Blood Curse, White Cobra—Part 2
TGDW — CHAPTER FOUR: A Two Part Mini-Story — PART 2 of 2
NOTE: This is a ‘mini-story’ and prelude to ‘THE GOVERNMENT DENIES WRONGDOING: Finding ancient Jesus in the post-whistleblower era’ — a dramatized story series based on real events, by Eeshan V. Melder. These two chapters, CHAPTER THREE and CHAPTER FOUR (this one), are dramatized autobiographical background about the blood curse on my grandfather. Click here for CHAPTER ONE & CHAPTER TWO which are an overview of the technical part of the larger story.
“My grandfather was a lawyer in Sri Lanka in the 1930s. After he made enemies defending smugglers and gangsters, somebody hired a village Shaman to put a blood curse on him. He was dead within two years.”
[DISCLAIMER: This story is part of a dramatized article series based on real events. In certain cases, events, characters and timelines have been created, changed or removed for dramatic purposes, to allow exploration of religious beliefs and spirituality, to protect sources of information, or for entertainment purposes. This story is NOT legal or professional advice. It’s a story. Regarding all matters of law, career or government policy, please consult a licensed attorney, expert or the appropriate federal agency. The U.S. government denies any and all wrongdoing.]
Blood Curse, White Cobra — Part 2
THE STORY: As a 10-year-old child in America, in the 1970s, I am told of a blood curse on my Sri Lankan Tamil grandfather. I am taken to a Hindu temple in Sri Lanka with a white cobra living in a glass enclosure around the altar. The priests cannot break the curse, but cast a protection spell on me to keep me safe.
INVOCATION
William Tyndale was captured and executed in 1536 for translating the Bible into English — from the original Greek and Hebrew manuscripts — just so people could read it for themselves. It’s harder for those in charge to improperly exert influence, and hijack authority for their own purposes, when the people can understand the written rules for themselves, and no longer require the interpretation or assistance of others. Despite being executed for his work, what Tyndale produced was later combined with the work of others, translated from German and Latin, to create the Matthew Bible (or Matthew’s Version), one of the first known English Bibles to be mass produced on a printing press.
16 Beholde I sende you forthe as shepe amoge wolves. Be ye therfore wyse as serpetes and innocent as doves.
17 Beware of men for they shall deliver you vp to ye cousels and shall scourge you in their synagoges.
18 And ye shall be brought to the heed rulers and kynges for my sake in witnes to them and to the gentyls.
19 But when they delyver you vp take no thought how or what ye shall speake for yt shalbe geve you eve in that same houre what ye shall saye.
20 For it is not ye that speke but ye sprite of your father which speaketh in you.
- Tyndale translation in English (circa 1500’s) of the oldest known copies of the of the Bible.
SOURCE: https://biblehub.com/tyndale/matthew/10.htm
BACKGROUND: Sri Lanka & Curses
In PART ONE of Blood Curse, White Cobra, I started telling you about the curse on my grandfather — my mom’s dad.
He was a proctor. That’s a flavor of attorney in the old British legal system. Ethnically, he was a Tamil. Tamils are native to southern India and Sri Lanka. The Tamil people of Sri Lanka are sometimes called Eelam Tamils. Eelam is the name of the independent state that Tamil fighters sought to establish in the north of Sri Lanka during the Sri Lankan Civil War.
According to their own beliefs, the Eelam Tamils are descended from the aboriginal Naga and Yaksha people of Sri Lanka. The “Nakar” as they were called, used the cobra as their totem.
Grandpa lived in Sri Lanka a hundred or so years ago. This was back in the 1920 and 30's — during the British Raj, the period just before World War II. The British empire controlled India and Sri Lanka, the same timeframe we experience in the Indiana Jones movies.
Some places are old. Other places are ancient. Sri Lanka is one of them. As a kid, growing up in America, it felt strange finding out about this curse. Now that I’m older, and I understand the ancient history of Sri Lanka — before the western occupations that I talked about in PART ONE— it makes perfect sense that Sri Lanka would be full of magic.
I’ve spent most of my adult life as a Management Consultant. We’re constantly trained and reminded to force ourselves to look at things differently.
