme: francafr@vatiradio.va; francafr@radiovat.va
German programme: deutsch@vatiradio.va
English programme: englishpr@vatiradio.va; english@vatiradio.va; engafrica@vatiradio.va
INDIA: india@vatiradio.va
Malayalam programme: malayalam@vatiradio.va
Hindi programme: hindi@vatiradio.va
Urdu programme: urdu@vatiradio.va Tamil programme: tamil@vatiradio.va English programme: engindia@vatiradio.va
THE VATICAN TELEVISION CENTER ctv@ctv.va (Office) ctvteca@ctv.va (Video-Archive)
Last but not least, email my hunger strike timeline to a couple of media outlets every day. This is the link to it: . If you are at a loss where to find the media in your country, use my Global Media Directory, which has 810 pages of emails to media people in countries across the world:
This is the only way to break through the walls of silence and the media blackout erected by the system.
We have the opportunity to make history rather continue to be its victims. But this opportunity comes with responsibilities and requires that people abandon their fears and prejudices and indifference and apathy and dependence on a system that is so desperately overwrought that its architects have decided to get rid of us on the sly rather than educate and empower us.
Few, however, avail themselves of this unique and historic opportunity and until such time as our governments and the international community see that more of us actually seize the day they cannot and will not change course because they will feel that we have not reached the critical mass necessary to shape public policy and become masters of our own society and will therefore be forced to continue with the existing methods.
This being the case, I urge people to rise from their slumber and speak up. The reality is ugly but its potential is beautiful. This is the time to stand up and be counted. Your necks are on the line so act accordingly. Your children’s lives are on the line so protect your flesh and blood because they have no one else to protect them. And your genetic lines are on the line, not to mention your rights and liberties, so fight now or be co-responsible for their annihilation.
Our governments will not save us. They are waiting for us to save them. So let’s do it.
Day 30 (May, 19)
It has now been a whole month since I began my hunger strike at the Vatican’s doorsteps and Pope Francis has yet to say a single word or acknowledge my presence. If anyone had a doubt about the Holy See’s involvement in the depopulation genocide prior to my arrival here, I believe it is fair to say that all doubts have been dispelled by the Vatican’s self-indicting silence.
People are asking me why do I starve for the Vatican when Pope Francis and the cardinals are not capable or willing to show compassion for our children and justice for our world? It is not the Vatican I starve for, but for the love of my children and of my fellow man; for the sake of peace and out of respect for the efforts of countless generations who have toiled and bled and struggled to leave us a better world then they inherited. I starve in a desperate attempt to prevent history’s greatest purge, which those who govern us seem bent on causing. Fall not for their deception and manipulations and prepare to bring to justice the very people who are in control of our society at all levels unless they change course. If they indeed want a war we will give them a war, but this time it is their heads that will roll in the gutters not ours.
Some of you also wonder how I can go without food for so long and still function let alone work 18 hours a day. Although I have given an explanation for this peculiar ability in my book “Killing Us Softly: The Global Depopulation Policy” it is worthwhile to repeat here for those who lack the time or the inclination to read a book. The epiphany that gave me the strength to endure the unendurable took place in the Palau Islands in 2003 on a deserted island on the seventh and last night of a solitary kayaking adventure in that paradise in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. To this day it remains too powerful and moving an event for me to butcher it with a simple summary or even revisit so I will instead quote my original description.
Sunset finds me gathering beach wood, of which there is plenty lying around, bone-dry and fire-ready. Before long the orange glow of a crackling bonfire sends forth its unpartisan warmth and jubilant flames jump merrily into the night sky. The beach is caressed by the fugacious tatters of flames and the ocean is touched by the stealthy projections of stars.
The water around me no longer gurgles and splashes as it did by the alcove where it got caught under the cavity of rock below. Now it ripples and murmurs from three sides ever so gently on its encounter with the soft and smooth sand where it washes ashore in shy wavelets.
In the tent, as I lie on my back stretching, giving my poor spine a break from bending over the journal and writing, I can smell the musty, distinct odor of overused and underwashed sheets. In search of better air I slide half my body outside the tent and look skyward. Until now I, like everyone else living under the rules of human civilization, have been defrauded of plenitude, of the multispectral inheritance of life, for only when we become single faceted are we any good for society and can conform and submit to its intelligence. Here, in the lap of nature, here, at the end of the world, I no longer long for plenitude. Here, I am whole.
There is a panoply of stars up there, magnificent to behold, but still no moon to be seen. It hangs so low on the horizon in the northern sky that I can discern its hallow over the eclipsed ridges of distant islands, but not the moon itself. It is strange to have such a bright and star-filled night sky, yet moonless. Just as odd is the realization that true joy is not possible without hardship. I fall asleep looking up and probing in.
