Lane von Herzen: Remember Why We Came

My Third Novel's Conclusion, My Heartbreak

My heart begins to break when I think about completing this particular book -- because this narrative has sustained me like no other story I've known. It's both more personal and more universal than my other works. But beyond memory and archetype, it's a cri-de-coeur about needing to become the person one is destined to be. And in the writing, I have met my own life's work, my own fated journey -- having the sense all the while that the pages are suffused with a resonance, an energy, an electrified field that defies explanation. Writers hope and pray to be overtaken by a work in this way -- to be conscripted into passionate service of a profound story. To experience it even once in a lifetime seems a great privilege. I still have several months before this novel is complete, and this constitutes my reprieve. Because I'm not ready for the beauty to end.

Friday, September 20, 2024

Remember Why We Came

Good people, what is at stake within the FOIA reports, which the Honorable Supreme Court Justice ordered delivered to me on an immediate basis in a judgement rendered on September 16, 2024?

What is at stake is the longterm potential of mankind -- nothing less than this.

In the longterm, if our societies are weakened by systems of deceit, propaganda, targeting, and predation of the sort currently being perpetrated within the FBI's unconstitutional "target of interest" program, then we will not realize our full potential for our greatest capacities as human beings.

What are those capacities? They are the gifts that render us unique -- the qualities that cannot be duplicated or surpassed by AI, robotics, advanced technologies, information aggregation, gadgetry or weapons.

They are our capacity for insight, transformation, creation, epiphany, learning, compassion, ways of knowing, moral and ethical development, and the sanctity of the human spirit.

The soul's progress, in other words, represents a magnificent potential in human beings, one which heretofore has been largely quiescent within human society as a whole.

Yet this is what makes us irreplaceable. This is what makes us invaluable. This is what makes us rare.

And in order for us to develop to our full capacities in the future, we will need our sovereignty, our freedom of thought, our freedom of speech, our freedom of peaceable assembly, our freedom of the press, and our right to privacy upheld.

In the longterm, if the FBI can silence those who seek to express original ideas or create original works by aggregating and disseminating disinformation about them, all of us will be diminished, frightened, limited, held back from the expression of our greatest gfits.

So, these FOIA reports matter, and not just to me, not just to those who have risked their lives and their livelihoods for the chance that I might obtain them -- but to all human beings who strive for freedom -- and to all human beings who will reach for freedom in the centuries to come.

Because of the emergence of AI into systems of surveillance and falsified law enforcement reporting, we cannot assume that the future will allow us time in which to re-assert the freedoms of mankind. The odds of that are quite low. If we do nothing now, dissenting voices in the future will rapidly be silenced through means that are yet more advanced than those in deployment at the current time.

This task has been given to us, here and now.

If we do not find a way, no one will.

It is in this knowledge that I ask for all to strive for the provision of complete FOIA reports to me on an immediate basis.

At this moment in human history, with our freedoms in the balance, let's remember why we came.