When I blink, re-focus, and look at Sri Lanka, what am I looking at??
A large, ancient, tropical island in the Indian Ocean. It has recorded history documenting continuous inhabitation for 2,000 years. But, the true history of Sri Lankan habitation by humans can be documented as far back as 40,000 years. Archaeological records of “Balangoda man” are tied to skeletal fragments found in caves show tool making as well.
That large ancient island is only Sri Lanka temporarily. It’s had many names. It may have many more before the Earth is done. It was called Taprobane by the ancient Greeks…Zeilan…Ceylon…Serendib…and likely other names, lost in time.
It’s only the packaging of modern society that delivers Sri Lanka to us within the narrow slice of modernity. It’s a ‘third world country’ and a ‘tourist destination’.
Yes. It is those things. It’s definitely worth a visit. Sri Lanka is a world class tourist destination, no doubt. But it’s so much more. Over a lifetime, I’ve come to believe it to be a profoundly spiritual place. Sri Lanka’s old name ‘Serendib’ is the origin of the word ‘serendipity’.
If the Hindu legends are to be believed, Sri Lanka is the ancient home of a demon king named Ravana…
SRI LANKA IS RAVANA’S KINGDOM
In the Hindu (Sanatana Dharma) epic story ‘Ramayana’, a 10-headed demon King named Ravana kidnaps Sita. She’s a goddess, born from the Earth. Ravana takes Sita away from her husband, Rama.
Ravana, who in some parts of India is still worshipped as a misunderstood and saintly figure, takes Sita to his kingdom — which is in Sri Lanka.
Rama, an avatar of the god Vishnu, is enraged. He gets a monkey army, led by the monkey god Hanuman, to build a bridge to Sri Lanka — so he can rescue his beloved Sita from Ravana.
Most of us grew up being told these old stories were a myth. No such bridge has existed between Sri Lanka and India. The stories were just that…stories. Now satellite images by the European Space Agency and historical records suggest a land bridge existed until 1480. Debate rages online as to whether the bridge is a natural phenomenon or constructed.
Anyway, the point of it is…if even one shred of that story in the Ramayana is to be believed, modern Sri Lanka is built upon the ruins of an ancient magical kingdom…so, of course, folk magic is commonplace.
ANCIENT MAGIC MERGED INTO MODERN RELIGION
Sociologists say that in many ancient places, like Sri Lanka, older belief systems were slowly merged, organically, into modern religions as they spread. Researchers call this phenomenon ‘syncretism’.
Today in Sri Lanka, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic and Christianity communities all, often, have some element of folk magic going on. As it got weaved into the day-to-day, folk magic was no longer seen as ‘magic’. It was just seen as part of each religion.
Christianity did the same in the west, absorbing Roman holidays and traditions that pre-dated it. Some of these are known, like the overwriting of Saturnalia with Christmas. Others happened secretly, and are shared only among the elect as esoteric secrets and those willing to spend time researching the matter.
As a kid I was fascinated by this stuff because whether or not ‘magic’ worked was personally relevant. I had a damn curse on me!
If magic was nonsense, then all this curse stuff was just make-believe. If it wasn’t, then I had a very real curse to deal with.
I didn’t talk about this curse news much as a kid. I was emabrassed about it for most of my life.
Western culture, to my 10-year-old “still new-to-America” eyes, seemed way beyond Sri Lankan superstitious stuff. Little did I know that western civilization has the same magic in its own roots. All I knew at the time was that media portrayals of Haitian and Louisiana voodoo were two dimensional — and made to seem kind of silly.
For a while, when I was a kid in America in the 1980's, before you could go online and find weird things to give people, there was one store known only for this. It was called Spencer Gifts (now Spencer’s). Located in many shopping malls, they’d sell voodoo dolls (human shaped dolls). They were advertised as a gag gift — a way to get revenge on an ex-partner. There was a doll in the box and you were invited to poke it with needles to symbolically torment your partner.
As a kid, I thought voodoo and curses were less civilized things associated with the ancient histories of people of color. In the west, the Greeks and Romans advocated for rationality and laid the foundations for science.
