Heart Of Darkness

Michael Gray Griffith, Yass 02/25

Steady
I know why you’re silent. I know how difficult it is to remove that spot.
Their son was beautiful. His eyes would blossom with joy, and he would laugh—that silent baby laugh—every time he found you smiling at him. A smile that let him know he was safe because you were letting him know, just with your smile, how wanted he was.

But he hated needles.
That was why, when he was receiving his second MMR vaccine, I sat before him, twiddling my fingers in a way that left him enthralled. Then, as they withdrew the needle, I watched him—and felt him—spiritually vanish into himself, and to this day, he has never returned.
I was called an idiot. I was told to move on, that I just got unlucky. I got told it was just one of those things. But I know. I know.
I recorded this interview in Queensland, but it relates to what’s coming.

My Brother in Arms, Steady The Fireman talks about his son

Heart of Darkness

Yass, NSW 24/02/05

I met her in a caravan park. She approached the bus as we were parking it. She told us that she knew she was going to see us. She just knew.
Later, she sat with me in an outdoor communal kitchen and told me her story—one I’m curtailing to keep her identity safe.
She was the CEO of a home-run Family Day Care business. She managed sixty homes, four students in each, all cared for by trained educators.
“I’m a hypocrite,” she said, as trouble, like a current, washed into her eyes.
“All the funding comes through me, so it’s my job to make sure that all the children are up to date with their childhood vaccines. In fact, one of my duties is chasing parents up to make sure their children’s shots are up to date. Your child cannot attend unless they are up to date.”
“My children are all unvaccinated,” she said. “I don’t believe in them, but I have so many people relying on me. What do I do? What do I do? For you see, if we get caught with having one unvaccinated kid, or insufficiently jabbed, I could cop a five thousand six hundred dollar fine.”
“That’s why I’m resigning,” she said.
“And the kids,” she went on in that smiling despair, which was full of stubborn disbelief. “So many of them are affected.”
“How many?” I asked.
“A third to half of them,” she said. “From autism—so much autism—to allergies, and you have no idea how many allergies they have. And many others are just not right. Asthma, eczema, developmental issues, and when we were kids there was none of this. None!”
“Then we have to cater for the integration specialists. These people are sent in by the Government to help the sick kids adjust. And they achieve nothing. They’ll put a picture here or a sign there, and then they’ll tick some box on some form to make sure the Government can see that it has been. Nothing. They achieve absolutely nothing.”
“So let me get this straight,” I said. “Instead of trying to discover what causes all these ailments, we just exonerate the vaccines, whose manufacturers are indemnified, and then, upon the misery of these children and their guilt-ridden parents, we build industries.”
“Like mine,” she said. “And the NDIS is worse.”
I knew most of this before she started talking, but to hear it all condensed into one woman in her sixties, who now makes a living pushing vaccines despite her wallet constantly wrestling with her morality, left me feeling like I could suddenly see deeper into all of us. For a moment, I understood the great silence—the same silence that haunts our suicide rate and the industries we’ve built upon them.
No, we are not a bad people, but all through history, good people have been responsible for atrocities.
Now, instead of protecting our children, which we love—and you can see this love everywhere—yet still we put them forward to be jabbed so they can go to daycare, so both parents can work, in the hope of paying off a house that their autistic child can haunt.
And we do this so often, and with such little pushback, that business people have realized each of these injured children is a golden goose. Which adds to the communal incentive not to discover or reveal the cause of our autistic pandemic—because if we managed to make all our children healthy, what, all these people would lose their jobs?
Can all of this truly be traced back to Ronald Reagan deciding that all the vaccine manufacturers are protected from prosecution, which meant he created a perfect business model that is now out of control?
And all they had to do after winning indemnity was wrap these vaccines in a dogma that claimed they are miraculous.
A concocted belief, that is now so strong, that even the daily visual evidence of all our ill children can’t penetrate it.
It was now, as she continued to talk, that I realized this was a Heart of Darkness story. Except instead of a river in the Congo or Vietnam, this river was our society, and the deeper you travelled, the darker and quieter it became.
I can’t recall when I first saw a yin and yang symbol—yang being white, the light, and yin its opposite. But I wonder if that’s who we are now. We live, work, and play in the yang, with its bus stops coloured with the posters of smiling young people selling phones, as we try to ignore the yin—like that teenage boy, sitting on the bus. The young man who is only partially here. The one sucking his well-sucked knuckles, between occasionally banging the side of his head with his fist, as though, somewhere beyond our view, someone was torturing him.

Michael Gray Griffith.