This post started out as a comment on a group of links I found on 12.3.23 and 12.4.23. It grew too long to be called part of a link log, even by me. It's a post about what are probably four unrelated families that use the same name, and about the current political issue facing one of the people using that name.
As a family name, "Peters" is traced to the Greek word petros, meaning a stone. It commemorates an extroverted yet lovable disciple whose original name was Simon Bar Jona. Of three nicknames by which he was known (the others meant "Big Fisherman" and "The Head"), "Rock" was the name given to Simon by Jesus, who told him, "You are Petros, and on this Petras (a boulder) I will build my church." While living, Simon Petros Bar Jona was known for denying that he knew Jesus during His trial, for repenting and being reconciled with Jesus after His Resurrection, and for being the most outspoken leader of the Jewish apostolic church. Tradition says that he eventually faced his own trial for preaching Christianity, affirmed that he was indeed a Christian, and when sentenced to be crucified said that he was unworthy to die the same way Jesus did, and asked to be crucified upside down. In an even later tradition the Roman Catholic Church named this saint (Petrus in Latin, Pietro in Italian, Pedro in Spanish, Pierre in French, Peter or Pieter in northwest Europe and Britain) the first pope. Though Petros clearly identified Simon as something smaller in relation to Petras, suggesting that Petras was a reference either to God or to the company of disciples, the Papist school of Christian thought blurred this distinction and identified Petros, the individual man, with the foundation of the church. In Spanish literature, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz called San Pedro her "father" and wrote a musical drama about his story. In western Europe and in the countries colonized by western Europe, Peter or Pieter was a popular name given to a lot of people's sons and taken as a family name by the descendants of those sons, whenever the country became crowded enough for people to register family names. The names Peters, Pererson, Petersen, McPeters, McPheeters, Pierson, and Pearson were chosen by several unrelated families in western Europe.
Two of those families are the numerous Peters family of western Virginia, descendants of three brothers who immigrated from Germany in in the 1730s, and the smaller Peters (sometimes Petres, Petre, or Petrie) family of Maryland, descended from a rich Anglo-Catholic family associated with the Howards in England. The German family were well-off farmers and builders; the English family were landowners who were proud of not working for a living. The original meaning of "all men are created equal" was that, by the time the American colonies became States, men in both of these families were landowners who worked as builders, teachers, and ministers A descendant of one of the German brothers surveyed the "District of Estilville," later known as the town of Gate City. A direct descendant of his, born on the land the surveyor chose as his home, was our late lamented Grandma Bonnie Peters' husband George Peters.
Grandma Bonnie Peters was not my grandmother, although she joked about being just barely old enough to be--she was thirty years older. She chose her own screen name when celebrating the arrival of her first grandchild, the little girl portrayed on the boxes of Grandma Bonnie's Allergy-Ease Foods. I checked. Google remembers that that company had a GoDaddy site but no longer has images of the products, which are no longer made. GBP lost a great deal of money by trying to make the company grow faster than nature seems to have intended. It was a great local business until she tried to take it to the national level.
Today we consider two very different men who represent other Peters families in former British colonies. Both men's given names celebrate the most admired Englishman of the twentieth century, Sir Winston Churchill. They live on opposite sides of the globe and look about as unrelated to each other as it is possible for two men to look. What can be said about both of them is that "Winston Peters" seems to be an auspicious name for politicians.
Photo of the Hon. Winston Peters from the official web site of the Parliament of Trinidad & Tobago.
