Saturday, March 31, 2012

I Finished The Book And Will Try To Lighten Up (Don't Count On It)

After the white man raped Indians of their land and destroyed their spirit, they intentionally set about destroying their culture.
Dig this comment by Thomas Jefferson Morgan, who was President Benjamin Harrison's Commissioner of Indian Affairs:"The Indians must conform to the white man's ways, peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must. They must conform their mode of living substantially to our civilization. This civilization may not be the best possible, but it is the best the Indians can get. They cannot escape it, and must either conform to it or be crushed by it.
The tribal relations should be broken up, socialism destroyed, and the family and the autonomy of the individual substituted."
This was official government policy.
Part of the plan included forcibly removing Indian children from their parents and transporting them hundreds of miles away to boarding schools.
In one case a boarding school instructor caught a kid speaking Indian. He picked him up by the shirt and threw him across the room, breaking his collar bone.
The Indian father, an old warrior, came to the school to get his kid. He told the instructor that among his people, children were never punished by striking them. That was no way to teach children; kind words and good examples were much better.
Fortunately the old warrior was somehow able to take his kid from the school. The family fled to Canada.
The words of Morgan compared to the words of the old warrior perfectly sum up the difference between these two cultures. Although I'm not sure you could describe what the white man has as a culture.
The white man invades this country and slaughters, deceives and destroys an entire culture, an entire race. A race that lived here beautifully for thousands of years. In 400 years, from 1492 through the 1800's, we almost wiped them out.
Then at some point we begin this charade of an open arms policy to immigrants, pretending that all foreigners are welcome to our shores, welcome to make a new life for themselves. We celebrate this to this very day. We are a melting pot, anybody can come to this country, become a citizen, and be absorbed into our culture while maintaining the uniqueness of their own culture. Anybody can come to America and make a good life for themselves because we believe in the concepts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all American citizens.
Bullshit.
This approach appears to be the exact opposite of the way we treated Indians. There was no shared culture there, only genocide. The approach seems inconsistent because it doesn't exist. It's a lie. There is no way our culture could morph from being murderous racists into becoming benevolent welcomers.
Every culture that migrated here was discriminated against. The Irish came over and they were abused. Italians came over and they were abused. Italians and Irish began fighting amongst themselves, partly due to their own heritages and biases and partly due to the environment encouraged here.
Pick your culture, pick your country, your people and the story is the same right down the line and on into 2012.
We created a karma, a mindset in this country that is at it's very core, it is the origin from which everything else flows.
So in 2012, you have a 17 year old black kid gunned down by a mindless white racist with a proven track record of unprovoked violence and he is still free. And right wing talking heads condemning liberals for demanding justice, calling the uproar a rush to judgement. Implying that the accusations against Zimmerman are based in hysteria and reverse discrimination.You have people initiating a smear campaign against Trayvon Martin trying to make him look like a bad kid, while ignoring documented evidence of what a piece of trash Zimmerman is.
Why?
It is written into the DNA of America.
I had fierce arguments with my father over the rights of blacks when I was a kid. Hate filled discussions. To this day I cannot believe in my lifetime that whites and blacks could not drink out of the same water fountains or eat in the same restaurants, that if a black person dived into a pool, all the whites would scramble out of it out of fear of catching a disease. It is inconceivable to me that this was the reality. But it was.
I was proud of my generation for their accomplishments in civil rights, believing that we had made great strides forward.
I was naive. Nothing has changed. Nothing ever will. Unless a culture with a highly evolved sense of humanity invades this country and is somehow able to snuff out the evil karma that burns brightly in America.
But of course we would be furious at an attack like that and would fight back with everything we had, wouldn't we?

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