Erasing the Erasure: On the Trail of

Canada’s Biggest Cover Up by Sarah J.

Webster

Preamble: A Personal Note from the Author

 By Kevin Annett-March 25, 2019

In writing this piece I’ve done something unusual for me, and that is to adopt
a pseudonym. I’ve only ever done that once before, in a situation of abnormal
danger. That was in Africa in the midst of a civil war. My efforts to construct
the story of the Canadian Indian residential school cover up and the
professional destruction of Kevin Annett have been no less perilous. I have
been met with not only an unexplained eyebrow-arched discouragement from
colleagues, but the loss of friends and family and at least one job opportunity.
After beginning my research I have also experienced more overt intimidation,
gang stalking, late night death threats and at least one “unofficial visit” by the
RCMP.
Clearly, some powerful people don’t want this story told, which makes it all
the more necessary that it be told.

I also want to point out that the details of certain personal aspects of this story
have been deliberately made more vague than I would have preferred, at the
insistence of my editors. One example of this is the issue of why the wife of
Kevin Annett chose to turn on and betray him at the prompting of his
adversary, the United Church. The reason involves the personal history and
psychological condition of his wife and the unethical sharing of the details of
her condition by her therapist with the church officials who approached her
in her weakness and exploited her vulnerability. The sordidness of their
actions is but one symptom of the domestic crimes for which the same church
is responsible: atrocities that the protagonist of this story has so unflaggingly
documented at the cost of everything in his life.

With time and more people like him, the full truth will be heard, even in a
place like Canada. This effort is another step in that long journey.

Introduction

Whoever looks beneath the surface of things does so at his own risk.
– Oscar Wilde
I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived on Vancouver Island last autumn
to start investigating this story. Frankly, I’d been warned off even attempting
it, which if anything made me want to write it all the more. For not only is the
issue enormous in scope, but so is the amount of fog, misinformation and
outright hysteria generated around it.

I am speaking of course of Canada’s home-grown genocide and how its awful

truth was surfaced, and then buried again.

Over thirty years of political journalism on four continents has taught me that
every story is at its heart a simple one that’s only made complicated by those
with something to lose by it coming to light. How Canada’s mainline churches
went about wiping out huge numbers of brown skinned children in their
“Indian residential schools”, aided by the government and its courts, is a
simple matter of money and land. How the same killers have got away with it
is a labyrinthine tale of ongoing murder, corruption, concealment and
duplicity that many Canadians may have difficulty believing. Or maybe not.

My efforts at unlocking this story have been aided from the start by another
simple aspect of the tale: the fact that it really begins and remains focused on
one man – a disarmingly unpretentious former clergyman named Kevin
Annett.

If you have a memory preceding July 8, 2008 you’ll probably recall Kevin,
since until then he was routinely quoted and featured in Canada’s national
media. After that date – when the Harper government “apologized” for the
Indian residential schools and set the official spin in operation – Kevin’s name
simply vanished from the press. How effectively his public erasure was
accomplished – along with what he had uncovered over fifteen years – is truly
breathtaking, especially considering the passions still aroused by the mere
mention of his name.

But to say that is to get ahead of our story, and of what I gradually learned in
the face of an industry of slander, distortion and panic generated from the
summit of Canadian church and state. All, it seems, because of this one man.

A Place called Port Alberni

I began at the scene of the crime, the nearly-exact midpoint of Vancouver

Island. It’s the place that served as the launching pad for our destruction of
most of the west coast aboriginal tribes in the last half of the nineteenth
century. There are still Indians around the area, but like any of us they know
little if anything about their origins or of what makes them unique. Survivors
of a slaughter never do.
Port Alberni doesn’t mix its races. I haven’t seen whites and Indians sitting
together in its restaurants or alongside each other in its churches. The browns
are cloistered on the two local Indian reservations or in the mid-town slum
area everybody calls “the Ghetto”, sprawled next door to the barely-operating
pulp mill. It was the same way when Kevin Annett arrived in town over a
quarter century ago, to take up his post as the new minister at St. Andrew’s
United Church, which closed down the year after Kevin was fired.