They formulated the basic principles of democracy, saying things like “I think, therefore, I am”. They were all about elevating the rational mind, dialogue and debate. They weren’t into voodoo and curses.
Right?
They’re were. As I’ve since learned, most of the commonly known magical systems trace back to a handful of sources — and that sh*t is everywhere.
This is a voodoo doll from ancient Egypt.
On exhibit at the louvre in Paris is this object. It appears to be a voodoo doll. It’s a woman, kneeling, pierced with 13 needles.
Ouch. So what’s going on?
First off, if you run into something like this, avoid it. If you must interact with it, treat it with care. It’s a magical object and has negative energy associated with it. At minimum, after you touch it, wash your hands and pantomime throwing the bad energy out the nearest window.
That’s what I was taught, anyway.
It seems to align to the ancient belief that human thought, speech, metaphor and reality are all connected. The Book of John in the Bible in the very first verse writes “In the beginning was the Word”, with the Word taken to mean Jesus. The Hindus (Sanatana Dharma) believe creation began with the chanting of the word “Om”. The aboriginal peoples of Australia play the Didgeridoo which, sounds to me an awful lot like the word “Om”, too.
The idea behind this kind of magic blends two principles around metaphor and symbolism. One is the idea that if I make something that looks like you, I can use it to control you.
The other is that if I can get a ‘piece’ of you — your hair, nail clippings etc. — I can connect to your ‘energy’.
It’s as though there’s a belief that some kind of ‘quantum entanglement’ can exist between a person — and their nail clippings, hair, clothes etc.
I was taught as a kid that you had to spit three times — on your fingernail clippings, hair etc. — before throwing them away. It severs the connection between you and whatever you’re throwing away.
We see an echo of this in Islam in the rules for divorce and marriage. The practice of talaq al-bid’ah allows a man to end his marriage by speaking that intent to her three times. Again the power of words. (Talaq means ‘repudiation’ or ‘divorce’.)
I still do the symbolic spitting thing when I cut my nails. I taught it to my kids, too. Were you taught anything like this? Write to me and tell me about your family traditions and stories.
Anyway, what practitioner of this folk magic would do was, often, to mix both of these techniques to make an object — like a clay statue — mixed with hair and nail clippings.
That object — now representing the person to be cursed — can then be pierced or bound symbolically. This one was found in a vase with a seal and a binding spell.
Unless the cursed person can find this object and undo the magic, they’re going to fall victim to the spell. If you believe that sort of thing.
Do you? I ask everyone I meet this days and hear fascinating stories…
PROTECTING ME FROM GRANDPA’S CURSE
Even at age 10, I was a proactive guy. After I had thought about this matter of being cursed, I asked my mom what her Hindu traditions said could be done to stop it.
She didn’t know. After all her western education, my mom was not connected to the part of the community that worked in curses. She went to a Catholic school.
But her sister-in law was plugged into it. So, mom got hold of her middle brother’s wife, who was from a small rural village. Auntie Rani was put on the case.
My Aunt Rani was a short stout lady with a lazy eye. Arriving at our place in a tuk-tuk (three-wheeled taxi scooters) she always wore a half smile.
I remember that smile as child. She always seemed to be fighting to suppress a full on smile. I found out later in life it was her dentures that made her mouth look like that. Like so much of human life, that half smile I remembered from childhood was just an illusion.
Auntie Rani was from the villages that dotted the perimeter of the then-modest city of Jaffna where my grandparents lived. I’d only been there once. Jaffna is dry, like a desert.
I remember the water tasted different. It tastes “flat” was how folks described it. Apparently due to mineral content.
Auntie Rani had been a housekeeper in grandpa’s home when she and my Uncle met. They fell in love and got married.
When my mom told me their love story as a child, it seemed like a sweet tale to me. It had a Cinderella quality to it. As I got older, my mom explained it was scandalous and suggested I should be outraged and then accepting…in that order.
So that’s what I did. Later in life, when I found out a former U.S. senator and presidential candidate had also had a relationship with his housekeeper, I was secretly relieved that this kind of stuff happened in other families. Segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond had a biracial child with his housekeeper as a teenager and kept it a secret forever. It was only revealed 6 months after he died at age 100.