***
He appears inside the tent; no, closer, inside my head, inside my soul, like a slender angel of light, like a sudden electric shock. I am startled, blinded, frightened. His hands, more elongated and younger than I remember them, are crossed in an attitude of pious repose or mute prayer while the index fingers are barely touching his lips, as one absorbed in silent contemplation. (This apparition, you must understand, was instantaneous, without admonition, warnings, portends.) There is light all around him. He is light and love and emanates both love and light with an unbearable luminosity of being and then his eyes fall on me, my father’s kind eyes are unraveling the depths of my soul with the ease of unfolding a scroll and penetrates to the very core of my being, seeing all I had not seen, not wanted to see or pretended not to see. He plunges his gaze into my very nature to become origin of my nature. The light that envelops him and which is enveloped in him leaps into me and thereafter sustains itself. Light, divine light – as all light is; love, divine love – as all love is; now concentrate their rays and waves of lovelight into a single mirror to etch itself with its entire code of truth, its infinite entirety and not just the essence into my fragile soul, which, being of flesh and blood, can sustain the cataclysmic force of impact for only a fraction of a second; a fraction of a second that threatens to disintegrate me. It is all too quick, instantaneous; too painful, but of an unknown and unqualifiable pain; and too ecstatic to either comprehend or quantify. All I can do, all I have time to do, all I have the strength to do is to react instinctively, irrationally, and instantaneously by jumping up and running out of the tent in one impossibly brisk and fluid motion, lightning fast, liquidly fluid, unhindered-by-anatomy-fast and then just as suddenly, just as uncontrollably, just as frighteningly to burst into tears and weep like an infant in an instant. I emerge from sleep not as from a viscous hologram or visceral hallucination, but as from the clearest of realities; so much so that the fantastic nightscape I now see with my opened and astounded eyes strikes me as being a delirious dream now that I’m awake. Above me the sky is as unperturbed and star-filled as when I fell asleep. Wherever I turn I am surrounded by spectacular beauty – beauty beyond words and beyond the possible – but the greatest beauty of all resides within me. On the outside I’m tense, agitated, incredulous, and I tremble, but inside there is peace and calm and quietude of the kind I have never known before; peace so powerful that it tears me apart like war, like shrapnel; pain so sharp that it satisfies like pleasure, like water; insight so deep that it confuses like falsehood, like betrayal; tranquility so complete that it equals furor, and chaos. I shiver like a leaf, I burn like a flame, I shiver and burn with soul-rending pain, the pain of love. I am moved to the core, which has melted and has been reconstituted. I weep for my father, overwhelmed by the love with which he touched me, which he gave me, which he instilled in me. All that pure love in all its immensity, in all its eminence, welled up and now released, lost and now found, given and taken and homegrown now overflows me like a river in spring. I am the wellspring and the world is my delta. I am in the limelight of lovelight under the starlight and it is all unbearably heavy, unbearably light, unbearably freeing, unbearably trapping, unbearably bearable is the unbearable light. I spill over with love: the love of my father, the love of a friend, the love of a lover, the love of a child; love, pure love, love indescribable and unclassifiable love; love gained, love lost, love altered, love unrecognized; omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent love. Love so pure and all pervasive it clarifies its object and its subject, it clarifies what I am made of, made from, and made for. It clarifies what sustains me and what sustains all and everything. Love so strong it calls forth longing for my beautiful father. I look to the stars for him and call him back. I want to know why? Why he came to me from the beyond? Why, father, why? What is the message? What is the meaning? I look at the islands in the starlight and at the sea in the moonlight, but find him nowhere save for inside of me, in the lovelight. I put my arms around me and hold him, hold the piece in me that is from him; so much in me is from him, so much in me is him. And the longing subsides in love and in tears only to be jolted anew by the source-less intimation: live on love alone, from a soundless voice resounding in the fiber of my being. Have I heard right? Have I even heard it? Have I understood right? I want confirmation. I need validation. I ask out loud for verification! I scream into the night sky for authentication!! I am desperate for substantiation!!! And then the words, the same words, the same admonition, live on love alone, live on love alone…
Live on love alone.
…somehow (to my consternation, to my dismay, to my incomprehension) acquire material form, body, substance, as a mercurial incarnation of sorts, concrete yet incorporeal, palpable yet without definition, tangible yet without proof and without trace save for the meaning that is communicated to me with words yet without words, but without doubt or ambiguity, mint-fresh and bell-clear. I understand, but I don’t understand. I hear and see the message, but I fail to comprehend. How am I to ‘live on love alone’? How? Is it literal or merely figurative? Is love to be my guiding principle or my sustenance? I fall on my knees and weep, and weep, and weep. Because I now know, I know, I know. I know what I must do and I am afraid. I am alone. I am human. I am of flesh and blood. I am a mortal and I’ve been told to be divine. I rise from the stirred sand mortally divine, divinely mortal.
I have been surprised in a state of purity – having been purified by travails, isolation, fasting – and have been transported to a higher state of purity. I am too moved, too alive, too stirred to the core and too transformed to go back to sleep, too transformed to go back to life. Instead, I slide inside the kayak naked as the night and paddle into the open to witness the sunrise without the obstruction of land, without obstructions of any kind; wanting to prolongue the state of transcendence and the feeling of exaltation, wanting to keep open the door to that “other world.” The other world being the truth of this world. I watch the day being born from a sea of tranquility and with a heart of serenity.
From the hush of the night rises a silent sun to bring forth a soundless day over a mute horizon and into my quiet soul. From the blueness of night rises an orange sun to bring forth a yellow day over a crimson horizon and into my light-flooded soul. From the coolness of night rises a hot sun to bring forth a fresh day over a crisp horizon and into my consecrated soul.
The day finds me naked in the kayak, staring at the rising ring of fire with dried tears in my eyes. It is a day like no other and a perfect image of the state of my being, as though nature is the reflection of my soul, or its allegory; the moment in which to define myself against an entire universe.