Despite the calumny and fog placed around his name, people here still openly
recall the young minister: especially the Indians. More of them seemed willing
to talk about him than did the whites.
“He was different” remembers George Tatoosh, a stooped Tseshaht
aboriginal man in his sixties. “You can always tell the fakers from the real
deal, and he was real. When nobody else gave a shit, there he was. Kevin kept
visiting us when his church told him to stop. I wasn’t surprised when they
booted him out.”

“He fed me and my family every month outta his food bank” says Karen
Connerley, a local Indian who attended Kevin’s church until he was fired.
“Those stuck up snots in his church didn’t like us bein’ there, no way. One of
‘em told me to take my brats and get the f(…) out.”

Local white people tend to have a different take on the same man. None of
them deny that the pews of his church were filled until the day he was fired
without cause. And yet according to a retired city official who attended the
other United Church in town and who prefers anonymity,

“Annett was his only worst enemy, you know, bringing a lot of it down on
himself. He liked to provoke and divide people. He wasn’t a good pastor, not
by a long shot. He alienated his own congregation, especially with all his social
justice talk. He never tolerated a different opinion, which is why he had to be
removed.”

Like the proverbial blind people describing different parts of an elephant, and
mirroring the nation, there seems to be no consensus among Port Alberni
residents about Kevin Annett, save one: that he let loose a political firestorm
about stolen land and missing and murdered aboriginal children.

Who’s Who

I tried to speak to the men to whom Kevin first unleashed that storm: a
handful of United Church clergymen, some of who still pastor churches on
Vancouver Island. None of them returned my calls or emails. Nor did the
national office of the United Church of Canada when I asked for an interview
with whoever could speak knowledgeably about their firing and defrocking of
Kevin between 1995 and 1997. Like the mass graves of the residential school
children that he first pointed out, an official Night and Fog still surrounds
Kevin Annett.

Two of these clergymen are Foster Freed and Phil Spencer: United Church
ministers in Nanaimo and Qualicum Beach. In November of 2018, they hired
a lawyer named Lewis Spencer from Derpak, White and Spencer law firm in
Vancouver to issue a “Cease and Desist” letter against Kevin Annett at his
former address in Nanaimo. Without citing any proof, the letter accused
Kevin of circulating in a leaflet “defamatory and false” accusations against
Freed and Spencer, and declared that the RCMP have “opened a file” on
Kevin.

Apparently Freed and Spencer didn’t tell their lawyer that with their
encouragement, the Mounties had already opened a file on Kevin Annett in
the spring of 1993, well before his firing from the church two years later.

But why is their “cease and desist” action happening now, more than two
decades later? Significantly, no-one has ever sued Kevin Annett for any of his
claims. And isn’t the United Church always the first one to say (at least, in
relation to their own malfeasance) that what’s past is past and should be
“healed and reconciled”?

Apparently not, when it comes to Kevin Annett. For even though Freed and
Spencer were the main actors in the secret and unauthorized destruction of
Kevin Annett’s job, livelihood, good name and even family, they take offense
whenever anyone mentions it: as did a group of local young activists who were
the ones who actually circulated the “defamatory” leaflet that their lawyer
attributes to Kevin.
People usually are defensive or over-react when they’re feeling guilty or
vulnerable. Or as my air force father used to say, “You know you’re over the
target when the flak starts.” So I followed the flak and did my own digging
into what had first caused Freed and Spencer, and eventually the wider
United Church officialdom, to tear apart Kevin Annett’s life. And my search
quickly led to a letter Kevin had written on October 17, 1994, three months
before his firing without cause or notice by the men to whom it was written.

