The Art of Richard Miklenic
© Richard Miklenic
There were many times when the dark and immediate days of the Covid madness in New Zealand seemed like an enveloping and impenetrable miasma. I remember, in an attempt to relieve myself from that feeling of suffocation, watching an old Italian movie — Il Sorpasso, directed by Dino Risi — over and over, as if summoning to myself a world that could never be again, a world of people, of raillery, comedy and togetherness, gathering at beaches and in restaurants and playing off one another for good and ill. It was a summoning of life.

During that time I was able to post various musings about the battle we faced, not knowing how they might be received and by whom, but following my own sense that doing so meant engaging against the enemy that sought to sequester us and split us apart and forcibly impose their evils.

Just recently I received the following email from a stranger from another far corner of the world. Its eloquence and message affected me powerfully and I have decided — with the author's permission — to share this missive with my readers.

Please take the remarkable and cogent testimony of Richard Miklenic to heart. I am both grateful and privileged to have had a role to play in this brave man's life.

Emanuel E Garcia, MD

***

Message from Richard Miklenic

Dear Dr. Garcia,

I am a seventy year old man residing in Parksville, BC, Canada, a small, seaside town on the east side of Vancouver Island. I am writing to inquire if you would be interested in receiving one of my contemplative photographs. It's much like a meme but of a serious nature. A covid era inspired image that I took and later enhanced with a thought provoking passage from one of your essays. As an avid reader of your work for the past several years, I'd also like to pay tribute to you as a professional and as an all round, good human being.

In the early stages of covid I discovered your submissions to globalresearch.ca., a news site I trust and one that I also keep as my home page. A reliable news organization that delivers outstanding journalism that informs rather than deceives. Finding people to communicate with, non-devotees that resisted being swept up in the covid hysteria was suffice to say a daunting task. What surprised and shocked my noncompliant self was having to bid farewell to the hearts and minds of so many people I trusted or thought I knew, those who fell victim to the lie and were taken out to sea without a hint of resistance, many of whom never returned. With each successive punishing mandate, the world became a lonelier place. As my social circle disintegrated, solitude increasingly assumed the lion's share of everyday existence. In my world, the world of a semi-retired bachelor, every few days or so one of your articles would graciously materialize on my screen like one of those life saving WWII morse code transmissions bleeping in at the last moment to save the day. Contemplating each essay placed me inside an oxygen tent for several hours. The relief I experienced in realizing I was less alone in the universe than I thought. There were others out there, like-minded, soulful individuals, maybe not close by, but they were real and they were alive, resisting this same madness, speaking in a language I understood.

When the covid injections were rolled out, I became a targeted individual. The health authority of the province I reside in deemed me "clinically vulnerable" due to me having received chemotherapy a year before. I received two letters from the office of Public Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry asking me to step up to the plate for my own health and for that (drum roll please), good ol' "Greater Good." My government who apparently was so concerned about my health, strongly suggested that I be amongst the first in line to get the injections, along with Indigenous peoples, "racialized" persons, (whatever that is), seniors, and the disabled. I had been attuned to their desire to mass vaccinate the populace for decades. Several years prior to the announcement of covid I started getting intuitive flashes from news articles. They, the hidden hand, were coming. Fast forward to 2020. Here it was, the forefront of their agenda staring me directly in the face. The first sign, a letter in my mailbox from Dr. Bonnie, a trojan horse, custom built for the province of British Columbia, its wooden interior and her pockets, both overflowing with fully loaded syringes. If I ignored her, would she soon be at my door? Government paper in hand, a sick feeling erupted in my stomach. I was now in their crosshairs. Intuition slammed me back against the wall, "Damn it boy, wake up!" What appeared to be modern day Canada, was not. In fact it was 1940's Germany all over again. The Aktion T4 campaign was back! Each letter, an invitation to attend to my own euthanasia, was given one way ticket to the shredder.

News reports suggested that federally funded encampments were under construction in various parts of the country to potentially house or isolate the unvaccinated, their true target being the vaccine hesitant, the part they refused to say out loud. Our so called Prime Minister despised anyone who resisted the globalist push to have you roll up your sleeve. It would have been comical if it weren't so tragic having to endure the smarmy, trust fund baby's daily issuance of orders telling millions how to live their lives when he himself had never so much as paid a utility bill in his life or cooked a meal for himself. I highly suspect, even to this day he hasn't a clue what it feels like to exercise his true humanity, to love and care for someone with the purity of his heart. My eyes rolled every time he took to the podium outside of Rideau Hall watching him spew sheer nonsense based on the script handed to him, I myself befuddled, "how do people even give this clown the time of day?" Yet unflinchingly he continued to flog the citizens of Canada with zeal, keeping in place life destroying restrictions that many people still today have not gotten out from under because they are either financially devastated or dead.


