by T.P. Wilkinson
For me 2015 began with a suicide. I was on my way to Berlin with an early train just after midnight on 1 January. About 8 am our connecting train from Hamburg stopped approximately 25 kilometres down the line because someone had apparently gotten up early that morning and travelled to a point in the middle of nowhere to jump in front of it. Since our train was approximately 45 minutes late, this person not only had to contemplate his way to the tracks but wait perhaps impatiently for the wheeled engine of his demise to do its work.
Later, in June of this year persistent analyst and critic of US Empire, William (Bill) Blum wrote to his subscribers that he was taking a break from the Anti-Empire Report. Age and health were certainly relevant but Blum also wrote that he was:
Burnt out: After more than a dozen years of putting out the report, because US foreign policy keeps repeating itself, with the same lies, I too often find myself repeating the same ideas I’ve expressed before, often in more or less the same words.
I also feel the effect of day after day, year after year, intensively reading and seeing images of the human horrors; not just the horrors, but also the lies and the stupidity.
A month ago I learned quite by accident that one of the most precious people in my youth had already been dead three years. She had just turned 59. We had had no contact for thirty years. A year before she died I had managed to find her but the contact could not be restored before her death.