Cry for the beloved country

Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth

I was on a road trip two weeks ago, heading back from the East Coast, and as I flew down the highway heading west into the setting sun, a song I haven’t heard in a long time came on the radio — Cry, Cry Baby by Janis Joplin.

Phrases of that song now play in my head every day: “And I know that she left you, And you swear that you just don’t know why….”

The song is heart-wrenching in a way that I never realized when I first heard it years ago. It’s a woman begging a man to come back — in the way that most women would know to never do (because he won’t come back, and especially not if you beg. There is nothing to be done.)

I’d like to write about my long absence from this platform and I don’t know where to begin. But as I think about where we are right now, and the reality of the situation in our country, I keep hearing this song in my head - Cry Cry Baby.

There’s no use in crying. There’s no use in begging. We’re not going to get what we had back. The country is lost.

I was sitting in the pew in church one Sunday morning in 2021. In his homily, the priest said something unlike anything I’ve ever heard said by any Catholic priest in any church I’ve been to. He said that one day our county will be no more, and that perhaps this time is approaching. I wish I could remember his exact words, but I cannot now. I can only remember how I felt when I heard them. It was like a bomb going off inside of me. I had such a profound sense of grief and loss that I wanted to double over and weep.

It’s not that I hadn’t heard something like this before. Of course I had. You hear similar talk among people online. But it was a different thing altogether to hear it said by a Catholic priest to a full congregation. Nothing I’ve heard or read in the last number of years has caused quite the upheaval within me that this caused.

Many of us have a sense that it is ending. The great Ron Paul wrote this week in a column: “When future historians go searching for the final nail in the US coffin, they may well settle on the date April 20, 2024. On that day Congress passed legislation to fund two and a half wars, hand what’s left of our privacy over to the CIA and NSA, and give the US president the power to shut down whatever part of the Internet he disagrees with.”

The $95.3 billion foreign aid bill passed the House on Saturday, giving another $61 billion to Ukraine for the CIA’s proxy war on Russia. Immediately after, Democratic members of Congress broke out in cheers, waving small Ukrainian flags on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Thomas Massie posted a video of this remarkable scene to X and was threatened by the Sergeant at Arms with a fine if he didn’t take it down.

https://x.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1782858040657510501

Little was remarked upon it, but the CDC, FDA and NIH were fully funded in next year’s budget, and if there was any talk of holding any of those agencies to account for Covid-19, their response to it, or for pushing the experimental Covid-19 vaccine on everyone including the medically fragile and infants as young as six months old, I didn’t hear about it.

When I say holding agencies to account, I’m not talking about hearings. Having watched congressional hearings for 30 years, I understand them to be theater — doing little, if anything at all, to check the federal bureaucracy. You have to cut the money. Congress has this power — the power of the purse. But they won’t use it. It’s a mystery, really. We are $34 trillion in debt and nearing the point of no return. There is no money. And yet they won’t cut spending.

In addition to no cuts for the corrupt public health agencies, there was also no budget cut for the FBI, which launched the Trump-Russia Hoax to overthrow the president of the United States — an ordeal that Attorney General William Barr called “a grave injustice” that is “unprecedented in American history.”

In fact, Congress not only didn’t cut the FBI’s budget: The bureau was awarded an extra $200 million for a new headquarters in Maryland.

On the issue of Covid…I’ve been particularly interested in what would happen with our U.S. military in the years after the experimental vaccine was forced on our troops. This was an illegal order for the Army, for sure, as Army regulation AR 40-562, Section 8, states that Emergency Use Authorization vaccines are only suitable for defense against a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attack, may be declined by a soldier and must be approved by the president.

In early 2022 I talked on the phone with an Airman who’d posted a video to Facebook on what he said was likely his last day on the job at Grissom Air Force Base in Indiana as he was being pushed out for refusing to get the vaccine.

He’d been battling for months against his superior officers who had been heavy pressuring Airmen to get the vaccine, threatening them with dishonorable discharge if they declined and warning them that if they left the service, they’d have no prospects in any other profession as every other job would also require the shot.

He said the pressure had “pushed people to the edge” and that the morale among the men had been “destroyed.”

There were a total of 40 people on base who refused to get the vaccine and another 45-50 requests for religious exemptions among the 1500 service members at Grissom for a total of about 90 who hadn’t gotten the vaccine – about 1 in 15.

All of the requests for religious exemption were being denied.

I just looked back at letters that he’d forwarded to me — letters he’d sent to his superior officers to explain and justify his decision to not have the Covid-19 vaccine injected into him.

Here is the first letter that he wrote:

I have 19 years of service to this great nation that I love. And I love the Air Force, the uniform I wear, the flag and the founding documents and what all these drive me to do.  That is defend and protect the Good men around me and the American citizens of this nation.  But I need to say a few things before returning this order… I am incapable of subjecting myself to the unlawful, unethical, immoral, and tyrannical order to sit still and allow a serum to be injected into my body against my will and better judgement. I am a God fearing, Bible believing Christian, and the Bible is very clear that “my body is not my own” (1 Corinthians 6:19 says “or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own”) and I will not inject a toxin into it, not knowing how it will affect me. It is impossible for this so called “vaccine” to have been adequately studied to determine the long term effects. It simply has not existed for enough time and any claim otherwise is blatantly ignorant and likely an outright lie driven by political agenda.  Studies show that natural immunity from exposure to the virus is far superior to the mandated “vaccine”. Plus the fact that our commander and chief said from a platform “that the vaccinated needs protection from the unvaccinated” rational thought then says that this so called vaccine does not work.  Also when the white house, congress and staff, and other elites are exempt lead to even more skepticism and should tell us all something.

