A HOUSE BUILT OF MYTHS

   Recognizing The Prison

      Whether the Wachowski Brothers intentionally intended for the convoluted message of their hugely successful Matrix movies to be deciphered is not known, but certainly the mass of interpreters ready to lend the movie their philosophical bent has added to the confusion as to the real intent of its ideal.
      The first movie clearly presents us with a reasonable corollary to the situation of our time--namely that western civilization is party to a mass manipulation of perceptual reality intentionally skewed to keep the energy and purpose of that society serving the interests of a calculating few.  The fact that the few are not machines, but Huxley's Power Elite, is irrelevant.
      At first viewing, the original Matrix is a traditional sci-fi thriller that promises an adventure of breaking free from the constraints of runaway technology (in the form of artificial intelligence) and returning to a real, albeit sometimes unpleasant, perceptual reality.  Unfortunately, there is at least one scene in the movie where the true and underlying theme of the Matrix is revealed.  In that scene, the leader of the rebellion, Morpheus, reveals to Neo the truth of what had occurred to bring about the catastrophy that had decimated the planet.  In the midst of his sililoquy he makes the astounding statement, "Since the beginning of time man has depended on machines for his survival."
      Say what!  Long before western civilization brought its supposed advantages to these shores, Indigenous Peoples, without even the benefit of the wheel, created pyramids and road systems, had continental trade and communication systems, and extensively farmed and landscaped the continents.  Only two or three days of labor a week was necessary to provide the daily necessities for most families.  The rest of the time was for leisure and the arts. Modern social scientists are beginning to postulate that specialization, once considered one of the defining attributes of advanced civilization, may actually be a step backward in the evolution of societies, especially as it relates to the time necessary to procure necessities, and the general happiness of the People.
        The second movie expounds further on this ideal, especially during the conversation between Neo and the Elder beneath Zion, where the machines that produce the atmosphere and life-support are found.  Their discussion about the feasibility of humans surviving without machines would be ludicrous if it wasn't treated with so much serious deliberation by the characters.
        Unfortunately their philosophies and conclusions are reflective of western civilization's preoccupation with the concepts of technological progress as an inescapable rollercoaster on which man is blessed (or doomed) to ride on the rest of his universal journey.
         One is allowed to criticize western civilization's (now modern global civilization's) failings, even predict potential dangers to come but not to suggest that its sacrosanct growth be constrained.  The discussion is framed within the context of an acknowledgement of, and resignation to, its existence.  Little discussion is allowed that refers to any attempt to alter it at a fundamental level or present alternatives to its underlying philosophies.
         The poet/activist John Trudell says it best in his inspirational spoken word CD, Descendant Now Ancestor, when he describes the current world view as a twisted perceptual reality that allows a few to utilize the global consumer society as fuel in their dominant quest for world power.
          The response of a contemporary newspaper journalist to seeing the second "matrix" movie probably represents the normal citizen's jaded and self-serving view of that manipulation.  He wrote that, though he was stimulated by the initial promise of the series, its failure to deliver the punch of idealism necessary to be convincing caused him, in the end, to identify more with the traitor who ratted on his friends--in order to be replaced into the Matrix where he could at least have the benefit of a pretend steak.
          The nightmare of the real, that Morpheus promises, has come true.  If we can't tell the difference between real and imaginary, who cares?  After all, if the Matrix can provide news, entertainment and experiences that gratify the individual human being, why worry whether they are real or contrived? Where is the value of the real?
         Having convinced the citizenry that technological civilization is inescapable (at least for the small segment of the world's population enjoying its supposed benefits), we are further promised sensory delights, entertainment, conveniences, and comforts unavailable outside the "Matrix" of consumerism and global imperialism.  Since the fantasy of our "superiority" is evident, and any alternative has been described to us as a "thin gruel" existence, most people are willing to overlook the terrifying realities of how we obtain our wealth and comfort, preferring to "close their eyes and savor the taste of their steak".  The sacrifices and changes in living standards necessary to change the systems so that exploitation of the planet and its peoples can be avoided require a change in the perceptual reality of western civilization.
        To be awakened to the real world is as much a shock as the original movie portrays it.  The horrors are so many, and so real, that it is difficult to resist re-immersing oneself in the distractions and sensory delights of the technological age.  For some freed men and women, being faced with the full brunt of the terrifying wave of reality is too much.  Suicide and violence are the only responses they can imagine.  Others of us have been activists all of our lives.  By whatever means, we have grown up outside the real matrix of the twentieth century.  Our hatred and loathing for the myths and lies that persuade so many, drives us to write and speak for an new perceptual reality.  As John Trudell says, if we use our collective intelligence consciously and coherently--as often as possible--we may, in the long run of time, make a difference.

