from July 17, 2009…

By Richard C. Cook…

During the two years since I retired as a federal government analyst, I have published two books and over 60 articles on public policy issues. In January 2007 I published “Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age.” I then began to write about the economic crisis, including recommendations for radical change to our debt-based bank-centered monetary system. I wrote through the experience gained in the field of public finance during 22 years of service with the U.S. Treasury Department. This culminated in publication of “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” I now feel I have gone far enough in commenting on current events, as I turn increasingly to my commitment to spirituality that has been central in my life since childhood. I plan to continue writing, now only as topics are revealed to me through my spiritual practice. My first such offering is to relate a dream I had recently.

Jesus Christ is sitting on a white horse. He looks like the popular Biblical Jesus: long hair, a beard, a white robe. I see Him and his horse in profile from a moderate distance. He and the horse are absolutely still. He radiates strength, stillness, and confidence. In every direction, spreading to the horizon, is rubble, the remnants of human civilization, piled a couple of feet high on the ground. The wreckage is vast, of a reddish hue, so annihilated that no specific object is recognizable. Smoke or mist wafts from the rubble. In the distance, on the horizon, is a pale reddish light as nightfall approaches.

I feel no fear. I feel that all is as it must be. The sight of the Lord brings awe and peace.
I make no attempt in this article to interpret what I have seen in my dream though the wreckage obviously pertains to the existing condition of the world. Whether the desolation is prophetic of the onrushing disaster to civilization many are predicting I cannot say. The other alternative is that the rubble symbolizes the spiritual condition of present-day humanity. Many of the people on earth today, especially those in charge of society, are materialists and atheists, consumed by fear, selfishness, violence, egotism, militarism, and greed, spiritually either deeply asleep or dead, destroying through negligence whole nations and even perhaps the planet we live on.

Then there are the many who passively acquiesce in the ongoing horror or those who try to cover it up through entertainment, denial, and triviality. Yet Jesus Christ is here, watching and waiting, perhaps allowing events to take their course, but available to inspire those who yet have eyes to see. The white horse is reminiscent of the Book of Revelations: “And I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” I also think of the song Johnny Cash sang in his old age: “The Man Comes Around,” where, at the end, Cash speaks those same words. The fact that in my dream Jesus sat astride the horse makes me realize that He was the one who through His resurrection conquered death. But who will now turn to Him? Who will “seek first the Kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness”? Now is the time to “come out and be separate.”

A world where war is viewed as normal, where human beings knowingly and willingly torture other human beings to death then lie about it, where governments terrorize their own populations, where millions are deliberately subjected to addictive legal and illegal drugs, where the food supply is degraded for profit, where radiation is purposely introduced into the environment through devices like depleted uranium, where space is viewed as the ultimate high ground for weapons deployment, where assassination is official policy, where pandemics are declared to market dangerous vaccines, where trillions are lavished on financial institutions while families are denied adequate income, where initiative is smothered by taxes and regulations, where justice is bought and sold, where the laws favor mainly the rich, where the media put people to sleep with pablum and nonsense, and where the intellectuals justify the status quo is a world whose time is up.

The Man Comes Around by Johnny Cash

Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal policy analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. Richard was born in Missoula, Montana, grew up in Michigan and Virginia, and is a graduate of the College of William and Mary, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Space Shuttle, documenting the “greatest tragedy of the Space Age” in his book Challenger Revealed. After serving at Treasury for 21 years, Richard became a vocal critic of the private bank-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform, published in 2007. He also served as an adviser to the late Stephen Zarlenga, founder and head of the American Monetary Institute, with whom he co-authored the American Monetary Act which Congressman Dennis Kucinich codified and introduced in Congress as the National Emergency Education and Defense Act—NEED Act—of 2011. Currently on the books and ready to implement, the NEED Act advocates for replacing the debt-based banking system run by the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency implemented through DIRECT FEDERAL SPENDING and a CITIZENS’ DIVIDEND.

Richard also worked for several years as a seasonal host for the Maryland Park Service. He and his wife Karen reside in Washington County, Maryland, near South Mountain and the Appalachian Trail, where they attend St. James Catholic Church and tend their organic vegetable and pollinator gardens. See Richard’s acclaimed new book, Our Country, Then and Now (Clarity Press, 2023). Richard has Native American and European ancestry.