Kevin’s letter to the local church Presbytery officials concerned a piece of

aboriginal land stolen by the United Church and then resold to the church’s
corporate benefactors. Such a theft was hardly an unusual event, but in this
case it was one fraught with major fall out once it was made known. For
Kevin’s discovery of the theft of Lot 363 on the Ahousaht reservation near
Tofino opened the lid on a hidden deal between his church, the provincial
government and the largest logging company in the world, Weyerhauser, that
stood to profit all involved by over two billion dollars.

Kevin’s letter was amazingly naive, in hindsight. It asked that, in accordance

with church policy, the land be returned at no charge to its rightful owners,
the Ahousaht tribe. But that of course would have “upset the whole apple
cart”, to quote the provincial Aboriginal Affairs minister John Cashore –
another United Church clergyman – whose government was a major
shareholder in the company. And so the word went out from more than one
boardroom for someone to deal with this meddlesome priest.

Foster Freed and Phil Spencer volunteered. They were the point men in
Kevin’s destruction. They had gone to seminary with the man and they had
his trust. By their own admission, both of them were chomping at the bit to
prove they had the right stuff to climb higher in the church rungs; they were
indeed subsequently rewarded with higher positions in the church for their
ruination of Kevin Annett, Freed as B.C. Conference President and Spencer,
ironically, as its head of Pastoral Relations. They had also proven themselves
to the civil authorities, by flagging Kevin to the local RCMP when he’d told
them accounts of children being killed in their church’s Alberni Indian
residential school.

And so, encouraged by the national church office, its lawyer Jon Jessiman and
B.C. government minister John Cashore, Freed and Spencer formed a secret
“oversight committee” to arrange not only Kevin’s firing and defrocking but
the blackening of his name and employability in church circles. Neither Kevin
nor his congregation nor even other United Church officials knew of this
shadowy committee, or its game plan.

Now here’s where it gets even sleazier and more revealing.

Apparently with the go-ahead from Jon Jessiman, Phil Spencer approached
Kevin’s wife, Anne McNamee, months before they actually fired him. Spencer
offered to arrange church funding for Anne’s divorce if she agreed to leave
Kevin after the boot came down on him, and if she helped spy on him and
purloin his personal files. Spencer also assured her that the church could
“arrange” for her to get full custody of their two daughters in Family Court,
as long as she played ball. Anne accepted the deal, and eventually she did
indeed win legal custody over their kids after she’d disappeared with them
following Kevin’s firing. The United Church paid Anne’s lawyer Ron Huinink
at least $28,000 during the McNamee-Annett divorce and custody trial in
early 1996.

This was not simply another sordid, in-house church slam-dunking of an

inconvenient heretic. Spencer – a low-level clergyman who was a relative
nobody – acted with complete impunity and without apparent fear of
consequence, knowing that the court system would be on his side. Nobody in
his position acts that way unless they know their back is being seriously
covered by bigger forces.
Who and what those forces were became starkly obvious as the tragedy
played itself out. As Kevin Annett was first fired without cause, and then
stripped of his children and defrocked without a semblance of due process,
and finally blacklisted, made unemployable and publicly branded as a social
pariah across Canada, ever-higher levels of church, state and big money
stepped in to lead the attack on this lone clergyman. That in itself began to
awaken a lot of people to not only Kevin Annett but more importantly, to the
crimes he was unearthing. As a colleague of mine at the Globe and Mail
newspaper wondered aloud in 1998,

“Why did these jokers spend over $300,000 to get rid of just one of their
ministers? And why was it all done so publicly? Who ever wants to wash their
dirty laundry in public unless it’s to make an example of someone?”

