Mike Ruppert has shot himself. This makes me very sad, but I certainly won't think any less of him for his decision to take his own life. Everybody has that option. I'll remember him for the happy times we had together, and for the big difference he's made in so many people's lives, opening their eyes to what's really happening in the world.
20 comments:
Whyyyy?????
Desperate sadness today at this news. A true warrior, suffering great grief at what is happening.
A true, good man.
RIP for a noble man who always followed what he believed was the truth to its most awful conclusions. Crossing the Rubicon was a transformative read. When I was a kid, Carl Sagan and Madeline L'Engle expanded my mind in wild new dimensions. Ruppert repeated this feat as an adult, taking me to darker conclusions. I'm grateful for his sharing, dark as it is.
Derek
dex3703.wordpress.com
Mike, I will redouble my efforts for you and the rest of us in turning this ship around.
Much love, sorrow and peace to you and those you left behind.
~ Caelan MacIntyre
Although I did not follow him and remember hearing him being interviewed on late night AM radio decades ago, I was very sad upon hearing the news of his death.
Respectfully, I'm curious about the circumstances. Working in hospitals it's almost common to see a male of his race and approximate age, choose that route of exit.
Condolences to his family, loved ones, friends and listeners.
I am so sorry that he had that level of pain, and that he carried it mostly alone.
A big loss.
Sad. Here is a tribute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWXbKOAHANQ.
Mike gave me "The Map" in Crossing the Rubicon in 2004. It changed my life. I chose to leave the US, settled in a remote land where I am now a citizen. It is 2014 all over, and nowhere is perfect. But, I will be forever grateful to Mike for revealing the hard truths behind the headlines. Godspeed, Mike
All things considered, I, too, find myself surprisingly sad that Mike is no longer with us--though he, just as everyone we encounter on our paths, will be some part of who we all are; a larger part for some of us.
I think that in the end, many of his impassioned monologues and diatribes will largely be proven prescient and accurate... And if that is the case, it seems the only reasonable approach to the situation is to live for the moment, regardless of how that looks to those who would perpetuate the status quo to infinity.
He will be missed.
COLLAPSE (Michael's last words on the theatrical movie trailer) "…you have to believe, not hope, not pray, that there's a way out of it, and you're going to find it." My takeaway from this tragic news is: do as Michael says, not as Michael does.
Sometimes you don't know how much you had come to care about someone until this happens. I was a long time listener of his weekly radiocast, and I mean from the days he started it years ago, and caught it almost every week, usually by download later. I saw right off how gifted he was and what a valuable message he brought each week and through his well crafted books. You couldn't help but like him. He could go off on ego tangents but his overall empathetic, sincere, and kind nature won many folks as solid fans. You felt he was very grounded as "one of us".
I called in once to ask a question about UFOs (his father and mine were both air force pilots and both had seen UFOs) and when I finally got through my wife ripped out the headphone jack to hear it herself and immediately awful feedback started with the cell phone. As I desperately tried to find the jack under the desk it turned into a drawn out comedy of errors with Mike patiently saying "you need to turn your radio down" and finally I ran into the kitchen. A lesser man would have just hung upon this moron who could not manage to even turn his radio down.
We folks who were long time listeners witnessed his highs and lows. His depths of emotion could be profound and I told my wife I thought he would eventually take his own life. Even as he evolved to a different message, more towards spirituality and beyond collapse oriented issues, I still tuned in because he was just fun to listen to. He always spoke like he was right there having a conversation with you personally. And some of his insights were priceless. His ability to trace the big picture perspective, yet present it for the guy on the street to get his head around, was a gift.
This is a big loss to society and a tragedy that the pain finally drove him away. I suspect his recent inner journeys gave him confidence he was going to a better place..... I sure hope so. Booze wasn't his thing but, man..... this makes me want to go have my own private mini-wake for the man. I will miss his weekly presence immensely. He began addressing his weekly radio audience as "his family" towards the end and long time listeners believed it too. Truly: RIP Mike and vaya con dios.
A good, thoughtful man. His passing reminds us that many many creative, insightful people are overwhelmed by their own gifts or perceptions. The list of artists, thinkers, and scientists who opt out as he has is long.
In Godspeed, Michael. I was glad to have briefly met you.
It shows that anyone who dares to tread down this road needs some sort of spiritual practice. For example--don't get mad--being a member of a spiritual community like a church. Something. Someone can't just be a smart. There has to be some process in their life to protect them from suicide. Michael Ruppert wasn't the only one. Gary Webb committed suicide before him. Michael Ruppert and Gary Webb worked together on the CIA/crack cocaine scandal in 1996. Gary Webb was the reporter from the San Jose Mercury News who resurrected the old story from the Reagan administration. One has to figure out how to remain happy and healthy in the midst of the insanity.
Thanks for passing the word. Mike's Rubicon was a wake up call for me.