       We're here to offer you a choice between perspectives.  Take the blue pill and reject our premise and conclusions and you can return to your life undisturbed.  Take the red pill and we will provide you with the impetus to create a "new perceptual reality".

        There is a group of Americans who make it a point to constantly criticize any attempt to preserve Indigenous language, culture, identity and social customs, believing that everyone should simply homogenize themselves with the pride and accomplishments of western civilization.
        More often than not, these people are Euro-centric and extremely nationalistic. They continue, even in the face of new evidence, to describe the continents of the Americas, before the arrival of Christoforos, as having been predominantly wild and empty, occupied mostly by savage, hunter-gatherer societies, with little or no cultural development.  They point to the so-called identifying characteristics that make up a "superior civilization"; utilization of the wheel, development of writing, technological advancement in weapons and machines, scientific advances, alteration and domination of the natural environment and utilization of resources to create economic stratification and specialization--while ignoring the historical evidence that were it not for the contributions of the indigenous civilizations of the americas, namely agricultural products, gold, and especially silver, Europe would have continued its depraved and downward spiral into starvation, economic chaos, spiritual destitution and political disintegration.
         As a young man, my brothers and I spent a number of years in exile from the modern social and technological environment, (enough of an exile that I did not know what year it was).  We returned with an altogether different feeling about the life we had been leading.  A life that, we had been led to believe, was as normal and as inescapable as the tide.  We realized that all the pent up, raging emotions of our native teenage years were not a normal reaction to the natural world.  Talking to Elders already old in the fifties, we realized that our youthful aggression, with all the rebellious emotions and reactions america has come to take for granted in its youth, were unknown among Indigenous Peoples.  In fact, teen rebellion was unknown to most rural Peoples until the middle century, when Hollywood convinced everyone that kind of behavior was traditionally typical of young people.  We realized that much of this behavior resulted from a feeling of being trapped in an irrelevant, surreal, frustrating, non-fulfilling, unhappy, endless, and seemingly unstoppable, roller-coaster ride.  It is a thrill ride, with the thrill removed: a dead end road defined by a meaningless abstraction called “success”, which seemed largely based on a similarly abstract economic or social classification.  This economic abstract is a direct descendant of the dreams of poor and classless Europeans who came here searching for wealth and power at the exclusion of any other redeemable value.
         Fortunately, our experiences liberated us from the matrix of modern global perspective and allowed us to experience being happy, content, balanced, harmonious, and free for the first time. We no longer felt constrained by the myths of the matrix of our previous indoctrination.  Like the samadhi, we were free to involve ourselves in the society and the civilization without the hopeless, gut-wrenching feeling that we were trapped with no release available to us.  We had to pull back from the tentacles of consumerism, and allow ourselves to be satisfied with less comforts, conveniences, and entertainments--but ultimately that gave us the perspective to begin to examine all of the structures and pre-defined realities that society, the mass media, and public education had ordered our minds to accept.
         Over time, we began to make comparisons between what we saw as Indigenous Native values and “Ways” and those put forward by the dominant anti-culture around us.  We use the word “Way”, in this context, to mean a life-philosophy or world-view resulting from the homogeneous integration of language, spiritual philosophy, social morality and ethics in physical interaction with the natural world.
        Today, after conversations with other like-minded twenty-first century escapees from the ever present, ever-growing web of the modern matrix, we think it our responsibility to attempt to explode some of the myths presently put forward by these adamant ethnocentric enthusiasts.  The first is myth is that they speak for themselves. The truth is they are led by their noses. They are the frontline footsoldier spokesmen for the Power Elite that need us to accept their perceptual realities to maintain their strangle hold on the worlds resources and organization.  Their reality is reflected in a belief that demanding that cigarette companies be responsible for the consequences of their actions toward the health of human beings is in some way a threat to our rights and freedoms.  Yet if you examine their catechisms, under their rhetoric you find that their system of measurement and empowerment always stems from an evaluation of an economic bottom line benefiting themselves.  One of John Trudell's more important observations is that all our struggles are not about freedom, or our rights, but about our responsibilities.  If we continually meet our responsibilities in a real sense, in the real world, for real people--freedom will come about as the natural consequence of our selfless efforts and, of course, a willingness to sacrifice our lives to be free.
        Through personal experience we have verified that the concept of superiority is largely defined as simply a personal preference.  The close-quartered, mundane, simple and slow moving world we experienced in our self-contained exile resulted in a contentment, happiness and harmony that we had never before experienced in the modern world.
        A high gross-national-product may or may not be an actual indicator of economic strength and civil satisfaction.  In fact, some theorists now believe that the more people purchase, the less satisfied they become.  Similarly, a technological advancement may or may not result in an improvement in the human condition. Science, once defining itself as the sole vehicle for determining truth and fact--is now realizing that at the root of everything there is mystery--and that discoveries which appear to be a benefit today, may be found to be a threat tomarrow. Social scientists have recently put forward the theory that specialization within a society, commonly recognized as a cornerstone of civilization, may actually signal a decline in the satisfaction, happiness and harmony of its citizenry.
         Part of the problem of clarifying a realistic perceptual reality has to do with the short historical view we presently have of these advancements, and the civilization.  Many Americans have become largely removed from the history of their immediate families and have given their loyalties over to a nationalistic fervor.  They can’t trace their own history back more than a few generations.  This results in the loss of any personal or emotional relationship to history.  Once history is removed from a nation’s historical consciousness, except as an abstract study, time seems to expand and a century of events takes on an exaggerated importance.  Therefore, there has been a rush to quantify and expound on the virtues of the American experiment and modern technological global civilization without an adequate amount of time to prove its real and lasting benefits or superiority.  What appears to some to be a rapidly advancing global civilization with an exciting and promising future, appears to others as a dehumanizing, voracious, irresponsible and rapacious virus intent on victimizing the planet and its resources.
         So we have come to question the modern matrix from its oldest institutions and beliefs, its very foundations and history, to the often mutated but similarly contrived ideals and policies of the present.  We accept our role and responsibility in disputing the assertion that the present civilization is superior to those of other times and places.  In addition, we intend to strive to identify what the elements of the modern matrix are, how it has come to suffocate and stifle humanity and the natural world, what factors support its dominance and continuation, and how it can, ultimately, be escaped.
 

