The Poisoned Well

Suppose that someone offered you a nice, tall glass of iced tea on a sweltering summer day. Just before you started to drink it, your host then told you, "I made it with water from our well, but there's a bit of a problem. The well has some arsenic in it, and the arsenic is in the water at the ratio of 75,000 ppm... or 7.5 parts per thousand. So don't drink too much of it."

Would you even drink ONE glass of it, at that concentration? Not likely. Two or three such glasses could kill you.

Now... suppose that you lived in a nation which was founded on the rights of the individual, and respect for those rights. Then, practically overnight, an evil cult formed from within the nation's population. A cult whose primary goals were the total revocation and dissolution of many of the nation's most cherished rights. A cult that was totally DEDICATED to the censorship of all art, literature, and communications which didn't live up to ITS criteria. A cult that sought the prohibition of love, itself, unless the partners could live up to THEIR very rigid and narrow standards. A cult that relegated the women of the nation to second-class citizen status by seeking to dominate and control what they could do with respect to their own bodies.

And... suppose that the cult perpetuated itself by pretending to be based upon the primary religious faith of the majority of the nation's people. A faith that is based on love and compassion. And a cult fashioned by its leaders into a counterfeit copy of the nation's religion. A counterfeit that seemed so realistic, that many people accepted it, just as they might accept well-counterfeited currency. But a cult whose true nature was such that its leaders subtly IGNORED the religion's beliefs in compassion, and instead substituted and taught repression. A cult whose leaders were so cunning as to be able to pull the wool over the eyes of countless people. Only the well-versed were able to see through it, but their resistance to it was manifested only by their ignoring it... as one would ignore any bee, unless it were to land upon him. Thus, the cult's recruits were akin to the recruits of all cults throughout history. The recruits were the gullible, and the weak-willed, in many cases. And the strong-willed who were using that as an outward defense against deep feelings of inferiority. And the cult was empowered by a means of communication to its followers that operated daily, thereby completely brainwashing its followers into a lemming-like state of passive compliance, from which few tried to escape. Programmed like automatons. A communications system having just one close parallel in modern literature: the telescreens in George Orwell's "1984."

That cult is very REAL. It is unique in the ways just described. Instead of telecreens, marching orders and propaganda are transmitted to its deceived masses daily, via a network of 1,300 radio stations, which are to some degree still Christian, but are largely controlled by the cult. It is unique in that it is -- unlike other cults -- a trans-denominational cult, which subverts members of churches from within, and keeps them there, where they can subvert others around them.

The cult began 20 years ago, but the concentration of its poison is approaching lethal levels. It has reached the level of 75,000 ppm (parts per million), and even if it never becomes any more toxic than that, it will KILL the freedoms and rights of America just as surely as repeated drinking of water containing that ratio of arsenic would kill a person. All the cult needs is a little bit more time... a few more laws... a few more court decisions like the one many of us saw on TV tonight (9-22-96), in the true docudrama, "Two Mothers for Zachary," in Virginia... and America will no longer be free. Nor, once that happens, is it ever likely to know freedom again. The poison will have KILLED liberty.

The RRR -- the Religious Radical Right cult -- will have established a theocracy that can no longer be resisted, and we'll have entered the sinister netherworld that is eerily previewed in Margaret Atwood's book, "The Handmaid's Tale." A world far more ghastly than even the one that Orwell imagined.

And it will be irrevocable... because we didn't fight the RRR while we still had the chance.

Written by Brad Nelson, of Xanadu Enterprises, P.O. Box 3007, Waterloo, Iowa 50707-0007 USA. Copyright © September, 1996. May be freely reproduced and distributed as long as no changes or deletions are made, and this statement is included.