Winston Peters of Trinidad rose to international fame first as a musician. Calypso music was at first considered a disreputable, working-class style, and it became traditional for calypso singers to choose stage names rather than using their real names. Winston Peters originally performed as "Gypsy," and later, as a tribute to a previous Calypso King called the Mighty Sparrow, "the Mighty Gypsy." The title of Calypso King, later Calypso Monarch, is conferred on the lead singer of one of the bands that compete in the international contest during the Carnival on Trinidad island. Calypso songs are a folk form with lyrics often about local news and gossip, sometimes very rude, but the prize is awarded for songs that are considered uplifting, in the category called "patriotic." Here is the song for which "Gypsy" first won the title:
I remember my husband bringing back a tape from a visit to the island in the late 1990s. At the time I thought George Peters might want to share it with the blind community on a FacTape, but a week after I heard the song, someone had "permanently borrowed" the tape! The song was quite popular in Washington during the Clinton and Bush administrations, though. "Look at the bank, see who's the banker. Look at the business, see who's the owner. Look at the prison, see who's in there, too!...Be Black, be Black, but be conscious." The song stayed in my mind through the folk process.
It certainly helped the song "Little Black Boy" that its writer and singer was a living example of "Education is the key to get yourself off the streets and off poverty." On Trinidad, as on Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, African immigrants settled as free landowners just as English, Indian, European, and other kinds of people did, but most of these families were "landed poor" for a long time...sometimes until they sold their land, after which they were just plain poor in Port of Spain, Kingston, or some other city. Traditionally calypso songs wee associated with farm workers and street vendors, but as the genre gained international popularity it gained respectability. Some twentieth century "calypsonians" came from white-collar backgrounds. When not performing as "Gypsy," Winston Peters was a politician.
Competitors objected to his election because Peters had dual citizenship; he had served in the US Marines. He renounced his US citizenship but has maintained some personal friendships and interests in our country, notably allowing a song of concern about Trnidad and Tobago's economy ("oil pressure reading low") to be used in a US political campaign.
At 71, according to latest reports, Winston Peters is serving out his term in Parliament but has resigned his position as a Cabinet Minister over disagreements with others in the party. His Wikipedia page shows an inclination to identify as a musician more than a politician--or veteran.
Photo of the Rt Hon. Winston Peters from the official web site of the Parliament of New Zealand.
More recently, Winston Peters of New Zealand has been in the news. Without claiming dual citizenship, he also says he wants to strengthen his countries ties with the United States.
Unfortunately, he has not starred in any music videos. Back to the serious stuff!
On promotion to the position of Deputy Prime Minister, Peters of New Zealand was called to account for the persecution of "whistleblowers" who first publicized the sad fact that experimental vaccines for COVID-19 were being developed too late to offer any actual benefit to people hoping to evade the currently circulating mutation of the virus, while carrying high risks of side effects up to and ncluding death--associated with contamination, specifically including glyphosate contamination, and with the uae of mRNA rather than traditional "killed germ" or "weak virus" as an ingredient in the injections.
I want to emphasize this detail because people discussing the recent vaccine-triggered death of a teenager in a town near mine have said, "Doctors ought to know from a blood test what kind of immunity a person has, and whether a vaccine will help or harm that person, before they vaccinate a person." They really ought to know that, especially in the case of flu and COVID vaccines, because specific batches of those vaccines have killed people who were only slightly inconvenienced by the virus themselves. How many of us expect to work right through most years' "flu season" whether or not we notice, much less whether anyone else suspects, when our bodies react to the virus. We grew up thinking that working through colds and flu was honorable--evidence of fortitude and dedication. We're still adjusting to the idea of the same choice being blamed, taken as evidence of selfish cruelty. But in any case it's hard for doctors to be sure about the effect a COVID-19 shot will have on a person because the effects of both the mRNA itself, and the potential glyphosate contamination, are unknown.
Many people have reported feeling very sick after a COVID jab. Vaccine reactions have often been described as much worse than the disease. People who may or may not have noticed feeling tired or having "that peculiar cough" when they actually had COVID have complained of having to spend days in bed, being sick or faint, having serious symptoms here and there, after the jab. Those immediate reactions are likely to have involved glyphosate contamination, especially if they involved internal bleeding. There are certainly other potential contaminants too, but glyphosate is known to be a factor in immediate adverse reactions to the vaccine. Individuals react to glyphosate differently. So long as doctors hide their heads in the sand and fail to diagnose glyphosate poisoning as a factor in the chronic illnesses so many people now have, they will fail to recognize the dangers of glyphosate contamination in vaccines.
