I wrote the post below several days ago, but I've been sitting on it because I wanted the poll to remain front and center longer for less frequent readers. The poll will remain open for a couple more days before I finalize the results.
March 9, 2006
This morning, I happened upon this bit of insight from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States:
Nations are not communities and never have been, The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
Lately, I find myself cringing whenever I hear anyone talk about how "we" invaded Iraq, whether "we" might soon do the same to Iran, or how "we" could go drill for oil in Alaska. Who is this "we"? It seems that even people who disagree with many of the policies of the state have adopted the "we" language. I've even fallen into it myself sometimes.
Reaching into the past, one might hear talk about how "we" committed genocide against the native population of America, or that "we" enslaved the Africans. Did we? If "we" admit that "we" did all this, how is it whenever the topic of token financial reparations for "our" past crimes is mentioned, "we" suddenly disclaim all responsibility? "Why should we pay for something our ancestors did hundreds of years ago?"
I'm of two minds on this. To the extent that we continue to complacently benefit and/or support the actions of "our" state, "we" -- each of us, individually -- are indeed responsible for its crimes. Do you pay federal taxes? If the answer is yes, then you are paying to have children murdered.
"But that money was taken under duress! If I'm held up by a gang of thugs, and they steal my knife and use it to kill someone else, you can't possibly say the murder was my fault!"
But what if the thugs came back to offer you a deal. In exchange for you supplying them with more knives, they'll give you a kickback of 10% of anything they steal from everyone else. Of course, if you don't agree, you're still toast. Now do you bear responsibility for what they do with those weapons?
Maybe after it's been happening for a while, you decide you enjoy the luxuries they provide you so much that you'll go ahead and increase the production of knives of your own accord. That way, you'll get more loot back.
Slowly but surely, the thugs become "we", and "we" become the thugs.
So, assuming "we" don't want to be the thugs, how do "we" break out of this cycle?
I like the way the much-maligned Ward Churchill put it in an interview with Derrick Jensen. From Jensen's book, Listening to the Land, Ward Churchill speaks:
Euro-Americans have got to psychologically and intellectually reverse the process of colonization, to find out what went wrong for them clear back in the beginning. And then they can begin to recover knowledge of those traditions, to bring about the decolonization of Europe itself, most of all the European mind.
... I talk about the landing at Jamestown, and about the pilgrim fathers coming over in 1620. I talk about what the dominant culture has done, and all of a sudden I get a bunch of red-faced, uncomfortable people talking about "white-bashing": "What? Are you talking about me?"
I reply, "Not unless you're old enough to have been around in 1620. I'm not white-bashing. I'm just recounting what happened. But you're really uncomfortable with what happened, aren't you? You're identifying with something here, and I didn't identify you with it. You did."
The lightbulb goes on now. You think you're "white" -- whatever that is, that's an invented term, too -- and since I'm talking about white people, you feel some need to identify with them, with the perpetrators of the massacre. That's exactly the psychology that perpetrates the legacy of it. You didn't do it, so why are you defending it? You don't have to, because you can oppose it just as easily as you can embrace it. But you can't do both at once. You can separate yourself from what has been done -- and what's being done. But first you have to be willing to call what's being done by its right name.
The dominant culture -- the colonized mind -- is at war with nature, and so by definition is at war with all peoples of nature. The more natural the people, the greater the degree of hostility the dominant culture manifests toward them.
This is an alienation from nature so profound and so virulent that no one in the dominant flow of things wants to acknowledge that it even exists. Theirs is the normal and correct ordering of consciousness to relate to the world, they say, they assert, they insist. So long as they look at it that way, there can be no admission of pathology. It follows that, absent an acknowledgement of the pathology, there can be no cure.
What's necessary is for people to come to grips with the fact that there is something radically wrong with the tradition into which they've been conditioned, and for these people to want to get out of that.
03/12/06: Yesterday, in an effort to become a little more involved in the local spiritual community, I attended an open class with the local neopagan group. (Predominantly Wiccan, but there are practitioners of other traditions there as well.) The topic was Celtic Mythology. I found myself woefully ignorant on a lot of what was being discussed (becoming informed is why one takes a class, right?), but the theme of a once-diverse population of tribes, each rich with their own stories and histories, being subsumed by the ever-expanding monolithic empire and its "One God" has become achingly familiar.
Did you know that even the word "Celtic" was not a label any of these tribes applied to themselves, but was invented by the Romans, much like "Indian" (or "Native American") would later be used as a blanket term to describe the hundreds of distinctive groups of people that once inhabited this continent? I don't know exactly what tribe(s) my ancestors belonged to, but I believe there is value in searching our heritage for an era before the diseased mindset of civilization forced us to adopt its destructive patterns. Perhaps then we might recombine the shards of our lost histories to shape a new vision of life and vibrance for the future. This is my hope, anyway.
bitscape at gmail dot com