Today, the landscape is at my mercy and I am merciful. And the seascape is benign for I am benevolent. The air is breathless and the water immovable and time stands still because I ordain it. I am breathless and immovable because time has ordained it when it stood still. Nature is my meditation and I am its premeditation. Neither one subordinates the other in its psychology, in its reach. My text and nature’s are verbally identical and so the end result is irrefutable, indubitable truth: knowledge without antecedents. The day is spurned by the spontaneous alliance and subliminal convergence of chance, nature’s and mine, which begot an analogue world of un-digital beauty, the pure nonsense and pure wisdom of nature, the chaos and the order. Swept along by the inertia of our arrested fantasies, I feel solitaire yet accompanied, accompanied in solitude. I have crossed oceans of time to find this moment or to be found by this moment. In a sense I no longer know where I end and the ocean begins, where time ends and I begin.
It is this otherworldly and inexplicable experience that has given me the strength to go without food for weeks and even months at a time and has endowed me with the resolve to go against the grain and against the entire international system, which is tantamount to going against the world.
And it is this same source that I will draw upon to persuade the world to change course, just as I was asked to do in a second epiphany that I will describe in tomorrow’s update since it is almost midnight and I am too tired to continue writing.
God does work in mysterious ways, even on an agnostic like me.
Day 31 (May, 20)
MISSION POSSIBLE
It is DAY 31 of my hunger strike and I now weigh 76.5 Kg or 168 pounds and 10 ounces. We have secured funding for two more weeks of hunger strike and I have finished sending my letter to 218 cardinals after spending two days mining the internet for their emails. (Editor’s Note: Please donate .)
I continue to be in great shape but am of course somewhat physically weakened and as a result felt a little dizzy walking to St. Peter’s and back today, especially since I picked up the pace to keep warm on this cloudy and somewhat cool afternoon.
Yesterday, I described my first epiphany, which gave me the strength to endure the trials and tribulations of the past five years and the privations of this and previous hunger strikes. Today, I will recount my second epiphany, which happened in the south of Brazil at the stunningly beautiful and gargantuan Iguaçu Fallsa few months after the first, but during the same one-year journey around the world.
I would have liked to let my diary describe it, as I lack the right words now, but all my property, including my intellectual property and the book I wrote at the end of my journey describing this event, has been confiscated by the Canadian authorities and never returned to me.
While the first epiphany gave me the strength to endure the trials to come, the second gave me an inkling of what I was expected to do. It happened on a clear night as I walked along the gorge of the river mesmerized by the sublime spectacle of a dozen gigantic waterfalls. The mist rose into the night sky and formed a rainbow in the moonlight, a phenomenon I have never seen before or since. In watching the churning river, deafened by the roar, I was struck by an insight that came to me with the same force and clarity as the tumble of the immense volume of water before me: that I must “be the drop of water that changes the course of the river”. The message and the mission were unmistakeably clear and they came with a severe warning, namely that if I lack the courage to pursue it to the end I will be denied the joy of being by the side of my two children. The mystery is that at that time my two boys, Ben and Oliver, had not been born and I was still single. I don’t know how to explain this and I have long given up trying, other then to resign myself to the time honoured adage that God works in mysterious ways. But despite the lack of logic, I took the warning to heart since I was allowed to feel, if only for an instant, the searing pain of the loss to come.
I am not a religious man, but I cannot deny the spiritual nature of these two epiphanies, the only such events I have ever experienced. They altered the core of my being and there is only one explanation. God spoke to me.
For the next five years, my life unfolded without any events of public interest. Despite my epiphanies, I was not called upon to change the course of history. I married and had two children. In 2009, a year before the birth of my second son, however, I was expelled from Oxford University where I attended an online course in political philosophy. The purported reason for my expulsion was ‘breach of netiquette’, thus of online etiquette, a poor excuse to justify Oxford’s brazen violation of freedom of speech, thought and conscience in the name of a national program of surveillance and censorship of the academic environment imposed on British universities by CONTEST, Britain’s strategy for combatting terrorism and radicalization.
And that is how my odyssey into geopolitical affairs of the highest order began. Those of you who would like to read about my ensuing battles can do so by downloading a free copy of my book “Hunger Strike: Defending Freedom of Speech, Thought and Conscience in Education”:
To make a long story short, I shut down that program of surveillenace and censorship and did so single-handedly by hitting the system where it hurts, its ability to keep secrets. In retaliation, however, I was arrested, separated from my children, thrown out of my own home, saddled with false charges, cut off from my own bank account, thrown pennyless into the street, and all my property, including my intellectual property was taken away from me and never returned. When the Canadian authorities attempted to arrest me for the fifth time, for refusing to stop exposing the perversion of the rule of law and of our democracies, I went into exile by crossing into the US clandestinely in the middle of the night. I shall describe this adventure in tomorrow’s update.
From my exile in Florida, I hit back even harder by uncovering and exposing the Global Depopulation Policy in my book “Water, Salt, Milk: Killing Our Unborn Children”, which everyone can have for free:
Within days of releasing it online, President Obama announced that water fluoridation levels across the US will be lowered effective immediately from 1.5 PPM to 0.5 PPM, which is in direct response to research I quote in my book that shows these lower levels to be far less damaging on the human body. This was my second victory shaping national policy and once again in a foreign country and not on Canadian soil.