Fortunately for posterity, nobody expected Kevin Annett to be so resilient and

tough. Stripped of everything, he just wouldn’t give up documenting stories
and holding public protests about the residential school crimes, and of what
he’d learned through bitter personal loss and experience. And the longer
Kevin persisted over the years, the more an even uglier truth began to emerge.
Fifty Thousand Children can’t be Wrong

The Canadian public has been so carefully inoculated to the little matter of
Genocide in their own backyard that the truth so briefly surfaced has once
again been placed beyond reach and understanding. Torn and violated little
bodies thrown into a mass grave have been sanitized into stale words of
compensation and apology. We can thank the media and academia for that
mind-numbing subterfuge, as well as the church-state spin doctors. But we
also have ourselves to blame. For who of us wants to take responsibility for
our own Group Crime, especially since there’s nothing forcing us to?
Nevertheless, in the matter at hand, the very degree of the official cover-up of
that Genocide is as revealing and as damning as the original crime itself. The
bigger the crime, the greater the concealment. Early in his campaign, Kevin
Annett published a front page article from the Ottawa Citizen dated
November 15, 1907 entitled “Schools Aid White Plague”. The article described
the report of a Dr. Peter Bryce of the federal Indian Affairs department, who
reported that as many as 69% of residential school children were dying each
year “after being deliberately exposed to communicable disease”. Yet this
official proof of intentional mass murder went down Orwell’s Memory Hole,
and remained there until Kevin published it in 1998.

Kevin also likes to cite the February, 1940 report of a west coast Indian Agent,
P.D. Ashbridge, concerning a fire that was deliberately lit by local Indians
that destroyed the United Church’s Ahousaht residential school. Ashbridge
wrote to the head of Indian Affairs in Ottawa,
“As this was the property of the church, care was taken to avoid too close an
inquiry.” (www.murderbydecree.com)

The same care to avoid looking too deeply into church malfeasance has been a
constant feature of Canadian governments and their courts, then and now.
The most spectacular example of that in recent times was of course the so-
called “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (TRC), launched by the guilty
parties in the summer of 2008 soon after Kevin and his movement forced a
belated “apology” from the feds over the residential schools. As Kevin puts it
so succinctly,

“It was like the serial killer appointing his own judge and jury.”
At the time and throughout the stillborn existence of the TRC, I wondered as
a journalist why nobody in the media was questioning the legitimacy or
legality of an alleged Commission that was set up by the very parties
responsible for the crime being “investigated”. Or why, under the terms of the
TRC mandate, their Commissioners (who were appointed directly by the
churches and the Privy Council office in Ottawa) were not allowed to issue
subpoenas, access church records or take down as evidence any testimony that
named the names of perpetrators or of capital crimes. The statements of
residential school survivors were even vetted and censored by the
Commissioners before being presented publicly. And yet the TRC was
continually presented in the government-parroting Canadian media as a
genuine investigation into Indian residential schools.

Delmar Johnny, a Cowichan tribal elder on Vancouver Island, remarked in

2008,

“It’s the same old game. Their TRC and the whole apology bullshit to us is
like a man stealing your car and then knocking on your door and saying he’s
sorry for doing it, and then getting in the car and driving away. After all the
fine talk, nothing ever changes for us.”

Hypocrisy aside, the TRC represented a clear miscarriage of the law and an
obstruction of justice. Perhaps that’s why the original TRC Chairman, federal
Judge Harry Laforme, resigned from the Commission soon after his
appointment with the remark that because of the TRC’s terms of operation,
his participation in it would be “highly inappropriate and irregular.”

Of course, none of that matters when the serial killer is still in charge. But
these incidents are also symptomatic of the Canadian nation at large, and our
deep reflex not to believe that our churches have the blood of over 50,000
children on their hands. It’s precisely that denial that Kevin ran headlong into
after his immolation by his own church and his casting out among the
survivors of their genocide. But ironically that positioned him to start
surfacing even more proof of the Canadian Group Crime.

I remember when I first heard about Kevin Annett, soon after he pulled
together the first public Tribunal into residential school crimes in the summer
of 1998. I was finishing a story on the toxic waste poisoning of northern
wildlife. Delaying my flight home with a stopover in Vancouver, I swung by to
catch the last day of the Tribunal. It was held in a maritime union hall on the
east side of the city.