It made me kind of proud of my uncle that he was open about his relationship and married her. Of course, time is a cycle that repeats itself. Decades later, my uncle would end up having a relationship with another housekeeper and having a child. I know my mom was involved in smoothing over the scandal and making sure the woman and child were hidden away.
It’s on my list of things to do one day, soon actually, to find this bastard child of my Uncle and make sure he’s okay. After my mother passed away, I don’t know what’s going on with her family.
Anyway, at the time, when my mom asked, my Aunt Rani was glad to help. She dutifully took the matter of my curse to a Hindu priest at a temple in the jungle outside a nearby village.
It was a long tuk-tuk ride to get there. Later in life I used to be frustrated about my uncle for having his second affair with the housekeeper. It was like he found his Cinderella and he was her Price Charming, and then he forgot her.
I later learned Aunty Rani was having an affair with that tuk tuk driver!
THE TEMPLE OF THE WHITE COBRA
What I remember the most about the Hindu temple at the end of that tuk tuk ride was the noise — and the smell of incense and flowers. Horns blowing, drums beating, people shouting, animal noises, tropical birds in the trees, people shouting as they sold their wares in the street. A kind of unspoken consensual coordinated chaos.
This was the south of Sri Lanka. Back then dense tropical jungle and coconut trees stood like sentinels with braids watching the masses writhing below. The temple entryway was a large open area with a roof, but no walls. Like a picnic pavilion in a park.
There were Hindu statues all around the perimeter of this outdoor space. In the middle of all this was a rectangular glass enclosure.
The glass enclosure was built into and around the midsection of a large, low and very old looking tree. The tree seemed, to my 12-year-old eyes, to be growing around the glass enclosure as well, the two fully integrated in some mineral to vegetable connection. Inside that glass, I was told, was a white cobra.
The cobra is associated with enlightenment and protection in Asian religions, and ancient Egyptian religions as well. While this was a Hindu temple this is also true of Buddhism, Sri Lanka’s majority religion.
As I would later discover, the mythology around the relationship between humanity and snakes is vast, complex and eerie.
THE PRIEST & THE PROTECTION SPELL
So there I was in the chaos of the temple grounds. I’m not sure why my parents didn’t come. It was just me and my Aunty.
As I later learned, there are white cobras that are albinos, and others that are actually a breed of cobra called leucitic cobras. I don’t know which one this was, but it all seemed very mysterious at the time.
I remember wanting to stop and look for the cobra. But it wasn’t like a zoo situation.
I was hustled along for this ritual.
I was told to sit on the ground, just in front of that tree. The Hindu priest, shirtless with a white sarong wrapped around his waist, was younger than I had expected.
He smiled. As a kid, I particularly remember that. He had good energy. I was then given a protection blessing. The ceremony took about 20 minutes or so, if I recall? Maybe a little longer?
Chanting, rubbing me with stuff etc.
Then the priest sat down and talked to me. He told me that my life would be hard. I remember thinking that sucked.
He also said not to worry too much, that I would always be protected.
DOES IT WORK?
I think so. The first indication I had that something had changed was a few months later in England. But like anything, it doesn’t last forever. It’ll work until it doesn’t.
I’d been sent to a boarding school in Wales for a semester while my parents traveled. About 5 of us kids had walked into the city to go see a movie at a local the theater. It was a typical gray rainy British day.
When you sign up for boarding school, the school sends you a list of what to pack. The cool kids know what to ignore. I did not. So there I was the one brown skinned kid in a traditional Paddington bear raincoat with galoshes.
It was the movie Convoy so it was probably 1978. I was 11 years old.
When we arrived we bought our tickets and stood in line outside the theater in front of a large standing sign that read LINE BEGINS HERE.
About 5 minutes before the movie, a group of punk rockers and their girlfriends walked up, moved the sign and got in front of us. They did this with a casualness that made it seem like they were the rulers of this little shire.
Gilbert, the biggest of our friends from boarding school looked nervous, but he decided it was up to him to say something. As he said “hey we were here first” one of the punk rockers who was smiling and talking to his friends turned.
