About the Author

Who is Mike Arnold?

I laughed a lot as a kid. I was quite the goofball. I think I spent more time in the coat closet in third grade than I did in my seat. I was a shoeshine boy from a little box that I made from scrap wood at my father's workbench. I took my pathetic little box with the wood every which way into the neighborhood bars. It was dark in there, and there were a lot of distractions. It was great. I had all kinds of jobs that kids got back in the old days: newspaper boy, mowing lawns, shoveling snow, bus boy, dishwasher, waiter. I also volunteered at a hospital. I wanted to be a veterinarian, but the pet shop didn't have any openings. I was a terrible student, but I used to read books on my own. Started out with Charlie Brown books, then comic books, then novels. My brother loved MAD magazine and he made me read them as well as Dostoyevsky's epic novel, "The Brothers Karamazov." My parents were divorced. My dad's house was only a mile away from my mom's apartment where I lived with my grandmother and sometimes my brother. Dad's house was fun, Mom's was stability. I didn't appreciate my mom until I was very old...about 40. After high school I joined the navy. The recruitment poster was true -- I really did have an adventure. After that, I went to college to become an elementary school teacher.

I left that to start a non-profit organization to try and get kids who were far behind, caught-up in a short time. I wrote letters to the billionaires whose names everyone recognizes. This was back in the 1990s, before the internet. It wasn't so easy to even know who the billionaires were back then. Didn't get a dime. Needed a job while I was working on this project, and that's how I ended up in mental health. I got an entry level job in Philadelphia, working with kids who were behavior problems in the classroom.

I met a groovy lady, got married, and started having kids. They're really cool. We moved to Georgia about 20 years ago. I ended up with my own company working with kids with autism -- it's a long story. But my activism didn't start with vaccine awareness. I've always been involved in activism efforts: environmental, anti-war, and different things that came up. Then, in 2010, something happened that changed my life: on 10/10/10 I learned the truth about the catastrophic events of 9/11. I was shocked to the core. I became an ardent and unashamed 9/11 truther. I went all in. But that's another story.

It was challenging to focus on my work with this knowledge that I had about that terribly tragic day. But I did the best I could to help my clients with developing basic skills and replacing problem behaviors with socially acceptable behaviors that would serve the same functions. But then, do you know what happened? I started hearing parents tell me about their children who were developing just great until a vaccine visit changed it all in days, or even hours. Regressive injury, meaning the baby lost the words, the eye contact, the laughter, and more.