It seemed impossible to get him out of office. Despite numerous conflict of interest investigations, he miraculously rose to the top each and every time, like cream. To many Canadians, he was like vermin that kept coming back. Those capable of connecting the dots saw who and what he was but could do little about it. Shielded by sycophants, he bought and paid for or eliminated anyone who could checkmate him, all on the taxpayer dime and if that wasn't enough, he simply printed more dimes. The ramifications of his ever-increasing fervour hit home when more than a handful of very passionate Canadians had their livelihoods curtailed, were de-banked or were threatened with incarceration, sometimes all of the above for speaking too freely against the mandates or for opposing them altogether. Judging by his government's ever-increasing fervour, it was difficult not to become rattled by such events. Would he come for me too? I doubted he would but his shills certainly would. I imagined automatons in suits accompanied by a registered nurse in a white uniform carrying a medical bag showing up at my door. I had been a tall blade of grass in my life and they always get cut first. I have been a resistor, a rogue, a defiant child and now an old man, still very much capable of saying no, preferring to perish in a struggle with authority figures rather than cower on my knees in defeat before them. Uncertain as to how far the government would take this, I started rehearsing my final moments on this planet, the struggle at my door, my defiant NO sending tremors down the hallway. My saving grace, the ensuing darkness. Its arrival instantaneous. Pain would have no chance to register. My dignity, crafted and honed after a lifetime of weathering storms held close to my chest, lovingly protected and departing with me.

The photo, Car Coming, is of the avenue out front of my building. In the new normal, streets were no longer inconsequential places. They were transformed into avenues of risk. A pall descended upon my little town not unlike most towns and cities all over the world. Akin to those scenes in western movies when shortly after the word is disseminated that a gunslinger is about to show up, everyone flees and shutters close. Any car in motion seemed out of place. Walking alone invited suspicion, and I frequently walked alone. In my periphery, I could spot people's fear-filled eyes peering through cracks in venetian blinds as I passed by.

Car Coming
© Richard Miklenic
On a gloomy day in March I looked onto the avenue and snapped this photo. It wasn't a particularly good photo but the car's headlamps struck a chord of fear in me. Two tiny pinpricks growing bigger and brighter in their approach against the backdrop of a dead street on a dying afternoon. My imagination took over. Who was the driver of that car? Where were they heading and why? Were they coming for me? Would they ever come for me? Were they coming to have another go at me? It wasn't that long ago, in 1963 when I had been violently restrained against my will by the community health nurse and two volunteer Karen cohorts.

While being stabbed in the arm at seven years of age with a gargantuan, reusable, steel syringe was excruciatingly painful, it was not my most immediate concern.The indignation of having my sovereignty dismissed was. These adults were supposedly ones I could trust. For them to disregard my screams, my adamant refusal, my NO, was the worst thing they or anyone could have done to me. With tears drying, in the absence of my parents who might have protected me, I recall walking away thinking that I was actually on my own in life. No one was coming to save me, and with that epiphany, the resounding clack of a switch being turned off inside my head, an antiquated, heavy, dull circuit breaker shutting down in some dusty, abandoned basement. A boy, forever changed, swearing to himself, "No one, absolutely no one, will ever do this to me again!" The event, dutifully recorded, became a black stain on my soul that I have never been able to wash out. Earmarked in my memory with the following label, "Defensive Rage Potential Resulting From State Sponsored Childhood Trauma."

Several days later one of your essays entered my world.

I plucked a passage from it and married it to the photo on my desktop. Standing back to look at it, it worked. I would send it to others, hoping that my hyper vigilance would spark a riot within them. Dark forces were at their doorsteps. Your words took the photo to a whole new level, giving it a synergistic push that it could not achieve on its own.

The passage was one of many I could have chosen. Since day one I have admired by your ability to transform wisdom into text with such eloquence and naturalness. No chaff to be found. Your essays are works of art. In the lines and between them, evidence of an innate disposition to heal and better this world. Your acute sensitivity and impeccable attention to detail inspires within me the very same.

Gratefully,

Richard Miklenic

Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He has authored articles ranging from explorations of psychoanalytic technique, the psychology of creativity in music (Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Delius), and politics. He is also a poet, novelist and theatrical director. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021 after working in the public sector in New Zealand. Visit his substack at https://newzealanddoc.substack.com/.