The guy that moved the sign was tall and lanky with a non-threatening looking canvas jacket. The guy that turned to face Gilbert was not that guy. This particular guy was shorter than the others , had a leather jacket, and clearly lived his life to prove he was hard. He started trash talking Gilbert and they did a face off.
He had a Mick Jagger looking face but with shorter crew cut hair. He had pouty lips accompanied by a noticeable bump on the center of his forehead — blue on his white skin with red stars of broken capillaries — clearly from headbutting people.
They also had a rather husky looking woman with them in a denim jacket. She looked like Cass Elliot from the Mamas and the Papas. Cass Elliot was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. But instead of that lovely voice, this woman had a growling slur, a cigarette and all she said was her annoying catch phrase, which was the word “rather”. She said the word in this exaggerated way, with an emphasis and sing-song on the second syllable. So as Punk Jagger moved down the line of us saying things like “you got a f*ckin’ problem, mate?” a second later you’d hear, “ra-THER…”.
As our friend Gilbert tried to firmly insist that we were in line first, Punk Jagger head-butted him. Not savagely, but hard enough that Gilbert went flying back clutching his head and crying. Hearing Gilbert crying was not normal.
As Gilbert went down, we all froze. Punk Jagger moved down the line of us one by one. “You got somethin’ to say? Ey? Ey?” He did that stare down with each of us. Occasionally, he’d feign a head butt just to watch the one of us he was facing recoil in fear.
I was one of two non-white kids there. When he got to me, he looked into my eyes and said, “Don’t worry…we’re not gonna mess with you, just your friends”.
Then he moved on to the guy next to me and shouted in his face for a bit.
I remember my friends looking at me like — what the hell?
When the doors to the theater opened we tried to run inside. They chased us and tried to beat the crap out of us. Everyone except me.
I remember the lanky kid that seemed to be non-threatening threw Gilbert into a wall. Then he punched him in the stomach. Gilbert wheezed and cried, like the child he was, here in this moment forced to be a man too soon by these fools.
Gilbert wrenched away. I had stood there and waited for him. Not just bravery. I didn’t know the way back to the school. He ran to me and we just ran. We ran and ran. We were all terrified, howling and crying.
As we ran away, my friends were asking if I knew those bullies somehow. I remember running and shouting no no no. I was crying too.
I still hate bullies.
I ended up going back to America for Christmas break. I waited till I was in the kitchen of our home in Bethesda and refused to go back to boarding school. My mom missed me too, so my dad caved in and ate one semesters tuition and I was back.
That’s how I ended up — after a brief stint in American public school —eventually attending a private school in Bethesda now called the Landon School.
[NOTE: If you read CHAPTER ONE and CHAPTER TWO of THE GOVERNMENT DENIES WRONGDOING, you’ll remember my discussion about the 1972 Federal EEO law? It was a bipartisan effort passed during the Nixon (R) administration. The Majority Leader in the House, when this law was passed, sent a child my age to this same school. We ended up in the same class…might even have come to my house when giving me a ride home. Amazing person and we remain friends to this day. ]
Soon afterwards, the power of that protection spell would get tested yet again, the summer before junior year, when the Sri Lankan civil war began.
SURVIVNG BLACK JULY 1983
They say you can never go back. That’s because everything changes. Not only do others change and places change, but we change too.
After we came to America in the 1970s, not only had our family changed, Sri Lanka changed.
A Sri Lankan politician came to power riding a wave of anti-Tamil sentiment after the British were gone. Things started being separated by race, language and religion. Tamils got the worst of it. Because we now had my dad’s last name, which was Dutch, we were somewhat immunized from hostility.
For decades, the Tamils had been in charge when the British were in power. As a community there was a legacy of education and skill. Those that could leave began to emigrate.
Eventually, it got so bad a group of Tamil ministers stormed out of parliament, saying it was time for the Tamils in the north to make their own way as a separate nation — called Eelam.
Among those that remained in the Tamil community, pressure began to build to join the ‘movement’. Over time, that one group of parliamentarians splintered into a variety of small groups and factions.