The place was emptier than I’d anticipated. At the front of the hall were
arrayed a dozen older people, mostly aboriginal, who were the official
observers from a United Nations NGO group called IHRAAM. Seated at the
microphone was an elderly native woman who was haltingly describing her
torture with electrodes when she was six years old at the Catholic Indian
school on Kuper Island. A few others sat protectively nearby, their hands
resting on her, but besides them I counted barely two dozen people there. One
of them was Kevin Annett.

I recognized him from a picture in the article I’d read about the Tribunal, and
I went over to speak to him. He was jotting down the words of another
aboriginal and I waited until they were done. Then he smiled at me good
naturedly but with an obvious caution.

“Most people were scared away yesterday by the goons” he answered me

casually when I asked why the attendance was so low. “We had over a
hundred survivors here when it opened.”

The “goons”, according to Kevin, were led by a native man from Bella Bella
named Dean Wilson who was himself hired by a “government Indian” Chief,
Ed John, and his associate, a United Church official named Alvin Dixon. How
could he be so sure, I asked him.

“Because Dean backed me into a corner last night with his hand around my
throat and told me that Eddie John would have me killed if I kept talking
about murdered residential school children.”

I was surprised that same week when the horde of Canadian media who’d
originally covered the Tribunal never reported a thing about it. For the first
time, eyewitness testimonies had spoken of mass killings and sterilizations at
residential schools, as well as ongoing aboriginal child trafficking across the
province, including in Ed John’s own territory. Yet not a peep of it appeared
in the press. I became less surprised as the years went by.

Jump forward a decade to the time just before Kevin Annett’s name became
officially erased from the “mainstream” media, when Stephen Harper
“apologized” for residential schools. It was March of 2008, and Kevin and his
people had just occupied a series of Catholic, Anglican and United churches in
Toronto and Vancouver, demanding that they and the Crown be charged with
genocide in international courts.

Under obvious pressure, the Globe and Mail had just published an article that
for the first time publicly confirmed what Kevin had been alleging and
revealing with documents for over a decade, that at least half the children had
died in the Indian residential schools. And yet the same article had censored
out most of what Kevin had actually said to the reporter, Bill Curry, including
about the continued disappearance of aboriginal women and children, and the
location of mass graves of residential school kids at twenty two sites across
Canada.

Having read Kevin’s original press statement about the graves, I spoke to Bill
Curry about why it wasn’t mentioned.

“Oh, that’s not all that was taken out of the article” he joked with me. “We
were going to run a major review of Annett’s documentary film Unrepentant,
but then certain people objected, so that was that.”
“Which people?” I asked.

“The Assembly of First Nations” Curry said, continuing, “In other words, the
feds.”

It was clear to me at the time that the writing was on the wall for Reverend
Annett. Sure enough, after his name and work were swabbed out of the media
and any public discourse, I lost interest in the man, assuming he’d disappear.
My work took me far afield during the next few years, and a storm of internet
attacks against Kevin confirmed to me that he was undergoing a classic black
ops “bad jacketing” campaign that would ensure his obliteration. And so it
was with genuine surprise that I rediscovered him during 2013, after he’d
expanded his work to Europe and helped force the resignation of Pope
Benedict.

More than impressed that Kevin was still alive and kicking, and that neither
he nor his adversaries were giving up, I nevertheless avoided contacting him. I
still can’t explain why. An unusual dread passed through me whenever I
thought of doing so. It was also a story that nobody wanted to touch, and I
knew I’d be likely freelancing it if I took it on. Plus, it was too big a story to
encapsulate in a print article. It would take a major TV series to give it
justice. And knowing something of the Hollywood scene, I knew the odds were
unlikely for a story like this one to get past the lawyers. But of course the odds
had always been slim, either for those little kids or for Kevin Annett’s efforts.