Armed with this new and deadly knowledge I returned to Canada to be arrested at the border so I could work the system from within and give it cancer right inside its belly, which is exactly what I did. I was released after nine months of pre-trial detention (on a motion for stay of proceedings on the grounds of non-disclosure), time during which the Canadian government tried to break me morally, psychologically and physically, but instead had to concede defeat – on the day the trial was supposed to start, but that of course everyone knew could never take place since all charges were invented and no court in the world would touch me, including the international courts.
Within ten days of my release from jail, I published “Killing Us Softly: Causes and Consequences of the Global Depopulation Policy”, a book I wrote entirely while in detention and therefore in a complete vaccum of information and that, like everything else I have written, I provide to the world free of cost:
For the next six months, which is also the time that precedes the beginning of my hunger strike here in Italy, I formed a politicl party and issued its manifesto, knowing that sooner or later the existing system will have to be replaced by a new one that is superior and in touch with today’s realities:
During this time, however, I channeled most of my efforts on fighting the system on three legal fronts – civil, criminal and family – to show its corruption and incompetence and have represented myself, since no Canadian lawyer has the courage or integrity to come anywhere near my case. Within the next year, I will publish a scathing book on the national and internation legal and political system – if I survive this hunger strike, that is – a book that will be entitled “Structural Violence: Personal Responsibility in National and International Organs”.
During these last six months I have also written extensively on the true nature of the New World Order and its central axis, the globalization/depopulation agenda, and on how the current international order needs to be changed and can be changed. My work has received recognition from policy makers and diplomats from across the world, which is why it is published by “Diplomacy and Foreign Affairs”. I need two or three months to complete it, at which point I will publish it in book form under the title “Survival or Extinction”. Those of you who want to know what the future looks like can get an idea by reading my “OM Principles”, which are available in eighth languages:
The reason I am still alive is because I have gained the respect of both sides, our policy makers and the people. This puts me in a unique and extraordinarily privileged position in the world today, as I am the only person who has a say, albeit yet to be publicly acknowledged, in shaping global policy, while also being the only person in the world who can close the destructive rift between the top and bottom of society and who can do so across culture and religions.
To accomplish this mammoth task I need to compel our leaders, both religious and secular, to find the courage to come out and tell us the truth; and I also need to empower and inspire you, the people, to find the courage to face the facts and to fight for your world and for your children.
And that is why I am on hunger strike.
To my dismay, our leaders have been far more receptive and responsive to my efforts and sacrifices then the people, who, for the most part continue to sit passively on the sidelines in the hope that a miracle will happen.
But if we, the people do not come out in full force and make ourselves heard, those who govern us will rightfully conclude that we are neither ready nor willing to assume responsibility for the wellbeing of the planet and of human civilization and will have no choice but to continue to eliminate the vast majority of us through covert chemical, biological and bacteriological methods until all the dead weight of ignorance, apathy and indifference is rid of and the world can be inherited by those who have their eyes open and who are willing to do their part.
It is that simple.
The picture I have attached to this update is an apt analogy of the situation we face, for the system we now have and need to change is based on deception and lies, so that difficult things can be done in secret by imposition rather than openly by informed consent. Once the secrecy and the deception are removed the system will collapse just as the levitating gypsy will collapse once the metal prop that sustains his weight is uncovered and removed.
But if the system collapses, we will all be buried, which is why we must be ready to prop it with our wisdom and sacrifices as soon as the truth is revealed and we must shoulder the weight now shouldered by the matrix of control.
Day 32 (May, 21)
FUGITIVE FROM INJUSTICE
It is DAY 32 of my hunger strike and I woke up feeling full of life and hope and excited to start the day. I have been entirely free of hunger and even cravings throughout the day and have managed to walk first to St. Peter’s and back for my daily prayer, which I did first thing in the morning, and then trudged through town the entire afternoon to find the right filming location, which ended up being the Palatino ruins. All in all I covered a whopping 30 Km. Yes, at times, I did feel dizzy, but never tired or weak. The human body truly is a marvel.
Our guardian angels have ensured that we paid the rent for the next two weeks and this took a load off my shoulders. Nick and I can now concentrate on the documentary and on enlightening the public while we wait for a response from Pope Francis. This also means that my hunger strike will be at least 45 days long, which is symbolically important because Jesus hungered in the wilderness for 40 days.
The scales show that I have lost 100 grams since yesterday and that means I now weigh 76.4 Kg or 168 pounds and 7 ounces. The total weight loss to date is 15.8 Kg or 34 pounds and 13 ounces. My body has therefore shrunk by 17.1% and has done so by losing an average of 510 grams or 18 ounces a day.
In yesterday’s update, I promised to tell you about my escape from Canada. It happened in February 2012, the coldest month of the year. In December, I had done a TV interview with Adam Bierman, the host of New Jersey Insider on Princeton TV, in which I discussed the covert program of surveillance and censorship I had uncovered in the UK. That interview is available online on Vimeo: .
Princeton TV then booked me for a second interview so I could name the politicians, judges, lawyers and doctors who framed me and then falsified medical records and court transcripts and committed perjury in order to get away with it. The second interview was canceled due to heavy pressure from Washington on Princeton TV, but I had my say nevertheless by publishing an article called “The Kingston Hillbillies” that was heavily censored for over a year but that is now freely available online:
In retaliation the Canadian authorities dropped all pretenses that I was arrested due to criminal code violations and sent an explicit warning through my then criminal lawyer, John Olver, that unless I “cease and desist speaking publicly about state secrets I would be arrested again and this time on new charges”. I told them to come get me because my rights and liberties are not negotiable and I will not abandon my children to fascists.