 On a moral standing and as a Christian man I whole heartily despise the idea of a so called vaccine that is derived of “fetal tissue” and or tested on “fetal tissue” (an aborted baby’s body parts) the idea of using the destruction of one human life to further another life is despicable and evil to its core and I will have no part of it. The Bible is clear we are fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14) and we were known before we were born. (Jerimiah 1:5 before I formed you in the womb I knew you…)  Human life is precious and for an administration and top military leadership to willfully endorse the murder of human life and with same breath say “you need this “vaccine” to save lives” is hypocritical and completely goes against my religious freedom and the Air Forces core value of Integrity first. There is no integrity in contributing to murder of the unborn and I assure you it sickens the heart of God.

Also I will not contribute to fall of this great nation and its people by going along with this lie.  Those same citizens I swore an oath to protect deserve better, they deserve freedom and it is being stripped from them as I write this. The values that our nation was founded on have been completely trampled by the current administration and the top leadership of the military. How are we as members supposed to trust and obey orders on our health and safety when in the same breath this same leadership has sidestepped the constitution (which we swore to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic) with these tyrannical mandates and also have aided and abetted the enemy and knowingly and deliberately armed a terrorist organization which wish to destroy the health and safety of all US citizens, and would have no issue with killing military members with the same weaponry top leadership has allowed them. All trust is now gone.  We as military members are sitting idly by as this administration, Governors, and mayors forcibly lock down and restrict the rights of Americans to pursue happiness. They will be forced from jobs, not allowed to be included in many aspects of society because of personal beliefs and values. This is unacceptable as a military member because our one and only job and purpose is to defend the freedoms of the American people.  For these reasons there is no longer confidence in the top leadership and proves they do not have the best interest of the American people and the US military in mind. Leaders who are unwilling to put their careers on the line in order to protect the wellbeing of their troops and uphold truth and integrity and fight to stop the unethical and immoral push of these mentioned matters are not only cowards but are unfit to lead.

With all that said, I cannot and will not sign this unethical and immoral order as it would violate every moral fiber of my being and the reasoning and ideas behind it blatantly goes against what we all swore to defend against.  May God forgive us for going down this road.

MSgt Charles Coyne

NCOIC Aircraft metals technology

Grissom AFB, Indiana

The letter was not well received.

“I was verbally reprimanded and told my letter made its way to headquarters and it was inappropriate and too harsh of language and to rewrite it. I was told to apologize and say  ‘what I really meant,’” Coyne told me in an email.

And…he said he was told he was now a security risk and his commander said that what he wrote could be taken as “white supremacy” and “extremism.” **

Yeah.

Reading this letter, I see a person with high moral standards, a Christian man, and a patriot — one of those incredibly decent, strong, righteous American men that our country has been so blessed with.

That he was forced out of the U.S. military because he didn’t want to get an experimental vaccine for a respiratory virus that posed no real threat to a man his age is revolting to me and I’m sure to many of you.

At a recent hearing of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida confronted Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin about the stunning story in the news that Austin had been in the hospital and completely incapacitated and had forgotten to tell the White House — while a few wars were raging:

“You didn’t tell the president that you had cancer, that you were being treated for cancer, or that the treatment for that cancer had gone wrong, because you saw it as personal and medical, and I think a lot of us have empathy for you in that regard. But now that you see how personal medical decisions are, will you call for the re-recruitment, restoration of full rank and back pay for the 8,600 servicemembers that were vax-mandated out of the military?” Gaetz asked.

“Ah, no, I won’t,” Austin responded.

It actually got even better after this, with Gaetz pointing out that Austin admits he made a mistake and that he has come before members of Congress seeking “grace and forgiveness,” but he is not willing to extend this same grace and forgiveness to servicemembers who didn’t want to get the vaccine.

He read from the Gospel of Matthew, ‘The Parable of the Unforgiving Debtor’ about the servant who is forgiven a debt by the king, but then demands full payment from another servant who owes him.

“Mr. Secretary, you come to us seeking forgiveness, but you offer none,” Gaetz told Austin.

He left off with this: “You say that the DOD is a learning organization. Haven’t you learned yet that the military is weaker, not stronger, without the 8,600 people that you vax-mandated out of the military?”

It was heartening to see this exchange.

Things may be coming apart. The country we knew may be gone. But at least we can see there are a few still fighting.

It’s not solace. It’s not exactly comfort. But it is something.

** In a 2022 Facebook post, Coyne identified the two main commanders at Grissom Air Force Base who’d kicked him out in December of 2021 over his refusal to take the Covid vaccine as MSgt Cassidy (this appears to be him) and Command Chief Nathan Parks. Coyne had been serving at Grissom for 19 years and two months at the time he was suspended. Since leaving the service, he and his wife had a child and he decided to run for local office.