Actual deaths from cancer and heart failure, the latter often caused by the formation of bizarre new types of solid formations clogging bloodvessels, can be ascribed to the "spike protein" reaction to either COVID or the mRNA in COVID vaccines...but although doctors studying this issue say that "spike proteins" can form when people have had only mild, unnoticeable reactions to COVID, the sudden deaths have been strongly correlated with vaccines rather than COVID itself. Glyphosate is known to promote the growth of cancer tumors. Spike proteins are believed to trigger the formation of tumors and/or those strangely solid, fast-growing, massive blood clots.
This link represents the cutting edge of naturopathic medicine as doctors try to find ways to protect the body from those spike proteins. Like the vaccines, it is new experimental research. It may or may not save lives. My feeling is that it's more likely to save lives than a vaccine is. I am a fallible mortal.
This web site is not going to link to the inflammatory speeches of some indignant New Zealanders accusing their government of having known the vaccines would kill people. It's hard to prove what people knew and it's far more likely that people discounted warnings about vaccine dangers because they so wanted vaccines to work, rather than that they deliberately urged people to take vaccines they knew to be deadly. New vaccines are always experimental. Some risk of adverse reactions, even fatal reactions, and some risk of simple failure--the probability that new vaccines won't protect people against the disease--has to be accepted. People want very much for "someone to invent a vaccine" against every disease. That desire motivates people to try new vaccines. People who line up to take new vaccines, not because they have been ordered to do so to keep their jobs or stay in school, but because they hope their vaccinations will protect them or others and help wipe out the diseases, can be remembered as heroically wrong if the vaccines kill them; they took a risk and paid the cost of it; they were not "murdered." Nobody took my Significant Other's life; he laid it down. He died as he lived, a man of extraordinary strength and fortitude who did many dangerous things in order to protect or encourage others. He was an Army volunteer in 1971, a COVID vaccine tester in 2021, and a risk taker in other ways in between. When people were coerced into taking vaccines they did not choose, of course, that's another matter.
This web site does, however, call on all government leaders, including Deputy Prime Minister Peters of New Zealand, to protect the freedom, the privacy, and the safety of all "whistleblowers" who warn people that popular products--vaccines, or whatever else--may be harmful. Corporations aren't going to stop selling profitable products merely because those products harm people unless the "whistleblowers" are free to call them to account. The world is free to call us party-poopers, buzz-killers, Cassandras, etc., but the world desperately needs ua. No nation that fails to protect us can fairly be called civilized.
Why has the Deputy Prime Minister been singled out for attention? Apparently a reputation for protecting whistleblowers was part of his early political branding in the 1980s, and his constituents are demanding that he maintain that reputation.
Google isn't doing too well sorting out the documentation of his record. One "trusted journalist" source, ranked high on Google, actually claimed that Peters was the protester whose home had been raided by the police. (Other news media make it clear that the whistleblower is a different man, though the name he apparently gave one reporter, "Winston Smith," the name of the protagonist in 1984, seems likely to be self-chosen.) So let's conclude our considerations of this topic, today, with a reminder of the sort of thing whistleblowers bring to public attention--the sort of thing that goes on and on in the absense of whistleblowers.
Do you want to know whether a doctor is actually treating your disease or merely observing its progress as it makes you sicker? Then demand that anyone for whom you vote, any newspapers to which you subscribe, any social media you use, very specifically BAN any attempt to censor content because it fails to support some sponsor's short-term commercial interests.
While recognizing the need to protect whistleblowers is not exclusively common to the US and New Zealand--An Enemy of the People was written in Norway--it is one of the cultural traditions that have contributed to the extraordinary success and prosperity of the English-speaking countries generally. It is a part of our culture that the rest of the world would do well to appropriate.
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