Desperate that they could not force me to remain quiet, the cops, lawyers and judges who had been coopted into committing conspiracy to prosecute and other serious criminal code violations that would earn them decades behind bars in a country where the rule of law exists, then resorted to issuing new recognizance conditions in my absence and behind closed doors, which is illegal, but they desperately needed in order to issue a new arrest warrant on the grounds that I had violated my bail. They did this on 17 January 2012 in a proceeding called a Show Cause Hearing that neither I nor my lawyer were told about, asked to attend, or informed of its outcome; all of which are serious violations of due process and of judicial conduct. More than this, the conditions they came up with would make the government of China blush with shame:
Condition 24:
“Not to be on the internet at all. Not to possess a computer, a cell phone or any device capable of accessing the internet. Not to be found in any internet café type place. Not to be found in a library without supervision to ensure you are not accessing the internet and that you not use any other persons computers to access the internet.”
Condition 25:
“No allowing others to access your facebook, wikispooks or Linkedin or other social network sites or any other site that you have access to or created including the checking of emails for purposes of attempting to communicate your beliefs via third parties.”
Armed with these new conditions that I was never informed about they then convinced a corrupt judge, of which Canada has no shortage, to issue an arrest warrant and on the evening of February 10, around 9PM, they sent a team of cops to arrest me.
Luckily I was not home, as I was dining with friends, and the cops were sent away emptyhanded by my sureties, the Tomaz family, who had bailed me out of jail a few months earlier. Immediately after the cops left, my friends called me on my cell phone and alerted me that they had come to arrest me.
With just the clothes on my back, $500 dollars of borrowed money in my pocket, and the tearful hugs and kisses of my friends, I began driving out of town intent on leaving the country, but with no definitive plans. The weather was miserable, bitter cold and snowy, which actually worked to my advantage as it blinded any road cameras and made visibility extremely poor.
To avoid being tracked I removed the battery from my cell phone as well as the SIM card and then shut off my global positioning system. I checked my gages to make sure I have enough gas and that everything is in order.
As I attempted to get on the highway, I discovered that every entrance had a police cruiser strategically located. I assumed they were waiting for me and altered course just in time and headed north of the city to use secondary roads. But the northern road had a roadblock, which I could see from a distance being night time, and once again I was forced to circumvent the cops, barely managing not to be noticed.
I drove east throughout the night, heading for Montreal, a distance of 640 KM on the most direct route, but nearly 900KM on the convoluted country roads I was forced to use. If I could have used the highway it would have taken me 7 hours but instead it took me 10 and I arrived in Montreal at dawn.
Before I knocked at the door of my childhood friends, who had recently immigrated from Romania to Canada, and who luckily live in Montreal, I waited an hour to make sure they are out of bed. They were shocked but happy to see me. I did not have to do much explaining since they were already familiar with my battles with the Canadian and British authorities. Within hours they emptied their bank accounts and gave me $1500 US in cash so I could flee the country and seek political asylum somewhere safe. We discussed Costa Rica and Switzerland as options. To reach Cost Rica I would have to cross into the US, without being noticed of course. But to get to Switzerland I would have to stowaway on a ship and survive a two week sea voyage without being detected. Both are possible but the first option is a lot easier.
Concerned that I would not have a decent meal for weeks to come, they fed me royally and showered me with love and attention. I thanked my lucky stars for having such extraordinary friends, both back home in Ayr and Waterloo and in Montreal, for had it not been for their help I may not have made it out of Canada alive or seen freedom again.
We decided to go to the house of our common friend to make sure I am not arrested at their house since the authorities knew of my friends and where they resided, as they had come to court a few months earlier to serve as secondary sureties in case the corrupt Kingston judges would try to deny me bail, as they had done previously on several occasions, by finding some invented fault with my sureties.
Just a hundred meters from the house, low and behold a police cruiser comes from the opposite direction and as soon as the cop sees my car he does a turnaround and starts coming after me. But as I watched him in the mirror, I veered to the left and out of his sight as soon as I saw the cruiser turn around and stepped on the gas and went on a wild ride through the quiet morning streets with the cop hot on my tail. To lose him I took as many turns as possible and then went at breakneck speed behind a small strip mall as soon as I was out of the cop’s sight. I then jumped out of car and abandoned it there, walking away from it as fast as I could without looking suspicious.
No sooner did I turn a couple of corners on foot that I spotted the same cop car driving slowly and looking on each side of the road for my car as well as eyeing the pedestrians. I walked swiftly out of sight, entered a building, came out a few minutes later and resumed my escape on foot. But the cruiser reappeared once again at snail’s pace. With nowhere to run this time I stooped to ask a lady a question so I would have an excuse to turn my back on the street and look like a local engaged in a friendly conversation with a neighbor. It worked.
I then crossed the street and headed towards a nearby depot for freight trains, but as I did that the cruiser showed up again and from the corner of my eye I could see the cop looking suspiciously in my direction. By then, however, I was already a good 50 meters away from the road and half-way into into the park that separated the road from the train yard.
As soon as the cruiser disappeared I jumped over the fence and into the train yard, then walked briskly to get out of sight and continued between the trains. A few hundred meters away I left the yard and went towards a large building that looked like a hopsital so I could hang out there until the coast was clear. I did just that for about an hour and then took the first bus downtown so I could buy a warm outdoor jacket, gloves, a backpack and then find a quiet place to think and plan.