Pathology of A Diseased Civilization

      We could start our discussion examining controversial topics: debates about climate change, political tyranny, religious fanaticism, etc., but there are more pressing issues at hand. The current industrial civilization considers itself an elegant experiment in progress and stability.  In reality, it is a lunatic who defecates in its bed and demands the obedience of its subjects in a headlong rush toward global suicide.

      Let's begin with water.
      Much of the world is already experiencing a crisis obtaining potable water.  Human beings are essentially animalized water.  If we pour water into ourselves it immediately becomes us.  It moves, it thinks, and it forgets that it is water.
       98.25 percent of the world's water is saline.  Of the remaining 1.75 %, eighty percent is frozen.  That means that less than 1/3 of 1 percent of all the drinking water in the world is available to all the life that needs fresh water to survive.  No new water is being produced.  Supplies are finite.  Currently, human toxins and practices have poisoned a significant amount of that available water.  In the U.S., 50 % of our drinking water is from underground aquifers that are being pumped dry or poisoned from waste seepage.  Those aquifers took 100,000 years to create.  They cannot be replaced.
        Technocrats insist that science will find a way to de-salinize the oceans for our use, meanwhile local governments can't afford to fill the potholes in our streets, let alone balance the federal, state and local budgets.  It's estimated that by 2015 many countries will face severe water shortages and in fifty years whole countries may be completely depopulated by the total absence of drinkable water. New discoveries in Egypt and in Central America have virtually proven that both the huge original Egyptian Kingdom and equally massive Mayan Civilzations were both completely destroyed in only a few years by rapid climate change causing both areas to be devasted by killer droughts.  Yet, few of the ultra-developed modern countries have examined that possibility occuring in their own lands.
        In response to this crisis, what are the clearly defined goals of the technological leaders, their governments and financial institutions?  They have moved to privatize water in the poorest nations of the earth to profit from the crisis.  This is a purposeful turning away from the shared responsibility of insuring adequate basic resources for humanity toward the accepted system that emphasizes global profit above any ethic or value.  We will rush to the aid of a country devastated by earthquake or tsunami, but we will turn our heads and ignore corporate attempts to profit from the privatization of resources around the world--a practice that causes more suffering and devastation than any natural disaster.
 
