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Guy Schell's avatar

Damn, Sean! Deeply moving work you’ve done here! I cannot thank you enough for this.

I am writing a short review of -X-Rubicon: Crossing Life, Sex, Love, & Killing in CIA Proxy Wars: An indictment of US Citizens: ignorantia non excusat- with a sense of shame on my soul because a short review does not bestow the justice that this work and its creators deserve. A more detailed analysis will have to come later. In the interim period I have been telling others about the book and bought another copy for a friend who was interested in reading it.

This book stirred in me thoughts, feelings, and emotions that come from a re-awakened past. Rubicon and I are the same age but, I write with caution when I compare our lives. Though Rubicon and I shared similar upbringings, a family dynamic that included alcoholism, sibling violence, and Catholicism, Rubicon walked a road at 18-20 years of age that would have swallowed me whole and shit me out as waste. And by the grace of some form of spiritual light that was seeded in all of us when the universe was born, he survived. Julie, Sean, and others who supported him, could still see that light of life that was hidden beneath the layers of trauma, pain, and deceit that is apart of our “glorious” USA conditioning, when that light was all but lost to Rubicon. In this, they pulled him back from the brink of a warrantless death that was handed to him by his nefarious commanders. Commanders who don’t give rats ass about soldiers who suffer PTSD and would just a soon see them die so the disease and treachery they spread far and wide can remain hidden from the public view.

A progressive Franciscan philosopher that mentored me in my earlier years stated once that, “human reality is moral reality.” When I read the book and read Sean’s post on the Stack this comes across loud and clear. X-Rubicon is a profound moral testament to our current times. The reviewer above notes that, “Readers are often left with a sense of moral urgency,” and that is exactly the point. Sean's reading of Patrick Henningsen’s essay again furthers this same truism: “It points at something of paramount importance — the freedom to be part of collective good; to deal with humanity honestly; to be part of making things better than they have been.”

If we, as human beings are not given the leeway to care for ourselves and others in our global family, which is the whole reason for our existence, then the time has come for us to jerk back the rights of all to exist in peace from our morally bankrupt, war mongering, colonial leaders. There is no room for them in our morally conscious envisioned future.

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