After I did my purchases I sought refuge in a Catholic library and asked the clerk to give me guides on convents and monasteries in Quebec. I wrote down a few addresses and then pondered if I should lay low for a few days in such a place, but decided instead to wait for nightfall and try to get my car back, hoping the cops never found it.
As soon as the sun went down, I returned to the place where I had abandoned my Mercedes and looked from a safe distance to see if any cops lay in wait. Seeing none I took a deep breath and walked towards it, opened the door as quickly as I could and drove away slowly, while my heart raced faster than a bullet train.
Relieved to get my car back and not have to rely on public transportation, I made my way to the apartment where I was to go with my friends earlier in the day. I was again fed and encouraged to stay overnight so I could rest since I had not slept in 36 hours, but I insisted on continuing on my journey so I could take advantage of the cover of night.
Two hours into my drive and just before reaching Quebec City a blizzard came on in full force and made driving a serious challenge but also gave me the cover I needed to be unrecognizable by road cameras. Feeling safe I took to the highway and headed north towards the Gaspé Peninsula, a lonely and wild part of Canada beaten by fierce winds and ravaged by storms. Throughout my drive I thought about my children and dreaded the thought of getting further and further away from them. I fought my yearning for them and told myself to stay strong and not give in to emotions lest I should crumble under their weight and be unable to continue to fight for what is right and just, all the while tears ran down my cheeks in a never-ending stream.
I imagined myself holding Ben and Oliver in my arms again under the palm trees on the shore of a tropical beach in Costa Rica or Brazil. But I knew that years would pass before I could see my children again and tell them that I never left them, that they are always in my heart, and despite my absence they have always been in my heart.
Quebec turned into New Brunswick and night into day. The snow stopped and the ploughs appeared on the barren highways. Edmundston, Fredericton and then St. John’s, all strange cities, all far away from my children, all dreadfully cold and dead silent in the morning after the storm. But none as dreadful as the desolation in my heart and the devastation in my mind. None as ravaged as my soul.
I found myself a bed and breakfast in St. John’s since I could not stay at a hotel as they would have required a credit card and I knew I could not use plastic as long as I am a fugitive from injustice. Wasting no time, I headed for the port to see if any ships were sailing to Europe, but none were for days to come. This meant I would have to drive even further east, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, or try to find a place to cross clandestinely into the US between the border of the province of New Brunswick in Canada and the state of Maine in the US, which is just 100 Km to the east of the city of St. John’s. So I bought detailed maps and spent the rest of the day looking for the right topography and the easiest place to slip over the border undetected. The spot I settled on is the town of Saint Stephen on the Canadian side and the town of Calais on the American side, as they are facing each other and are separated only by a small river, which I could easily swim over if only I had one of my scuba diving suits with me.
Satisfied that I had found a way out of Canada I settled into my luxurious room and after a bath I closed the curtains and fell into a deep and troubled sleep. I rose with the sun and made it into Saint Stephen in about an hour, all the while looking over my shoulder to admire the deep blue hues of the Bay of Fundy, which is known for its high tides, the highest in the world in fact.
Once in Saint Stephen, I sought out the closest bed and breakfast to the border and checked in at the Blair House Heritage Inn, a lovely Victorian mansion, as Mugur Catalin, my first and middle name, but left out my last name just in case a police alert had been issued. I then went for a walk along the border to find the best bend in the river where I could swim or float over to the other side. It took me six hours of careful consideration to find the right spot, but I did, just a 30 minute walk from my bed and breakfast.
Next I went looking for either a boat or a diving suit but since Saint Stephen is a rather small town and has limited shopping and it was the middle of the winter I found neither a boat nor a diving suit. Instead I bought a self-inflatable camping bed for $75 and hoped it would suffice to see me safely to the other side.
The only problems remaining were what to do with the car and finding transportation to Florida, where my twin sister lives, once I made it to the other side. So I decided to ask the B&B owner, a gracious British gent, to keep my car in his backyard for a week as I was going into the US with friends, I told him. He agreed and, relieved that I had solved another logistical problem, I set out to make inquiries into public transportation, which proved to be more difficult than I thought. But in the end I found a transporter van that left every morning at 9AM from Calais to Bangor, where I could get on a Grey Hound bus. This meant I would have to kill four early morning hours, from 4 AM, when I intended to attempt my crossing, until 9AM, when the van left Calais. Finding a safe and unobtrusive place to stay off the street and out of sight of cops would be crucial to the success of my endeavor so I worked the phone and used local knowledge to see if anything was open in Calais so early in the morning. Luckily, American capitalism never sleeps and both McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts opened at 5 AM.
With all problems solved, I granted myself a good meal and then waited for the night, hoping also for early morning fog, which is a rather common occurrence in that coastal area. But the fog did not come and, to make matters worse, the thermometer dropped to a bone-chilling -25 degrees Celsius (-13 degrees Fahrenheit). Concerned, I went walking along the river in the late evening to see if it froze and to my disappointment I found that ice boulders had formed that flowed down the middle of the river. I nevertheless decided to attempt to cross.
Before going to bed, I put everything I could not carry into my car and bid goodbye to my last worldly possession that the government of Canada had not taken away from me, my Mercedes ML 430.
