The Wholly Liable

By Ron Myers

Growing up in the beautiful State of Idaho, Ron suffered an ugly childhood. Against the odds, he became Special Assistant to the Governor of Idaho where he wrote abuse legislation and lobbied for its passage, never knowing what force was driving him. What began as a quest for truth and understanding led to a shocking discovery. Over the course of 12 years, Ron probed his and others' memories leading to some horrifying revelations, not least of which were theological roadblocks placed to prevent the pursuit of justice and the apathy of those involved. Ron's journey of soul-searching, his quest for truth and justice and his perceived need for salvation led him to Jerusalem, the center of the world's main religions, and the epicenter of the world's most intractable conflict; a place about which so many lies are told that one must study to know the truth. Ron chose a people that suffer collectively as he does personally. This is the story of one man's abuse and another's abuses, and also a commentary on the abuse of religion, the religious abuse of humanity and religion's role in the diminishment of the child. A challenging and enlightening book - this is one of the most important books that you will ever read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raider Publishing International
• Release date: Oct 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465829702

Book preview

The Wholly Liable

By Ron Myers

Published by Raider Publishing International at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 by Ron Myers

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

About the Author

I am not a Very Important Man, as importance is commonly rated. I do not have great wealth, control a big business, or occupy a position of great honor or authority.

Yet I may someday mold destiny. For it is within my power to become the most important man in the world in the life of a child. And every child is a potential atom bomb in human history.

A humble citizen like myself might have been the Scoutmaster of a Troop in which an undersized unhappy Austrian lad by the name of Adolph might have found a joyous childhood, full of the ideals of community, goodwill, and kindness. And the world would have been different.

A humble citizen like myself might have been the organizer of a Scout Troop in which a Russian boy called Joe Stalin might have learned the lessons of democratic cooperation.

These men would never have known that they had averted world tragedy, yet actually they would have been among the most important men who ever lived.

All about us are children. They are the makers of history, the builders of tomorrow. If I can have some part in guiding them

to the high road of noble character and constructive citizenship, I may prove to be the most important man in their lives, the most important man in my community.

A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove. But the world may be different, because I was important in the life of a child.

(Adapted from ‘Within My Power’ by Forest Witcraft, 1950.)

Acknowledgements

I must acknowledge my parents, Norman and Joyce, whose hateful hypocrisy and sinful silence, respectively, made the writing of this book a necessity. My quasi-sibling, Uncle Dan, and siblings Rick, Nancy, Tim and Ted also provided a necessary motivation. To them, I say, with all due sarcasm, Thanks for the love. You gave me nothing; now that’s all I’ve got.

To my American son, who grew up well and wise. Thanks for accepting me back into your life and for showing me that I’m not half as crazy as I had imagined. To Doctor Dan Rorman I owe a great deal of gratitude for keeping me stable and functional when things were most difficult. To my parents-in-law, I say, Thank you for your love and acceptance. It has meant a great deal and been of great comfort to me.

The Wholly Liable is dedicated, however, to MY family. To my children, who are the gauges of my performance as a person, as well as a parent. Your love has been the compass in the barren wilderness that is my soul. To Kelly, my wonderful wife, where would I be without you? It was first and foremost your unconditional love that helped me to break free of my father’s constraints and allowed me to be honest without limitation. Your belief in me never wavered; your indignation many times exceeded my own. You and our beautiful children make me thrice-blessed. I love you and thank you with everything that was able to survive my childhood and the life I had before I met you.

Raider Publishing International has honored me with its decision to publish the story of ‘just some guy who wants to change the world’. I am indebted to a receptionist at the London office who believed in my sincerity and gave me an ‘inside’ address. What can I say to Mister Baird who then salvaged the manuscript from his spam folder? Thank you for seeing in it enough value to warrant forwarding it to New York. To Mister Adam Salviani who also believed in a man he’s never met and has been with me every step of the way. To Vanessa in Cape Town who helped me tremendously with the editing, and to everyone who worked on the book, the words to express my appreciation elude me.

I am grateful for the use of quotes copyrighted by the following groups and individuals:

Supertramp; Alanis Morissette; Manic Street Preachers; Bono and U2; HBO and Sam Kinison; and, Mike and the Mechanics.

Foreword

In the beginning of Western civilisation, life was not so very civilized. Throughout Europe and in the European colonies abroad, adherents to the Universal Church (catholic) denounced non-conformists, confiscated wealth and executed persons at will for the cause of ‘purity of faith’. Every opposition to this monopoly was greeted with cries of ‘heresy’ and tens of thousands of good people were subjected to torture on ‘the Rack’ and slow, excruciating death over hot coals; the Church created Hell. The fear implanted in the uneducated public was total. If man could do this, then God’s Hell must be much more tortuous. The Church cemented its position with the doctrine of Original Sin; we are all born ‘guilty’ (i.e. prejudged to Hell), and only by obedience to the Church can we escape the flames. Scientists, inventors, artists and simple seekers-of-truth were punished severely, even unto death. Thus, we were given The Holy Inquisition and The Dark Ages.

