Michael Ruppert Has Died

We always knew it could come to this.

To write about Mike requires the tranquility of recollection but at the moment, all is turmoil.

Mike, you told us, “Evolve or perish.” Yet in Apocalypse Man you merged them, speaking of death as the ultimate evolution. One day we’ll all find out whether that is, in fact, the case but it’s not the message you used to impart!

Among the emails that have tumbled in this evening is a wonderful link which is sorely needed at such a time: Hope and Courage http://www.oilempire.us/hope.html. Accompanying it, the following quote from Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List:

“Where’s the electric fence?” Clara asked the woman. To her distraught mind, it was a reasonable question to ask, and Clara had no doubt that the friend, if she had any sisterly feeling, would point the exact way to the wires. The answer the woman gave was just as crazed, but it was one that had a fixed point of view, a
balance, a perversely sane core.

“Don’t kill yourself on the fence, Clara,” the woman urged her. “If you do that, you’ll never know what happened to you.”

It has always been the most powerful of answers to give to the intending suicide. Kill yourself and you’ll never find out how the plot ends. Clara did not have any vivid interest in the plot. But somehow the answer was adequate. She turned around. When she got back to her barracks, she felt more troubled than when she’d set out to look for the fence. But her Cracow friend had — by her reply — somehow cut her off from suicide as an option. LINK

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The hardest part of this, for me, is that everything I did with or for Mike was in an effort to prevent this day from ever happening. CollapseNet was literally formed to provide a means for Mike to make a living. In doing so, he was brought back into a world of despair that he thought he had retired from. He absorbed the pain of the world on a daily basis until he could not take it any longer, and he left CollapseNet when it got to be too much. But that pain kept following him, and there is nothing that anyone could do about it for him.

He told me many times that Jenna saved his life after Venezuela. I reached out to him in 2009 to help resurrect his career and his honor, and help get him back on his feet again. I know his death is not on me, but I still can’t help feeling, unlike his experience with Jenna, that I failed…or that by “helping” him, it merely brought him back on his path of self-destruction.

My grandfather once told me, “Never mourn the death of a fool,” and suicide has always fit into that category to me. But not this time…this time, it just really fucking hurts.

I’m so sorry you’re gone, Mike. I hope you are finally at peace, and one with Gaia.

Wes