The Walkers across Massachusetts for 9-11 Truth Need Your Approving Smile

by Mary W Maxwell and Mark Miller

Australians who are old enough to remember Cliff Young’s Sydney to  Melbourne run in 1983  will recall the excitement it engendered. Quite unexpectedly –  with the help of radio stations — residents along the route came out at all hours of the night and day to applaud and encourage the 61-year old runner, a potato farmer from Queensland.

I [Mary] hope the same will happen to the two septuagenarians who are walking a long way to get people’s attention as to the unfinished business of “investigating” 9-11. (Personally I think we dissidents have done all the necessary investigating already, but Mark and Bruce are being very proper.)  Here is what Mark said in the Berkshire Eagle:

“I lent David Griffin’s book to a friend who had been a flight engineer for two airlines for most of his career, but he wouldn’t countenance this alternative view. Rather than refute Griffin’s thesis, he wouldn’t talk about it. I’ve given perhaps 25 copies of the 50-page ‘Beyond Misinformation: What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7,’ put out by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (and available for free on its website) to people with scientific or engineering backgrounds. Most of them won’t discuss it. A few say it makes sense, but those who criticize it won’t sit down and go through it line by line saying where it’s invalid.”

In Gumshoe’s first article about the 9-11 walk, I up-played the good parts, the friendly honkers and even the donors  of “$20 each” in the rain. Maybe I should also have mentioned the driver who did not honk but yelled “F… you, A..holes.”

In any case, I now quote from the diary of the walkers, which you can read in full here.

This is Day 10 from Mark Miller (April 22):

“Do you know who Mike Juliano is?”

The questioner has pulled his old Ford Ranchero over to the side of a suburban back road in Braintree. Heavyset and wearing a cowboy hat and sunglasses and a short-sleeved white shirt, speaking through a salt and pepper beard. Out for a Sunday drive or going to church?

“We’re not local,” I say to indicate we don’t know Mike.

“He was incinerated in the Towers … thanks for your help.”

Then he pulls away in the direction we’re walking. It’s about 9 this Sunday morning, and we continue plodding along. The Ranchero driver has seen only a couple of strangers wearing “9/11 TRUTH” signs and had to stop.

He might be typical of the friendly people we encounter if we had the luxury of talking with them for even that long – about 20 seconds.

–   –   –

“What IS the truth?” This yesterday afternoon from the thirty-something driver of a clean late-model pickup truck as he waits for a green arrow signal to let him take a left off of Union Street in (I think) Braintree still. Not much time to fill him in on the whole truth.

“We don’t know, but it’s not what the government says,” I shout across a couple of lanes, and he is off, the light having changed.

It is a good question that we get once or twice a day. The pejoratives “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorists” is a handy way to put down truthers who are trying to figure out 9/11 themselves. I don’t like to get bogged down in who did what, why, how, where, etc. What is certain, I say, is that the government’s accounts of the crashes at all three sites – the World Trade Center, the Pentagon headquarters and the field in rural Pennsylvania – can’t POSSIBLY be true. Why all these lies, lies, lies?

Reinforced by the uncurious, parroting news media, or we wouldn’t be out here walking across Massachusetts.

–  –  –

“I know who did it … the Bush family!” shouts a fairly well-heeled guy in his forties in a late-model car who has slowed down while driving in the other direction this afternoon. He smiles widely. Then he is on his happy way.

Who knows?

An hour or so later we check in at a chain motel where the front desk clerks checked out our signs and were delighted to see and talk with us. One had studied the atrocity for awhile and then gave up.

Yesterday at a Chili’s the young black female version of a maitre di beamed at us when she spotted our signs. All waitpersons were positive. One had done research on the Kennedy assassination and liked my assessment that the Kean Commission report on 9/11 didn’t have any more validity than the Warren Commission report on JFK in Dallas. A teenage patron several booths away smiled at us, took our picture, and gave a big thumbs up. We get a lot of thumb up from people in cars, often accompanied by toots. But it was nice to see it from someone in the same room. Gave her a big smile and a thumbs up back.

Well, it’s about 6:30 and we’ll head out for supper. Seventeen or so miles today.

Lest We Forget Cliff Young

Mary Maxwell adds these excerpts from interviews with Cliff Young  and his bro (published by the ABC to mark Cliff’s death at age 81 in 2003):

REPORTER: Is it the greatest moment in your life, Cliff?

CLIFF YOUNG: Yeah, it is, because I’ve done something I’ve always wanted to do. I mean, another year or two I wouldn’t be able to run anywhere, you know, I’ll be too old. I’m 61 now, so. This will be my greatest achievement, I reckon.

LOUISE WILLIS: At 62, Cliff Young’s marriage to 23-year-old, Mary Howell, further cemented his fame, but they divorced 5 years later.

Prior that he lived with his brother Sid, who remembers him as a gentle vegetarian who loved nature, and a runner who would just never give up.

SID YOUNG: You’d find him halfway up there at half past 11 at night heading home. And I used to sometimes take him down a bottle of Milo. And you couldn’t talk him into giving it up and having a ride back. No, he said. I’d say to him ‘but nobody will know you didn’t ever round run it’. He said ‘but I would’.