Our nation is such a fraud.

I’ve “always” known this, but I’ve also always hoped that the masses of people who might have believed the lie and tried to do good would override the minority telling the lie.

This morning my hope no longer sustains me.

Reading the stories of how people are being treated in our prisons and detention camps and even now torturing prisons in foreign countries to which we sent them without due process – has broken me. Especially the story about the Afghan artist who interpreted for our Army before bringing his family here.

In the 1970s, after I and two siblings had graduated from high school, my parents went into the Peace Corps. Who knows what they actually did there. I met a man here in Tucson, serving with me on the food co-op board in 1985, who by great coincidence was with my parents in Afghanistan, and he told me he was sent home for having published an unauthorized newsletter about CIA agents in the Corps, and he told me he thought my parents were them!

I believe it. It fits their personality far more than the other image we have of the peacenik Peace Corps volunteers.

But I didn’t know that in 1974, when my siblings and I accepted their offer to travel halfway around the world to see them there and travel with them a bit in the Middle East.

Afghanistan, my father said, was proudly marching into the 17th century. Their water supply and sewage system seemed to be all one, called jetties, that wound through their cities. And women were rarely seen, covered from head to ankles, scurrying quickly alongside walls when out of their homes for errands. Meanwhile, men squatted in circles, laughing, smoking, sipping thick coffee in tiny cups, seemingly having lots of free time. Others, beggars, were everywhere.

We were young and able to put these things out of our minds and just focus on the beauty we found in their architecture, embroidery and foods.

Our nation’s presence there did nothing to help. All we did was take over the poppy harvest and the profitable heroin trade.

And now I read about how our nation has failed these people again. We promised them asylum, presenting ourselves as a nation of freedom and human rights, only to take off that mask today and show our true brutality.

I said above I “always” knew our nation was a fraud, but how did I know that? I was brought up with many advantages: a stable home, a lovely home, often with my own private bedroom, good food, nice clothes, music lessons, dance lessons, and quiet time to read and practice self-hypnosis, dream interpretation and drawing. And everyone I knew had similar. Everyone seemed to be living the American dream. So why did I have this inner knowing about our fraud?

And why did I spend most of my life asking, “What’s wrong with me?“ I would be almost 50 years old before I would learn that I was a US government mind control subject and had been since birth. Made so by the same organization, the CIA, that sent my parents to Afghanistan after I had run away at age 19 and, I thought for a while, somewhat broke my mind control programming, but only somewhat, if at all.

That’s a very long story I’ve told elsewhere and will probably tell again. And I’ve been dealing emotionally with this horrible truth for 23 years now. Alone.

I sometimes marvel at how well I’m doing at integrating this truth, remaining functional, and trying to do good despite the isolation the controllers have forced me into and the days I wake up and wonder, “What happened to me last night?” Yes, sometimes I marvel.

But not today. Today I’m devastated by the image of that Afghan man, a man who also believed the lie, tried to help our nation, then depended on our nation, and is now betrayed by our nation. I so relate. And I am devastated.