Then in 1976, one group called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam led by Velupillai Prabhakaran absorbed or assassinated all the other groups to emerge as the dominant fighting force for the north. They were strategically ready to fight an asymmetrical battle against a larger, better resourced enemy.
Each “Tiger” fighter, regardless of gender, wore a glass vial around their neck filled with cyanide. If captured, they would bite down. The broken glass would cut the inside of the mouth giving the cyanide instant — and fatal — access the bloodstream. The psychological impact of this willingness to die was profound. I remember as a kid if there was a rumor that even one Tiger was in the area, people would panic and there would chaos and traffic.
Bombings and skirmishes intensified into all-out war with international players getting involved. In the book, By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer by a former member of the Israeli intelligence, Victor Ostrovsky and journalist Claire Hoy, Ostrovsky describes an alleged incident where Israel had secretly brough both Sri Lankan Army and Tiger fighters for training to the same camp — without telling the other. They almost ran into each other.
The war began on July 24, 1983 a little over a month after my 16th birthday. It was between Hindu Tamil separatists in the north and a larger Buddhist group in the south. The war started with an eruption of retaliatory violence in the capital city. Mobs went house to house burning, looting and killing Tamil people.
We were visiting from America. It was the summer of my 16th birthday. Me and my cousin Tanya were wandering around the city taking pictures — clueless there was this social tension building (there was no social media back then) — when the rioting began.
Tanya and I saw many of the stores were strangely shut despite it being just after morning rush hour. We had come downtown with my Auntie Eunice when she came to work.
A crowd had gathered outside what I know in retrospect was a Tamil store. As people banged on the metal gate, a long flatbed truck came by. Rioters jumped onto the vehicle and pulled the driver out of his seat and stabbed him. They then backed up the truck into the gate, ripping open the front of the store.
The next thing I remember is opening my eyes to see pavement and the horizon all wrong relative to my eyes. I was flat on my side. All I could see was running feet.
I had been tear gassed. My face was on fire. Tanya was screaming at me to get up. I got up and, just like me and Gilbert ran that day in Wales, we ran.
I remember not knowing where to run. Military vehicles. Smoke. I remember looking down between my feet and seeing blood spatter on the pavement.
“Get over here you bloody fools!”
It was my Auntie Eunice. She’d come looking for us. She got us back inside. My Uncle Owen sent three cars for us. The third one made it.
The ride home was terrifying. Mobs were stopping all vehicles, identifying anyone NOT an ethnic Tamil and getting them out. Then they would drop a match in the gas tank. For buses, slow burning diesel fuel meant Tamil passengers — men, women and children coming home from school or work — were slowly burned alive.
Our car was stopped multiple times by mobs. Once it was stopped as a man hit the car with a length of chain. I remember his eyes. I could sense his rage and anger as he looked into the car, and at me. As even a 1/2 Tamil Sri Lankan, I would have been killed. I looked like a tourist. They let us pass. It was the first of many times I held my life in my hands in Sri Lanka.
I found out shortly after we got home that our house got burned. My dad had rented it to my mom’s brother. His entire family — all Tamil — was living there. There was an allegation that rioters had, somehow, got hold of voter registration lists. Using last names, they could determine where Tamils were living.
My Uncle and his family made it out the back door as the rioters and looters arrived. Their oldest son Krishna was only 7 at the time. Out of fear of being harmed, he was told not to speak. If people heard him speaking Tamil, the entire family might be killed. He was so successfully frightened into silence that he stopped talking for almost a year. When he started to speak again, his voice never sounded the same. Even now, I’m one of the handful of folks that know what Krishna sounded like before the trauma of that day.
This is just a taste of the strange life I’ve had. It got even stranger from here. Cursed but protected. Because of this legend of a curse on my mom’s family, I’ve had a lifelong fascination with spiritual and religious belief systems, both modern and ancient, as well as folk tales of magic and myth — from all around the world.
I’ve also had a lifetime of premonitions, spiritual experience, paranormal experiences and other generally weird stuff happening around me. But I also found that when I did share these stories with others, you know what I found? I’m not alone. All kinds of people whisper back that they have encountered paranormal or anomalous stuff in their life experience.