One should not take life too seriously, I mean what you read in the news or global events or corruption and such like. Say you lived in latin America or Africa or somewhere where corruption and so on is normal, everday life and brutal military takeovers are commonplace. People focus on family life, their own culture and what-not. Maybe this ideal of an ex-policeman and US patriot of all his ideals going wrong is what gets someone going down. Perhaps his generation went through this thing. In my generation the ideals never got built up(Xer). It was cynicism from the start so personal life is everything. Perhaps his tragedy is a general thing of a generation. He just felt it more as he was caught in the middle of it due to his profession and saw what really happened, the dark side of corrupted idealism.
One should start with spirituality from an earlier age. As another commenter said Ruppert was only more into spiritual stuff later. I got into that seriously around 30. Perhaps being under such stress as author and public figure (newsletter,etc.) is too much and a dramatic exit is easier than just slowly declining into obscurity. It is a shame that actually nothing much changed which he fought for. Things just get worse with imperial expansion and expansion of wealth to the few. But seeing everything negatively is bad for the soul. So that when you focus on yourself, gardening and taking a walk, prayer and such then turn off all media and play cards or chess for example with friends then none of the nonsense matters. Doing Tai Chi for example calms one or listening to or playing music. Life meaning has to as concrete as possible and not abstract. I work physically and when I do a good job and feel my body flexible, strong and sleep well then I am satisfied. The news is a hobby. Chasing ghosts of bad guys will get us nowhere. Snowden knew well enough to escape to Moscow or he would have gone down. Otherwise he would have had to keep quiet and quit his job and maybe drown in alcohol the disappointment at betrayal of the populace by his govt. away. At any rate every generation has theri crisis of conscience in the system.
The current Ukraine crisis is a sort of crisis for me and my family as Isee only lies in the so-called free press. I suppose Mike Ruppert felt that way all the time as he understood "the system" intimately. Most of just accept life as it is and could care less, like zoo animals, as long as we are fed. You only notice the contradictions as in the Matrix film when you fallinto a particualr hole where you get trapped. Some people got a house loan that blew up in 2008 and they probably turned against the system then. Millions of students will be caught in debt and see the American Dream as a scam.
Rome fell and then spirituality became the big thing. Everyone saw taht they themselves were to blame, not some "other" corrupt people. We are corrupt wanting it all to go on as it has done, always bigger and better: "progress". When it stops then we will only have ourelves to blame and to help each other. RIP Mike.
Shit !
RIP
He was very articulate with a broad focus, and the collapse doc clearly remains one pointing to most of the interrelationship.
RIP Mike
“John Michael Greer @ The Archdruid Report, with a macabre thought for “Baby Boomers” this American Spring (Parentheses mine):
"The only question that still remains to be settled is how many of the people who are awake to the imminence of (industrial society collapse) crisis will rise to the challenge, and how many will fail to do so.
The suicide of peak oil writer Mike Ruppert two days ago puts a bit of additional emphasis on that last point. I never met Ruppert (also the author of “Crossing the Rubicon" an early exhaustive study of the World Trade Center Attack, and more importantly, it’s root causations), though we corresponded back in the days when his “From The Wilderness” website was one of the few places on the internet that paid any attention at all to peak oil, and I don’t claim to know what personal demons drove him to put a bullet through his brain.
Over the last eight years, though, as the project of this blog has brought me into contact with more and more people who are grappling with the predicament of our time, I’ve met a great many people whose plans for dealing with a postpeak world amount to much the same thing. Some of them are quite forthright about it, which at least has the virtue of honesty. Rather more of them conceal the starkness of that choice behind a variety of convenient evasions, the insistence that we’re all going to die soon anyway being far and away the most popular of these just now.
I admit to a certain macabre curiosity about how that will play out in the years ahead. I’ve suspected for a while now, for example, that the baby boomers will manage one final mediagenic fad on the way out, and the generation that marked its childhood with coonskin caps and hula hoops and its puberty with love beads and Beatlemania will finish with a fad for suicide parties, in which attendees reminisce to the sound of the tunes they loved in high school, then wash down pills with vodka and help each other tie plastic bags over their heads…”
Greer's post, the End of Employment
I would add, Regarding Mass suicides, by the children of Baby Boomers in this case. When I worked at a local coffee shop a few years ago with a counter staff of UCSC students, EVERY ONE OF THEM over the four years I worked there had at least one friend who had committed suicide in their still-short lives.
In Japan, group suicides among teens has become all the rage.
The children… are they “Canaries in the mineshaft”? Or the first outcropping of industrial age self-annihilation?
Mike felt more like family because of his common war for truth. I feel very sad about this.
My soul and his are very related.
See you on the other side.
What a shock!.I was about to download the lifeboat hour it's bloody tragic.
He seemed to me like a guy who had the courage to really, really give a shit.
RIP Mike.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lgj6q-x5yOI
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