Frankly, I was also frightened. The previous year, Kevin Annett had received
another major take-down after he had helped a group of Mohawk elders to
excavate and positively identify the physical remains of children who had died
in and were buried next to the former Anglican Mohawk residential school in
Brantford, Ontario. Once again, the Canadian media studiously ignored the
whole thing, even though it was the first public opening of a residential school
grave in Canadian history. Even after the Smithsonian Institute in
Washington had identified one of the excavated bones as being that of a young
aboriginal girl, it was still not considered “newsworthy” by any Canadian
media.

But that wasn’t what frightened me. Kevin was quickly shut out of the
Mohawk community that had publicly supported and endorsed him, and he
was violently attacked and smeared across Canada during 2012. Also, three of
his aboriginal co-workers in Vancouver had died suddenly over the same
year, upon investigation, from obvious foul play. These killings, and the speed
of the take down and the obvious collusion between the feds, the media, the
native elites and the Anglican church in wiping out Kevin, convinced me that
the guy’s days were numbered, as were those of anyone who stuck with him.

While I kept my distance from him in those years, I didn’t step back from the
story. I kept doing my own digging and discovered that everything Kevin
claimed about the Mohawk school was accurate, including Anglican church
records in Huron College in London, Ontario that detail a master “smoking
gun” plan by Crown and Pulpit to exterminate the Mohawks that went back
to the 1830’s.
With the official wrap-up of the ludicrous TRC in 2015, and the breaking of
the story into the international press again that same year (“Canada admits
cultural genocide”, New York Times, June 3, 2015), I considered approaching
Kevin Annett once more. I was curious how he was and more than concerned
that he was still alive.

What finally nudged me to take the plunge into his story was an encounter I
had last summer with a former Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS)
operative who’s been a source for me. The topic of the convicted serial killer
Willie Picton and the disappearance of native women in B.C. came up, and my
source let out a laugh.
“Nobody’s ever going to know the truth about any of that. Not with the
Twelve Milers involved.”

It turns out that my source had been one of the CSIS field agents who had
infiltrated the infamous “Piggy’s Palace” in Coquitlam at the time that so
many street women were disappearing. He’d discovered quickly that the
Picton brothers were merely on the body disposal crew, and that the killings
were happening at a wealthy home frequented by senior Canadian politicians
including a former Prime Minister and two serving Senators, RCMP
Superintendents and at least one local Catholic Bishop. All of them are
members of something called the Twelve Mile Club – their name for
themselves – named after Canada’s territorial limit.

“Outside of twelve miles you can get rid of anything and anybody” said my
source. “It’s an old pastime on the west coast. They’ve been doing it for a
century to the Indians. Now the Chinese are getting into it big time. What’s
his name found out about some of that, you know, the pastor they screwed …”

“You don’t mean Kevin Annett?”

“Right. He was on to more than he realized.”

That started me on my recent search. But I waited for some time to contact
Kevin again, partly because the man is forever on the move. When we did
finally meet again it was obvious that more than the proverbial chickens had
come home to roost.

And a Time for Every Purpose under Heaven

Kevin Annett had noticeably aged since we’d last met. But he has actually
borne the war waged on him incredibly well. He looks much younger than his
sixty two years. His manner is easy and open, still radiating his
characteristically calm self-assuredness and wry sense of gallows humor,
despite all his losses and setbacks.

After we’d been seated in the cafe where we met, Kevin handed me a copy of
his recent book, At the Mouth of a Cannon, with a smile on his face.

“I autographed it for you. That way when I get whacked it’ll be worth
something.”

“Is that still a danger?” I asked him.

“I don’t think about it much” he answered laconically. “I doubt if they want

to make me a martyr by killing me. They prefer to marginalize and discredit
me, and they get a lot of help with that from a lot of people.”

I tapped his book and asked him if its recent release was the reason for the
latest attacks on him by Freed and Spencer, since it focused on the Ahousaht
land theft and their role in his professional destruction.

