Public Comment

It means a lot to me that in September of 1983, we were on the brink of global destruction from a narrowly avoided nuclear war.  

I turned the ripe old age of nineteen that month, and I was heavily involved in two groups that were actively campaigning to try to prevent worldwide atomic annihilation. I attended the Unitarian Universalist Church in Walnut Creek, and I gave hundreds of my earnings to the Mount Diablo Peace Center, money I made in my job as a janitor in a number of supermarkets in the Bay Area. There was a man named Andy Baltso who would write me nice notes when I made my donations. I was also involved in a Ken Keyes Study Group. I read a book by Keyes called, "The Hundredth Monkey" that scared the daylights out of me. I sang songs and visited with other people who wanted peace, in the home of Dale Swinney on Oakland, and I meditated at work while my body was on autopilot polishing the supermarket floors.  

I was noncompliant with taking my psychiatric medication, and I almost succeeded at bucking mental illness. However, events did not allow me to make that escape. 

On September 12 and 13, in 1983, I almost lost my life when one of the stores where I worked had an armed robbery. I was alone with two gunmen overnight while they awaited the arrival of the morning supermarket employees who would be able to open the safe for them. At the time, armed robbers probably were less murderous than they are now. They let me live, perhaps because they had some amount of empathy.  

It was after the armed robbery that my deterioration into a second episode of being psychotic accelerated, even while my body continued to do my job on autopilot.  

On television, on the ABC Network, a show aired that was a depiction of nuclear war. It was called "The Day After," and it starred Jason Robards. It was the last straw. I didn't go back to work, I deteriorated very fast, and I was 5150'd in January of 1984.  

Since that time, I have been continuously in treatment except for a couple of instances of noncompliance in which I didn't last nearly as long before getting acutely ill and being re-hospitalized.  

However, it is nice to think that at the time I wasn't too far off base, and also that on some level I may have contributed, just a little bit, to the survival of the human species.