November 26, 2001
[Andreas Toupadakis explains his decision to leave the USA where he has lived for 20 years and to go back to his roots (e-mail exchange with Swans' editor). Toupadakis appeared on Democracy NOW! in Exile with Amy Goodman, on October 11, 2001. You can hear the audio clip of the interview at http://www.webactive.com/pacifica/exile.html (click on: Program Archives, next click on: October 11, 2001 and then on: "Story: UNIVERSITY WORKERS WALK OUT ON PATRIOTISM AS THE US WAGES WAR." The interview is the second clip which you can reach by using Fast Forward to 9 min and 55 sec.)]
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Dear Andreas,
I am so glad that you contacted me back. I saw that your previous e-mail address was not working anymore and I had no way to get in contact with you. I see that you intend to go back to Greece next year. Will it be for good? Will you still be interested in working with us at Swans? Kind regards, Gilles d'Aymery Dear Gilles, I am also glad that we are again in contact. Yes, I am going back to Greece for good and alone. I trust God that my family will soon follow. Interestingly these days I was thinking that I would like to be free without a computer in Greece but I think I will follow the middle path having one but using it with measure. I am thinking that without it I would lose contacts and also I would not be able to publish at places like your site. Of course I am interested to continue working with Swans. I have renounced all ownership and I will start in Crete from virtually zero. I will have to borrow seeds from the people of the village to start. I trust God that they will help me start a new life there without working for a salary from the corporate world. I am going to Greece to serve the people of my homeland. I go to work on the land of my grandparents to take care and love the earth where my ancestors lived, worked, laughed, cried, and fought for their liberty and died in peace and dignity. I am going to travel on foot the mountains of Crete and in Greece going from village to village to hear what my people have to say, to enter their hearts, to make their pain and joy my own. I will work with them, eat with them, cry and laugh together with them. It might sound to you apocalyptic as you have mentioned it before but I believe that the coming days in our world are hard to describe. These days will come on prepared and unprepared people and every flower of the so-called civilization will wither and dry. I am going to prepare my people as others are doing for their own people and will do in the near future. There are a few people who I hear saying: 'Why do you believe this way, is this not a pessimistic way?' To them I give my answer: 'If you think you can save this world or at least make a difference then why are you still talking about it?' but if the world will be saved or not is not for us to decide, but God alone. What is within our power is the choice we have to either continue talking about saving our world or stop cooperating with a system which murders the souls and the physical bodies of all living things and nonliving things of our beautiful and magnificent world. We have the choice to live for ourselves or to live for others, to unite the people for peace and unconditional love, therefore happiness, or to divide them for war and continuation of hatred, therefore agony, fear and pain. By making the right choice we find meaning in our lives and we finally have an answer to the most important and fundamental questions during our human existence, and that is we learn where we came from why we are here and where we are going. Questions that our materialistic world buries under its new scientific discoveries every day making us continue to ignore them. These answers cannot be passed on others like scientific knowledge, but are acquired individually from the eternal fountain of TRUTH. Warm regards, Andreas Andreas Toupadakis, Ph.D. 1990, University of Michigan, has done research as a chemist in industry, academia and two US Government laboratories. In January 2000, Dr. Toupadakis resigned from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in protest against the further development of nuclear weapons. Since then he has been lecturing on peace and environmental issues at many universities and colleges, including Tufts University, MIT, the University of Notre Dame, San Francisco State University, Humboldt State University and Waseda University in Tokyo. Please, DO NOT steal, scavenge or repost this work without the expressed written authorization of Swans, which will seek permission from the author. This material is copyrighted, © Peter Phillips 2001. All rights reserved. |
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This Week's Internal Links
The New Kind of Education - by Jan Baughman
The Dictatorship of Bullshit - by Stephen Gowans
Democracy? When? - by Stephen Gowans
Talk About Demons! - by Gilles d'Aymery
Sweeping the Truth Under the DU Rug - by Dr. Vladimir Ajdacic & Dr. Predrag Jaksic
Lie Has Short Legs - by Pedja Zoric
The Potter of Gold - by Alma A. Hromic
A Trip to the Garden - by Andreas Toupadakis
Ending or Beginning? - by Milo Clark
The Making of a Radical (Excerpt) - by Scott Nearing
The Real Freedom of Free Speech - by Scott Nearing
Uniform Engendered - by Sandy Lulay
Three Quotes to Ponder - by R. D. Laing & Derrick Jensen