<strong><em>"I don't know a soul who's not been battered, don't have a friend who feels at ease ..."</em></strong>

Do I know anyone who is truly happy, at least anyone my own age?

Even folks who say they're content -- as I am pretty much of the time -- find themselves battling to shed the regrets of the things they did wrong, or the things they didn't do, or the bad decisions they made. That's all well and good. An important part of life is letting go of those regrets and not living in the past.

But what about people whose problems aren't their own fault? Or even a result of their own limitations?

What about the people who had stuff done to them?

[caption id="attachment_1060" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Mind control at its worst"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/ManchurianCandidate.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-1060" title="ManchurianCandidate" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/ManchurianCandidate.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="200" /></a>[/caption]

In the middle of the last century, the American military and intelligence communities became absolutely obsessed with mind control. There were stories coming out of the Korean War about how enemy scientists were perfecting brainwashing techniques that could send people home seeming perfectly normal yet actually anything but normal. Richard Condon's book <a title="Manchurian Candidate" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manchurian_Candidate" target="_self">"The Manchurian Candidate"</a> and the movie that was made from it did a lot to frighten Americans.

And because the '50s might have been the peak of American arrogance, we apparently decided that anything those godless Commies could do, we could do better -- or worse, depending on your perspective.

There were all sorts of government programs, the most famous of which was the Central Intelligence Agency's <a title="MK ULTRA" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA" target="_self">MK ULTRA</a>. It's difficult to say anything is the "worst" thing Americans ever did. When you start with slavery and genocide, you're setting the bar pretty high, but the 20th century brought us forced sterilization of retarded people, medical experiments where syphilis was given to black men and a number of other cute little tricks like prefrontal lobotomies.

Still, MK ULTRA was pretty awful. It went on for nearly 20 years, and maybe the worst thing about it was that an awful lot of the subjects or its experiments had no idea they were being used. The Rasputin of the project was a man named Sidney Gottlieb, who started out as a speech therapist and wound up as a maestro of mind control.

Gottlieb was the life of the party in an evil sort of way. He loved giving large doses of LSD to people without their knowledge to see how they would react. He also ran a program that tested large numbers of schoolchildren, many of whom have no memory of the testing even to this day.

Here's the problem with all that.

It's really quite simple.

How dare they? How dare they perform experiments on people without their knowledge, particularly people who hadn't committed any crimes or breached any laws?

It seems to me that one place this country went seriously off track was once we had a ruling class -- whether in government, in business or in academia -- that decided they were somehow more important than other Americans. Once some captain of industry, or professor, or government official decided that his life was more important than a guy who worked at Walmart, we were headed down the slipperiest of slopes.

And when experiments were performed, and subjects don't know who they were performed on, people also don't know that they <em>weren't</em> subjects.

At least one of my friends -- and maybe more -- was probably a subject of those experiments. For all I know, there was testing done on me

I know too many people who don't feel comfortable in their own skin, and they aren't people that you would look at and automatically call them nerds or losers. And too many of them had at least loose connections with people and families who were involved with the CIA.

What frustrates me the most about this is that I don't have a conclusion to bring this to. I don't have a point to draw from this, other than the fact that corrupt people have gone a long way toward destroying what was most special about our country. How dare they have picked people -- American people -- at random and destroyed their lives in the name of protecting America from communism?

I hope they are burning in the deepest circles of Hell.

<strong><em>"... and so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."</em></strong>