It has been four months since my last post at this "Discovery Channel." But after watching some crime docos and films I was inspired to write the following prose-poem.-Ron Price, Tasmania.
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GOING INTERNATIONAL: OUT OF OBSCURITY

During 77 days in 1971 while I was getting ready to come to Australia, flying to Australia from Canada and settling in to a teaching job in a primary school in Whyalla South Australia, The Godfather was filmed.1 By 1971 the Mafia had been reported on in the print and electronic media on a number of fronts while a vast Mafia-connected international heroin trafficking network was developing.2 The narrative base of The Godfather spanned the years 1945 to 1955, the pre-narcotics phase of the post WW2 resurgence of the Mafia. Also in 1971 another Mafia-related film, The French Connection, the first R-rated movie in cop genre to win an academy award, took cop movies into a grittier, faster and more violent direction. The storyline in The French Connection was the world’s largest narcotics seizure in 1962, the year I began my pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community. This film was released in October 1971, three months after I arrived in Australia from Canada as an international pioneer.

During these post WW2 years from 1945 to 1979 in the history of the Mafia, I grew from early childhood well into the years of early adulthood, that is, from the age of one to thirty-five. In those years, too, I knew little to nothing of the Mafia and took little interest in it when it was mentioned in the media. Even the FBI took little interest in the Mafia until November 1957. Illegal heroin involving the Corsican Mafia was first discovered in 1937 in France right at the start of the Baha’i Seven Year Plan, an international pioneering venture of significant magnitude. Like the Mafia, the Baha’i Faith was an organization, a movement, that held little interest to the print and electronic media. It was virtually unknown then in popular or academic culture. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, 25 March 2008; and 2 A.W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in South-East Asia, 1972.

It took many years before
any public recognition came
our way or your way even
though our histories were
drowned in blood all the
way back to the middle of
the 19th century....yes.......

.....murder, rape, prisons,
executions, crimes—they
traversed sombre skies with
bitter hostilities: vindictive,
relentless, heated, prolonged
controversy, betrayal, discipline,
toughness, nerve, streets running
with blood, severed heads, horrors
of unimaginable dimensions.........

And when we and you went into
international arenas the horrors
went on in our homelands, although
on the international front very few
knew anything about us or you.....

As the 1960s became the 1970s
and on and on into the millennium
our public profiles gradually escaped
the obscurity in which they languished
for a century and a half since their origins
as far back as Darwin who had told us
our world went far back beyond 4004 B.C.
on 31 October at 7:35 in the morning.

Ron Price
26 March 2008