Later in life, I saw that this civil violence was something that wasn’t just a Sri Lankan problem — it was a human problem. I was growing up in an America that was like a haven for me, as a Sri Lankan, during the war.
That changed. As an adult, I began working around the government and saw the same tensions emerging in America. The America that was so safe, in 1983, as Sri Lanka burned, would by my adulthood, soon be simmering with those same tensions, as forces pushed to take America down that same path.
CLICK HERE FOR CHAPTER FIVE: The Shocking Untold History of the Government’s Civil Rights ‘Exemption’ Program (Coming soon!)
THE GOVERNMENT DENIES WRONGDOING — Finding Ancient Jesus in the Post-Whistleblower Era
A DRAMATIZED STORY BASED ON REAL EVENTS
INDEX OF CHAPTERS
CHAPTER ONE: Seeing the Big Picture — PART 1
CHAPTER TWO: Seeing the Big Picture — PART 2
CHAPTER THREE: Blood Curse, White Cobra — PART 1
CHAPTER FOUR: Blood Curse, White Cobra — PART 2 (You are here!)
CHAPTER FIVE: The Shocking Untold History of the Government’s Civil Rights ‘Exemption’ Program (Coming soon!)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eeshan Melder is a Public Sector IT Programs Specialist with 25+ years of experience in federal program operations. After 15 years as a Public Sector Management Consultant, he joined the federal service as a senior manager. He spent a decade at two different departments of government as a Supervisory IT Program Manager, a Senior Adviser, and a Division Director. In 2015, Eeshan was certified as a federal agency Lean Six Sigma Greenbelt, specially trained to diagnose broken federal systems using engineering industry methods. In 2019, he received the Comptroller’s Award, one of the highest performance-based awards given by his federal employer, for generating exceptional cost savings to the government. In early 2020, he resigned from federal service, reporting apparent vulnerabilities in the design of the mandatory Federal EEO Program used across the federal government, since 1972, for federal employees to report sexual harassment and other EEO violations. He holds a Master’s degree in Communications Management from the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California, and a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism, from Carleton University, in Ottawa Canada.
POSTSCRIPT
In April 2020, a month after he resigned from government, the Federal #MeToo report was released by the government’s own U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
The report raised concerns about this very same program.
More than a year later, a September 2021 article in FEDWeek quoted a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) from a group of legislators urging an audit of the federal EEO program. The letter cited concerns “…the ‘fox is guarding the henhouse’, due to…agencies conducting their own (sexual harassment) complaint investigations…”.
As of 2024, and it’s not clear if any audit has happened. In February 2024, an article in FEDWeek noted that GAO issued “a report on training on preventing sexual harassment in the federal workplace says that such harassment has been a persistent problem for years, and also one that is underreported”.
No audit is indicated. No other action to actually address the problem is indicated or recommended. The GAO has been asked to conduct an audit of the Federal Sector EEO Program by legislators. It appears the organization is making a choice not to do so.
Why? Is the government cooking the books on sexual harassment?
The article does add, “GAO pointed out that it has issued some two dozen reports on sexual harassment and assault since 2011, some of them focused on the uniformed military but most involving federal employees as well, or exclusively.”
Meanwhile, sexual abuse scandals have continued to emerge in government at the Merchant Marine Academy (Department of Transportation) and elsewhere. In 2023, the Los Angeles Times ran an article…“Former warden at women’s prison known as ‘rape club’ gets 70 months for sexual abuse”. The warden of this federal prison was found guilty of molesting his own inmates in his prison, forcing them to pose naked for him. These are criminal, not civil, offenses, but could the permissiveness of the workplace Federal EEO laws for staff be a factor?
As of 2024, and it’s not clear if any audit has happened. But in February of this year, CNN reported a story with the headline, “CIA fires whistleblower who is suing over claim she was sexually assaulted at spy agency’s headquarters”, further suggesting we may have, indeed, entered a very dangerous ‘post-Whistleblower’ era.
If so, it compromises the security of federal workers, and the integrity of government, in profound ways that even legislators and attorneys may not fully understand.