The Reformation did well to weaken the Church in the ‘spiritual’ realm. Protestants, however, did not forsake ‘witch-hunts’ and the like, and continued with torture and burning for heretics. The Church was weakened further by the emergence of independent kingdoms, which began to reduce the Church’s territory and political influence. The culmination of these processes was the declaration by the United States that church and state would by separated by law. However, memories of The Inquisition live on even in my hometown in the guise of the Order of De Molay. A youth movement of the Freemasons, the Order endeavors to instill Jacques De Molay’s example of fidelity and loyalty. De Molay, the 23rd and last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, fell victim to the envious greed of King Phillip IV of France and the weakness of Pope Clement on Friday the 13th of October, 1307 (probably the origin of the ‘Friday the 13th’ superstition). The Templars, guardians of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, had amassed great wealth, introduced banking as we still know it today and were answerable only to the Pope. Suddenly, they found themselves accused of heresy and many confessed under torture. De Molay may have been subjected to, and survived, crucifixion as part of his ordeal; the image on the Shroud of Turin may be his. He later recanted his confession and was burned alive at the stake in Paris on the 18th of March, 1314. From the flames, he called out, God knows who is wrong and has sinned. Soon a calamity will occur to those who have condemned us to death.

Pope Clement died a month later. The French king met his end in a hunting accident the same year.

At present, Thank the Law, it is illegal to roast someone like me over hot coals. There remains in the collective consciousness, however, the fear of damnation, torture and Hell for being judged ‘unworthy’, and the idea that babies are headed for Hell unless we ‘save’ them. Religious fundamentalism and intolerance are fact. They are pervasive in society, restrictive and confusing in the life of a child. Be they Jewish, Christian or Muslim, they have the same attributes and should be criticized as one and the same. Fundamentalism is to take a book, to say it is God’s and to apply it literally. It is devastating to be raised by people who are already in possession of ‘The Truth’ from which deviation is not allowed. Teaching the child to torment himself because he is not ‘worthy’ is the worst cruelty of all.

I was born in 1960 on the Eve of the Passover, the celebration that commemorates freedom from slavery in Egypt. But, I was never free from bondage. I was dedicated as a Christian on Easter Sunday, the day of the Resurrection, but wasn’t allowed to live my own life even once. On the announcement of my Dedication to the Lord appears the familiar quote from the Bible; John, 3:16. For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. I was presented in order to show the Lord that I would be a believer and today, I believe wholeheartedly. I believe that the Son was never the Father’s to give!

My hope is that this book will be deemed worthy of burning by fundamentalist clergy.

Ron Myers

Jerusalem

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Old Testimony

Genesis

Exodus

Ridiculous

Penitence

Pro Bono Publico

Rehabilitation - I

Rehabilitations - II

The Holy Land

Revelation

Sacrificing the Son

New Testimony

Resurrection

The Promised Land

Testimonials

The Acts of the Eldest

The Book of Daniel

First Timothy

Impotent Law - I

Impotent Law - II

Second Timothy

Mea Culpa

Last Letters

The Shunning

Judgment

Tranquility

Old Testimony

Genesis

I have memories from 2 years of age; I always have. They have made my life a nightmare. Taken apart to their four components, the memories consist of: extreme physical and emotional distress as my bottom burns; a boy and little girl outside on the window trellis, though I desperately wanted them inside; my little mattress being made of frightening, wriggly, slimy snakes; and, just a little bit later, Satan (a glowing skull) at the back porch window which caused me unspeakable terror but didn’t bother my father at all. He was the only other person present. Daddy said that they were nightmares from the Devil that could be resisted if I was good enough and called upon the name of Jesus. I would lie awake at night murmuring, ‘in the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus…’ Eventually, I would fall asleep from fatigue and from that I suppose, I became convinced that he was right.

My parents, Norm and Joyce, were born and raised in Spokane, Washington. Maybe it was because of their youth or maybe because they lived downwind of the government’s open-air releases of radioactivity from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation during their adolescence, but they didn’t have a clue about parenting. Mom didn’t get the chance to finish high school because of a pregnancy, which became a miscarriage. She was seventeen when they got married. He was barely nineteen. They moved to California where her sister lived and where her brother flew for the US Navy. They had three of their five children before she was twenty-one; I was the third. Aside from the above paragraph, I don’t have many memories from California because nothing happened that could surpass that trauma.

