“To fail here is not mere life or death. It is that we become as him; that we henceforth become foul things of the night like him – without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love.”

- Mina Harker’s Journal, 30 September

Bram Stoker penned this warning in his classic “Dracula” through his protagonist Dr. Van Helsing, articulating a deep set fear beyond personal injury to becoming one of the un-dead himself. In the presence of the vampire the living are subject to a parasitic trance, a paralysis of the will held in grotesque sway while their life blood is drained. It was this immobility Van Helsing warned against as the greatest danger in opposing the ghoul.

Fiction allows for a dramatization we’re reluctant to perceive or acknowledge with the rational portion of our mind. We satirize the ignorance and callousness of our President and his minions but hesitate before the certain knowledge of what he is and what our nation is becoming through his poisonous leadership.

Like Dracula’s victims we appear immobilized by the horror of war and continued military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. We are saturated by mass information with few exceptions that spread the propaganda of terror and fear while within the herd we take off our shoes and empty our suitcases before a coterie of Wackenhut pseudo cops.

The corporate media project further war in the Middle East as if it were the decision of our personal Caligula beyond the will of the people while every high office in the land has been corrupted.

The vice president and the president’s family directly profit from the war machine they loosed upon the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Justice Department has been reduced to a contemptible charade by an ignoble and shameless puppet of the presidentcondones torture.

The Senate and House of Representatives have proved unable or unwilling to put a stop to the horror of foreign wars while 191 Congressmen profit from them even though ending the war in Iraq was the clear and overwhelming mandate of the recent national elections.

Top ranking military officers with honor and conscience are forcibly removed under the cover of resignation, from General Shinseki who correctly predicted the cost of invading Iraq to General Taguba who exposed Abu Graib, from Admiral Fallon who opposed the Neocon madness of nuclear war against Iran and spoke bluntly about media hero David Petraeus to most recently Capt. Michael P. McNellis, Commander Of Carrier Air Wing 5 of The Kitty Hawk, removed because men of conscience will not be tolerated by the current regime.

The candidates in our presidential primaries are competing to see who can out-fawn their competition in regard to the Israel lobby even though studies have clearly shown that the American Jewish population is largely opposed to the Bush Neocon agenda.

vpdonhynes.blogspot.com/2008/05/driving-stake-to-fail-here-is-not-mere.html

Citizen paralysis is underscored by the cowardice of our elected officials, by repulsion at the militarism we are funding abroad and the violence of poverty our government’s outrageous war spending is causing in our own nation.

Psychological analyses demonstrate that on average only 15-17% of a population are willing to think independently, to challenge the herd mentality of the mass. This may appear a depressing statistic but in fact it enforces the crucial responsibility of the minority to refuse to succumb to the sickening dread of the population at large and to continue to affirm and expand the moral importance of individual freedom of conscience and action.

It is the irony of the vampire’s fate as Stoker describes it to rely on the goodness and virtue of the soil within the coffin to which he retreats at daybreak. The strategy of those who must end his bloodlust is not to fall prey to his sub-human means and methods but to re-sanctify the soil of his resting place.

The universe is a sacred and holy creation and though we find our culture in this dark night of the soul it is our duty to re-sanctify what has been despoiled. President Carter and his wife Rosalynn have been at least as effective as citizen advocates for peace and justice as their tenure in the White House afforded. We each have that same individual power and sovereignty, the authority and responsibility to drive a stake into the heart of the creature that is sucking the life from our nation and unhinge the door from the odious tomb threatening our future.

We can articulate the good road for our children and grandchildren and reaffirm this truth for our fellows. We can clearly and unequivocally affirm the road of peace, the ethic of compassion, the practice of forgiveness, the central way of enlightenment and evolution. Here lies the dawn of understanding beyond the night of the un-dead.

“It is the only thing we can do, Klaas, I see no alternative, each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.”

- Etty Hillesum quoted in The Open Road now replaced by a zealot who