By Sean Cruz
Portland, Oregon—
“I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain
I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end….”
James Taylor’s timeless1970 masterpiece “Fire and Rain” speaks to the universal soul of human experience, connects us in the most intimate ways to the grief we share individually and collectively at different times in our lives, recalls for me the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, who wrote in Anna Karenina that “Every happy family is exactly alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
None of us are exempt from the pain and loss that life brings: the death of loved ones, betrayals of trust, forces of nature, random acts of violence and deliberate criminality, catastrophic indifference and just plain stupidity. Whether tsunami or house fire, public and wholesale or private and intensely personal, we all cross paths with one or more of his lines, sooner or later. We are human.
“Lord knows the cold wind blows it’ll turn your head around….”
There are few songs that say so much in a line, and Fire and Rain has become for me a song that captures my uniquely unhappy family’s experience in the wake of the abduction of my four children, a Mormon kidnapping now entering its sixteenth year.
“The plans they made put an end to you….”
At this time, in January 1996, Mormon officials in three states were putting the finishing logistical touches on their plans to cause my four children to disappear into a series of remote Mormon enclaves in Utah, deliberately causing them to suffer the loss of their father and all of their Cruz family, in order to impose a full-on Mormon indoctrination despite the order for joint custody that had kept their lives orderly and secure, their personalities whole and beautiful, for five years.
These Mormons, you see, wanted to exact a price from me for speaking in opposition to Mormon dogma. They wanted to enforce a shunning, and force my own children to participate, first by isolating them and then by creating both physical and emotional distance. No mail would get through, no phone calls, no contact, and a squad of Mormon lawyers in three states fully engaged to enforce the shunning.
In fact, mail sent to their mother’s last known address in Hillsboro, Oregon, was not forwarded to wherever my children had been taken, a step the Mormons had taken to make it more difficult for me to find them. I later learned that the desperate letters I wrote to my children were forwarded instead to the Hillsboro home of Evelyn Taylor, then the president of the Mormon Relief Society, the highest office a woman can aspire to in the Mormon universe.
My son Aaron did not survive his forced immersion into concentrated Mormonism, isolated and surrounded, under constant pressure to reject his non-Mormon father.
Indeed, the Mormons wanted to kill off anything in my children that would remind them of me, and Aaron was just about exactly like me. They even noted that his skin was “slightly dark”, and Mormon dogma preaches that a dark skin is “the mark of Cain”, a sign of an evil nature.
(Explain that fact to the voters, about the dark skin, Mitt Romney, Mormon Bishop Mitt Romney)….
For my other three children, the key to survival was to adapt themselves into the new regime, and they did. This is where they remain today, still caught up in a religious war between Mormonism (“Good”) and everyone else (“Evil”).
“Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone….”
No one had to let me know that the children were gone. I could feel it! They had been removed from their schools in violation of the joint custody order and their mother’s house had been emptied. They were gone, just like that, no information at all about where they had been taken!
Kidnappings are always ambushes. Stealth and surprise, whisperings in Mormon congregations....
I wake up every morning knowing that you are gone….
“I walked out this morning and I wrote down this song
just can't remember who to send it to….”
I’ll write about these lines sometime soon, but not now, about the walking, about the writing, about the remembering and the sending….
“Well, there’s hours of time on the telephone line
To talk about things to come….”
And I’ll write about the hours, about the time, about the end of time on the telephone, about the end of talking, of planning, of dreaming with my children, about the things to come….
“Won't you look down on me, Jesus
You've got to help me make a stand
You've just got to see me through another day
My body's aching and my time is at hand
And I won't make it any other way….”
By the time the first kidnapped year came to an end, now aware of the Mormon forces at work, even to the names of some of the criminals, I had slipped into a crushing clinical depression. I had lost all hope of seeing my children again, and these were “lonely times when I could not find a friend….”
Just as I was preparing to end my life, in January 1997, a pastor from Victory Outreach, an inner-city church in Northeast Portland, invited me to move into their Men’s Re-entry Home, a sort of halfway house located upstairs over the building the church met in, a former neighborhood movie theater.
In order to live, I had to find reasons to live every day, day after day, and from there I became involved in community and public service, receiving an appointment by the US Attorney to a crime-fighting steering committee, and later a founding board member of a national program for the US Department of Justice, representing the Pacific Northwest.
The battle to find and recover my children became more intense once I became involved in a church, because the Mormons believe that all other religions are false, even “whore(s) of a church” in Mormon dogma. They are an American Taliban....
I would live there at Victory Outreach for the next five years…where I asked Jesus to look down on my children and protect them every day, every single day, counting each day, day after day….
“But I always thought that I'd see you again….”
I will never give up, thinking that I will see you each and all again, even knowing that the entire Mormon church is organized to protect itself and its members from any negative disclosure.
But Mitt Romney is in the news now, and will be throughout 2012, and we are going to take on the subject of Mormonism and its rampant evils, all…year…long.
My son Aaron waits for me in the afterlife, my son who rejected Mormonism just like his father, and there is not a thing the Mormons can do about it. I will see you again, Aaron…and you too, Natalia, Tyler and Allie, I will see you again, when you are free once more, free to be who you really are….
And here is James Taylor himself, to send our spirits soaring….
Fire and Rain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOIo4lEpsPY
------
Just yesterday morning they let me know you were gone
Suzanne the plans they made put an end to you
I walked out this morning and I wrote down this song
I just can't remember who to send it to
I've seen fire and I've seen rain
I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I'd see you again
Won't you look down on me, Jesus
You've got to help me make a stand
You've just got to see me through another day
My body's aching and my time is at hand
And I won't make it any other way
oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain
I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I'd see you again
I’ve been walking my mind to an easy time
My back turned towards the sun
Lord knows the cold wind blows it’ll turn your head around
Well, there’s hours of time on the telephone line
To talk about things to come
Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.
oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain
I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I'd see you, baby, one more time again, now
Thought I'd see you one more time again
There's just a few things coming my way this time around,
Thought I'd see you, thought I'd see you fire and rain, now
Thought i'd see you just one more time again.
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