      How about soil?
      It has taken about 100,000 years to build the world's topsoil.  Due to the giant shift in agriculture and population growth over the last five thousand years, fifty percent of the world's topsoil is gone.  In twenty years, 30% more will have blown away.  That's eighty percent of the world's arable soil, gone.  There have been positive discoveries that could redevelop soils, but not even one nation has shown the slightest interest in actually paying for it.
       North and South America have been devastated. Six billion tons of soil is lost per year in the U.S.  A Soviet scientist once recommended that the Soviets stop the arms race because he estimated that in one century the U.S. could no longer grow enough food to survive.  In Asia, twenty billion tons are now being lost annually.  Millions of children starve to death each year in close reach of our great and modern industrial civilization.  Third world countries are encouraged to grow cash crops, harvest resources, or develop industrially so as to pay back their international debts rather than grow food to feed their peoples.  In the face of de-forestation, development, progress and lack of necessities (like water), 10,000 distinct and irreplaceable species are lost every year.  The loss is permanent.
       What could be a better indicator of the sanity of a civilization than its desire and commitment, or lack thereof, to protecting the very resources essential to its survival?
        Still not convinced?

        Let's talk DNA.
        The architectural elegance of DNA, the genetic material of the planet, is evidence of the vulnerable quality of creation.  All of the DNA molecules of all the humans who have ever lived would fit into one teardrop. That is, 80 billion molecules in a teardrop.  Everything that will happen to the future of human beings on this planet depends on the quality and protection of that teardrop.
        "War on Terror"?  Here is the real terror!
         There are 264 million tons of hazardous waste spread liberally around the U.S. each year in the form of 70,000 (mostly untested) chemicals and their by-products. To these, add 1000 more untested chemicals each year.
          DNA contains the information and intelligence at the root of an Organism.  It is known that chemicals can enter the body, and go straight to the cells, attaching themselves and disrupting, modifying, mutating or destroying that information and intelligence.  This is damage that cannot be altered and will be part of the human species forever.  Some defects can be carried, only to show up in later generations. Serious birth defects in humans alone have doubled in the last 25 years.  The worst effects are not expected to appear for another 10 to 20 years.  We will spend billions to fight a war on human violence yet to come, and only pennies to fight the daily poisoning of our children and a chemical threat to the DNA of our species.
        Where is the responsibility to be found in the freedoms that guarantee the fervor that drives these companies to gamble with the future of our species for profit?

         The economic systems developed on the principle of an endless compulsion to growth are obsolete and must be abandoned immediately for systems which demand society be outfitted with physical, architectural, and technological artifacts that last centuries--not days or months. Systems that judge their success by GNP must be abandoned and replaced with systems that operate on renewable resources, recycle non-renewables at 100%, and produce no more waste than a local region can dispose of naturally.  The U.S., in order to survive, must cut production and use of resources at a minimum of 50%.  Third world debt must be forgiven outright or traded for the establishment of wilderness systems. The present economic structures are based on a process that begins with the depletion of finite resources, proceeds to the manufacturing of disposable products which immediately begin to depreciate in value and quality, ending with their disposal as non-renewable wastes which are beyond the natural capacity of the earth to dissipate. 
         Sanity?  Common sense?

         Each instant, one million new faces appear on the earth--representing many species and forms. The vanity and arrogance of human beings in creating and expanding the role of potentially deadly toxins and weapons points not to a healthy society, culture, or civilization but to a scorched psyche that has become resistant and maladaptive, even sinister.  Primary human bonds, which connect families and provide roles that incorporate citizens of all ages into familial relationships, have been replaced with the secondary commercial bonds of consumerism.  The new revelations of web-string science and universe cosmologies demand that those who believe in technology commit to a new understanding of the Universe as one entity; inter-connected, inter-reliant and inter-related in every way.  To separate humanity from this cosmology will result in a continued insanity that may bring about nothing less than the suicide of our species.
        Scholars have long lamented the destruction of the library at Alexandria at the hands of barbarians who burned the manuscripts to heat their bath water because they were unable to grasp the beauty they cast into the flame. Those who discount these warnings have only to examine themselves in a mirror to see the faces of those same barbarians.