The adrenaline kept me awake all night and at 4AM I started walking to my designated spot. I slipped down the bank and inflated my camping bed in the deadly silence. The river was still riddled with ice boulders in the middle part. I placed my backpack at the front and gingerly kneeled in the middle so I could paddle with my hands on both sides. Then I pushed away from the steep shore and dunked my hands in the freezing water. Within seconds they were frozen stiff and insensate. Then, towards the middle of the river, my floating bed capsized as soon as it hit the first ice blocks and I fell in. My heart stopped for a few seconds when the freezing water seeped through my heavy winter clothes and reached my skin. I gasped and struggled to stay afloat as the heavy garments and the current tried to pull me under. My boots came loose and both sank to the bottom of the river, but after managing to gasp for air through the pain and fear I set out towards the Canadian shore. Sheer will not physical strength helped me through the five minutes it took me to swim back to safety, all the while pushing my backpack ahead of me. But once I reached the steep embankment my hands were too frozen to grab onto the bushes that offered their branches. As I reached for them it felt as though my hands were sliced by knifes and I could not get a grip. I used my body to crawl and my teeth and hands and arms and will to somehow get ahold of something and make it out of the river. And I did.
Barefoot and drenched I crawled up the hill, my body convulsing with shivers and my teeth chattering so hard I thought they would shatter. I felt like I weighed a thousand pounds and had a hard time keeping my eyelids from freezing over my eyes. By the time I reached the B&B I was a walking icicle. I had left the door unlocked, just in case, and fumbled my way in and up the stairs as quietly as I could. Once inside my room, I ran a bath, undressed and immersed myself in the lukewarm water, which felt like a boiling cauldron of magma. But I bared the pain and tried to bring my core temperature back to normal. It took at least an hour and an hour more to get the blood back into my toes, three of which had turned dark blue and black. They did not recover their color for six months, but at least I did not lose any.
I spent the rest of the morning and a good part of the day drying my clothes. Once I looked and felt human again, I put on a smile and went downstairs to explain to my host that I would have to stay one more night as my friends had postponed the trip. With that out of the way, I went back to the mall to buy another inflatable bed since I had lost the first to the river.
Then I waited for the night and tried again and succeeded.
Day 33 (May, 22)
THE HUMAN CONDITION
It is DAY 33 of my hunger strike and I have used it to clear my head and to think idle thoughts. I did not start the day with this intention, but it turned out that way once I found myself unable to get inside St. Peter’s square for my daily prayer, due to the mass of worshippers assembled to receive Pope Francis’ blessings, which happens every Wednesday.
As I walked around the perimeter, trying fruitlessly to find a way in and shuffling through the maddening crowd, it dawned on me how choked with need the Church must feel and how impossible it is to find a quiet and peaceful moment, or make any progress whatsoever, or accomplish anything of value in such a hustle and bustle that only exhausts the body and stains the mind and drains the spirit.
What an apt analogy this suffocating mass of people, looking for salvation, for relief, for direction, for help, for mercy, for forgiveness, it is for the state of the world. The more is not always the merrier. There comes a point where a balance is destroyed between just enough to share the work and the fruits of our labors to being too many and getting in each other’s way and fighting for space and things and peace.
During my travels, and I have had many, as I have been to about one hundred countries and have twice journeyed around the world, I could not help but notice that the higher the population density the lower the quality of life and the greater the number of laws and rules and bylaws and regulations that curtail and control human conduct and individual freedom.
In Hong Kong, where the population density is amongst the highest in the world at 6,544 people per square kilometer (or 17,024 per square mile), people are forced to live in closet-sized apartments that most westerners would not be able to tolerate for a day let alone a lifetime. And in India, where resources are so overtaxed by its 1.1 billion people and life so devoid of luxuries, street children are rounded up by cruel gangs and mutilated so they can earn a “decent living” as beggars, since the cripple elicit more pity and therefore more alms. That is how desperate poverty, caused by overcrowding, dehumanizes people and how life becomes cheap and cheapened even further by the cruelty of those without scruples.
And history has even harsher lessons, as the Great Chinese Famine of 1958 to 1961 attests when 40 million people died of starvation and countless others survived only because they resorted to cannibalism on a scale unprecedented in the 20th century. Sure, one can argue about causes until the cows come home, but fact remains that such calamity could only have happened in one of the world’s most grossly overpopulated countries. To this day, China struggles with its burgeoning numbers, despite having a one-child policy since 1978.
I have been to these places and have seen the situation with my own eyes. When I lived in China in 2004 and in Thailand in 1996, I had to take a nap every afternoon because the pollution was so thick that I felt exhausted by midday. In Shanghai my eyes burned all the time and I had a pesky cough that I could not get rid of. My body struggled to cope with the filthy air.
One dares not think what the situation would have been like today had the one-child-policy not prevented the birth of 400 million Chinese. Just as one dares not countenance India’s desperation had the government not surgically sterilized 80% of the women by hook or by crook. Or to what violence westerners would have resorted had our governments not interfered with our ability to procreate by covert chemical and biological methods.
But while the Indian and the Chinese people are fully aware of their countries’ population control efforts, westerners, who consider themselves to be the most “advanced” people on earth, are utterly ignorant that they have been physiologically altered, denuded and enfeebled by their own freely elected governments and that this has been going on since the early 1950s.
Coming out of the illusion will not be easy.