Just before my fifth birthday, we moved to Idaho. The state name is derived from the natives’ phrase ‘Ee-Da-How’, which means, ‘the sun comes over the mountains’. It is a place of tremendous beauty from the mountains to the valleys. A land teeming with wildlife and rivers, a land of four full seasons, each more beautiful than the last in an unending cycle. We made the move because ‘God told Daddy in a dream and even showed him exactly the house’. He wasn’t yet 28 and she was younger. They already had their five children, ranging in age from three months to seven years, when we moved. I fell in the middle of the sandwich. As we crested the Owyhee Mountains of south-west Idaho, we pulled to the side of the road to survey Treasure Valley below. It was twilight and the sparse lights of the farms and ranches were beginning to twinkle in the growing darkness. The early spring chill turned to an awful shiver up my spine as Daddy declared that he could feel the presence of ‘The Prince of the Valley’, apparently a demon of some rank, though not Satan himself. We, he stated, were sent here by God to prevail over this ‘super-spirit’. I was so scared that I very nearly pooped in my pants!

Our house sat on ten acres and had a barn and a shed built close behind. There were no neighbors or kids within a mile. The telephone was a party-line that was shared with neighbors. To know if the call was for us, we had to count the number of rings; two long rings followed by one short ring told the neighbors that the call was for Myers. Our address was simply: RFD 1 (Rural Fire District 1), Nampa, Idaho. Nampa was actually four miles away, but somehow the mail found its way to us. From the Shoshone natives’ word for moccasin or footprint, Nampa began life as a railroad town in 1884 with the completion of the Oregon Short Line Railroad. Ethnic-cleansing had been completed two decades prior with the last of the ‘Snakes’ (racist immigrant term for area natives) being herded to the Fort Hall Reservation nearly 200 miles to the east. Until the completion of the Phyllis Canal, which brought the water necessary to make the land productive, it served mainly as a supply depot for the territory’s gold rushes. Idaho was admitted to the Union as a state in 1890. Nampa was incorporated the same year with a population of more than fifty families. It was called ‘New Jerusalem’ by many because of the strong religious focus of its citizens. New Jerusalem is, in religious terminology, a synonym for Heaven. Of course, the realization of the white man’s Heaven sent the red man to Hell.

Having come from Los Angeles, I wasn’t used to the isolation or to being able to see the horizon. The sun would rise over the mountains above Boise and it would set at the other side of the valley over the Owyhees, most evenings in the deepest shades of red. Treasure Valley, located at the western end of the Snake River Plain, is actually about fifty miles wide if measured from the sunrise to the sunset. The valley narrows at Farewell Bend where it crosses the Oregon border and the Snake River turns north. The speed of the Snake’s flow increases continually, finally reaching a torrent in the rapids of Hell’s Canyon more than 8000 feet below the peaks of the Seven Devils. Deeper than the Grand Canyon by about 2000 feet, it is the deepest gorge in North America. But that was worlds away from our small farm on the valley floor where the feeling of wide-open space gave me the illusion of freedom. However, as Daddy had no qualms about working his children, it was only an illusion. We were set to shovelling manure out of the shed. The oldest of us kids was Rick, not yet eight. When the shed was cleared of it, we had to start on the much- larger barn which he wanted to turn into a cabinet shop. As he wasn’t having any luck finding employment, the task took on some urgency. The work was back-breaking. I was only four years old, and I still had the nightmare that had begun two years earlier, every single night. ‘In the name of Jesus; in the name of Jesus; in the name of Jesus…’

As our poverty deepened, we turned to gleaning the surrounding fields of anything the farm machines might have missed; potatoes, onions, even walnuts. We walked and walked, occasionally stooping to pick up something found to be edible. We drank water from a well that was fed by the Snake River Aquifer into which the government was pumping ‘low-level’ radioactive waste upstream at the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Laboratory; a cluster of reactors more numerous than any other site in the world. We got a cow and she drank the aquifer water too, and then we drank her milk. For meat protein, we started to raise rabbits and they drank the water too. With Rick and my sister Nancy in school, more and more of the daily chores fell on my shoulders; feed the rabbits, clean their cages, shake the cow’s cream into butter, et cetera. Daddy would say, and say again, No work-ey, no eat-ey.

That it was phrased in the vernacular of a three-year-old would give an indication of just how small we were. My little brothers shadowed me, but they were really too small to be of much help. Daddy used the ‘hang and club’ method of butchering those little rodent rabbits that I so dearly loved. He would hang them in the shed by their hind legs, ten or more in a row. Then he would club them behind the ears; WHACK, WHACK, WHACK. Dead or just unconscious, he slit them open and poured their guts onto the floor; I was sick. When he had finished skinning them, I had to clean it all up, dig a hole, and bury it deep enough so dogs wouldn’t get to it. And then there were the kittens.

On a farm, cats multiply nearly as fast as rabbits. They’d be born, open their eyes and grow hair, and become just ever so loveable, and we did love them. When the older kids were at school and the chores done, I would sit for hours with my two little brothers stroking the kittens. We marvelled at their ability to return our love through their non-stop purring. Daddy exterminated the first few litters by stuffing our loved ones into a gunny-sack and drowning them in the cow’s trough. Once he got scratched though, so he devised a method whereby kitty-killing could be another of my chores. I was to take and