“Oh geez, poor Phil and Foster don’t know what they’re doing. They’re
shooting at shadows, seeing me in anyone who mentions dead Indian kids.
Maybe it’s their latent guilt and shame speaking.

Anybody who gets away with a terrible wrong is eventually driven crazy by it,
especially when it involves the mass psychosis of a Group Crime. I often think
of that whenever I see all those silly church leaders carrying on about how
everything is healed and reconciled now with the Indians. They aren’t just
hypocrites and criminals. They’re deeply dissociated people, and quite crazy.”
He smiled and added, “I’ve worked on psych wards. Trust me, I know all the
signs.”

But why now, I asked him.

“I don’t know, ultimately. Probably there’s stuff going on we don’t see, new
garbage coming to the surface that’s making the perps gun shy. Their stupid
TRC whitewash didn’t work …”

“Truth and Reconciliation Commission?”

“Yeah” he answered. “Like some Naked Emperor, Canada is still strutting

around officially like everything’s all better now. But under that is a deep
rage with ourselves. We’re past the denial stage of our Group Death, and now
we’re into raw anger. One day soon it will collapse into acceptance that our
time is over, that there is a judgement on us. I’ve come to realize that what
I’ve really been doing for over twenty years is conducting an exorcism and
funeral ceremony for my own people.”
I remarked that perhaps that’s why some Canadians hate and fear his name
so much.

“Don’t believe what you read on the internet” he answered, smiling again.

I asked him what he knew about the Twelve Mile Club, and he lost his smile.

“The Ahousaht Indians first warned me about them, the year after I got to
Port Alberni. They even named who was involved from my church: all of the
old West Coast Marine Mission clergymen who toured the Indian villages on
the Thomas Crosby mission boat. They include the same men who had me
fired and wrecked my life, and their buddies. They’re still active members,
from what I’ve pieced together. They knew I’d eventually find out about
them. They’re child killers. I don’t put anything past them. And their best
defense is that nobody wants to believe this evil goes on.”

I’d like to say that my two solid months of investigative research have cast
more of a light on that evil, but mostly it’s left me facing a wall. And by that I
mean more than the official denial and cover up that prevails at every level of
our country. The wall is in me as well. An immovable barrier seems to stand
inside me, preventing me from acting on the horror of it so that I can help
stop this murderous system. My job is to uncover and write and inform, but I
must do much more than that if I am to call myself a human being.

This prompted me to ask Kevin the question that so many others do, seeking a
clue to the mystery of how he has done all that he has.

“One thing just led to another” he began with his usual self-effacing manner.
“Once you see the wrong you can’t pretend it’s not there … ”

“But you never gave up” I interrupted in frustration. “How did that person
you were keep going, when you’d lost everything?”

After a long pause he said,

“I don’t know. I just knew that I had to, there was too much at stake, too
many lives on the line, starting with my own, and my children, and lots of
people who depended on me. But it cost me my life. That young man was
killed. And here I am.”

“Here I am, God” I said quietly, quoting the prophet Isaiah. “Send me.”
Kevin smiled again.
…………………
Epilogue

Sometimes I think that only a future generation will fully appreciate the truth
of what I’ve written about, and of what Kevin Annett has embodied. Neither
that truth nor Kevin have yet received the acknowledgement and recognition
that a mature and genuinely “healed” culture would bestow on its fallen
children and on its homegrown heroes. But truth is the one thing that outlasts
time, having a momentum all of its own, as do the pure in heart who embody
it. And so I end this piece with an abiding hope in the future because that’s all
we have left; and with an appreciation for Kevin Annett that words alone
cannot impart.

I leave this in the hands of those of you who can do more than simply
understand.
………………
Sarah J. Webster is the pseudonym of a syndicated journalist and adviser to
alternative media networks on four continents. She has been nominated for
journalism excellence awards on numerous occasions.
Posted by Thavam