These thoughts were going through my head as I walked for hours looking for a shampoo that I have come to like but did not find. And as these threads tugged at my heart, and I had just turned a corner and found myself facing the high walls of the Vatican City, I could scarce contain my tears of compassion for our human condition. And I understood also the plight of the Church, which for the past 2000 years has been the final sanctuary for the broken and the ill and the desperate and the lonely and the demented and the forgotten and the abandoned; only to find that the misery never ends, and the more the dedicated men and women of all faiths have tried to heal the world, the sicker it got.
Those in high places have contended with these problems since times immemorial, but it was not until 1945 that a decision was made to break the cycle of poverty that leads to misery and ends up in war. And since that year, policy makers and clergymen and military high brass and scientists and doctors and jurists have worked hand in glove to attack the problems of humanity at their core.
The reason I was able to uncover their methods and means is because I struggled to find an answer to the misery of the human condition from the solitude of my prison cell. And I arrived at the same conclusion as they did, namely that people outgrow resources and, as such, if you control the number of people you can prevent scarcity and thus pre-empt conflict. And so they declared war on human fertility so that man would never again have to fight man.
They have done the best they could without our help and behind our backs.
Now we must do our part…or else continue to be victims.
(Those of you who wondered how I fared once I made it into the US over the frigid waters of the Saint Croix River should know that I will continue my story tomorrow.)
Day 34 (May, 23)
THE LOVE OF FAMILY
It is DAY 34 of my hunger strike and still no word from Pope Francis or the Vatican, who have chosen to hide behind the 5th amendment in order to avoid self-incrimination. But for the Holy See to remain silent is more suspicious than any apologetic statement it might have made.
My health is excellent and the sensation of hunger is still under control. At times, cravings distract me from writing and interfere with my ability to focus, but I can still function normally. I anticipate the cravings to get worse especially now that seasonal fruits like peaches, cherries and watermelons are on wonderful display on the neighborhood vegetable stands and I have to walk by every day and abstain.
The scales show that I have lost 400 grams in the past two days and that means I now weigh 76 Kg or 167 pounds and 9 ounces. The total weight loss to date is 16.2 Kg or 35 pounds and 11 ounces. My body has therefore shrunk by 17.5% and has done so by losing an average of 476 grams or 16.8 ounces a day.
Let me now return to the narrative of my escape from Canada.
I have just set foot on the American side of the Saint Croix River and am trying to keep my boots dry while pulling the inflatable bed ashore and letting the air out so I can fold it and hide it under the snow. When that is done and my backpack is safely on my shoulders, I start walking up the hill and into the backyards of the good people of Calais, Maine.
The snow is deep and crisp and it crunches rather loudly every time I take a step, which makes me cringe with apprehension that the inhabitants of the two houses I am just walking between will open their windows and start screaming at me or, worse, alert the border guards that an illegal has entered the country from the north. But none of this happens and in a few more steps I am on the cleared sidewalk of a quiet residential street where I straiten my back and keep walking with feigned confidence and my head held high, just as though I were on my usual daily routine.
The state of Maine is an hour behind the Province of New Brunswick so although I started my clandestine crossing at 5 AM in Canada, I made it into the US at 4:30 AM, which means I actually gained half an hour. This detail is important and I considered it carefully when I decided upon the best time to make my escape because at 4AM people are in a deeper sleep than at 5AM. I could have conceivably floated across even earlier in the morning, but then I would have had to wait for McDonalds or Dunkin Donuts to open and I would have been suspiciously wondering the streets at that ungodly hour and drawn unwanted attention from the police.
Since I have lost my wallet in yesterday’s failed crossing attempt, when I fell in the river and my wallet like my boots sank to the bottom, I have to be particularly careful not to be stopped by the police and be asked for ID, of which I have only my car insurance papers because I had placed them in my backpack and therefore survived my near drowning. Just in case I am stopped I have folded my car insurance papers so that the name and address of my insurance agent shows and not mine, as I am uncertain whether or not Canada issued an international arrest warrant, which for the sake of precaution I must assume that it did.
Everything goes according to plan and by the time I reach the local McDonalds I find it open and I take a seat and treat myself to breakfast and coffee. I linger for as long as I can and three quarters of an hour later I go to the Dunkin Donuts shop and repeat the strategy, all the while watching the street and counting the police cars and border patrol pick-up trucks that went by, at least four. It is now 6:30 AM and I still have two and a half hours to kill before my bus departs and daylight is just starting to appear on the horizon, as the town is waking up.
I walk firmly and with purpose, as though I was a man with a destination, but in fact I am desperately looking for another place to hang out. It is now daylight and to my delight I stumble upon a mom and pop breakfast place that is worn and lovely and full of war veterans with sad and beaten faces; just the kind of place where I can spend an idle hour without drawing attention.
A few minutes before nine o’clock, I make my way to the parking lot where bus stops to pick up the Calais passengers. It is only when I am inside and take my seat that I begin to relax. And the further it moves away from the border, sneaking its way along the wooded coastline, the safer I feel. With a sigh of relief I lean back into my seat and enjoy the ride.
During the trip I take stock of my money, of which I only have $150, just enough to pay for the Grey Hound bus to Florida once I reach Bangor and to buy a couple of meals along the way. As I think about my dire situation I remember that my brother-in-laws’ parents live in Philadelphia and that I had had the pleasure of meeting them once, but I cannot for the life of me remember their