              (Much of this material was gathered from "Canticle To The Cosmos", Brian Swimme.   Dr. of Mathematical Cosmology)
 
 

 Commitment To Morality

          When many people hear the word morality, they immediately think of sexual conduct, or the personal behavior of an individual.  Indigenous people often see morality as a communal trait.  It involves the global perspective of the people.  Western civilization began with the colonial conquests of Rome, with economic and political power as its prime directive.  Roman Catholic traditions drove forward the conquest for greed disguised in the cloak of religion.  European colonialists, specifically England, Spain and France carried on this tradition of seeking to enrich themselves utilizing the shield and conveyances of religion.  In America, the concepts of manifest destiny mirrored these traditions of spiritual deceit, pretending a social, political and spiritual superiority while conducting its own holy war against millions of Indigneous americans.
          These blueprints have since been drawn upon by countless despots and dictators looking for methods and rationalizations to openly condone their programs of genocide and pillaging of the earth.  Today these models are openly used to bully and coerce resource rich nations into allowing a handful of powerful international criminals access to those resources.  We benefit from this horror by continuing to allow our modern gods of comfort and convenience to supercede our spiritual values and morality.  By relegating morality to individual standards it relieves us of any group responsibility for the horrors being perpetrated upon the world.  Technological civilization and its deity Progress are in the process of demanding the allegiance of every world citizen and enlisting every malleable mind to their ends. But the fruits of that civilization, which once promised to be so sweet, have soured as of late as the foremost societies in this quest plunge into cycles of inner turmoil and violence. In America, even our children dream of murder.   We pretend that we can safely continue this lifestyle indefinitely while sevnty-five percent of the rest of the world is lacking nutritious food, shelter, or a safe place to sleep. It is a myth that there are enough resources for the rest of the world to share our standard of living.   Even if the entire world were to model their political and economic systems after ours this could not be accomplished without finding six more earths to plunder.   This is what the current crisis is really centered around. Those who despoil not only humanity, but the life of the earth, will continue to be visited by the plagues of moral bankruptcy.  Our families and our children will be the targets of our own transgressions. This was a seed planted at the beginning of this nation in soil soaked with the blood and dreams of indigenous peoples.  Even today, across the world new blood soaks the ground.  The fabric of civilization must be torn and resewed with a new moral perspective.
           Morality relates not only to the actions of human beings toward other humans but toward the entire planet   In the indigenous world the earth is a living being.  Every physical form upon it is comprised of the same elements moving and interacting.  Earth, fire, air, water, rocks, trees, animals, and human beings are built from the same materials.   All these forms share an inner life for differing purposes in our global family.  The rock does not speak because that is not its purpose.   Indigenous people do not ascribe to humanity any superiority or greater value than our environment because we could not sustain our lives separate from it.  If we depend on it, how can we be superior to it? To be very frank, some of our Elders predicted the present circumstances a century ago because they recognized in their conquerors a selfish belief that considers humanity to be the preferred species of the earth rather than as an integral, equal part of the whole.
        We are asked to possess three characteristics: respect for Creation, responsibility to act in the best interests of Creation, and gratitude for that Creation.   Indigenous people revere Creation.  It is all sacred. We view death as a natural process.  Just as we eat, so we are eaten--and give back our spirits to Creation. We know that the basic elements of creation are everlasting and cannot die.  No guilt, no blame .
         As the volcano pours its lava into the villages below, we are assured that someday flowers will sprout in the enriched soil of that destruction.  That is what separates natural violence from the violence of men.  Natural violence will always result in new creation. But the horrors men put upon each other do not guarantee that from those horrors new flowers of great beauty will sprout.    There is a difference between the mysterious order and purpose of natural destruction in Creation and the willful and calculated violence of human beings purposely destroying the very relationships that should give their life meaning, purpose and joy.  An uncle used to say that it was the fear of death, the fear of judgement, the fear of loss, the very selfish fear of personal extinction--that leads men to evil.
       In our family we think that it is part of man's purpose to search for a balance between fate and choice. Those who have chosen war and conflict will not be convinced or changed.  As my friend, Clayton Duncan, says--they are the people of ruin, everything they touch they ruin.  That has become their purpose.   In America, one would expect that the people would be overwhelmed with gratitude for our many blessings and overflow with compassion. For American leaders to act with attitudes of arrogance, superiority and a willingness to exercise a violent spirit can only lead to the loss of these blessings.
               We cannot expect to move away from revenge and violence toward morality and gratitude until we acknowledge the absence of the sacred in this modern path.  Until we revere Creation. Meaningful change can only be led by people who demand that the moral principles of our spiritual heritages be applied without compromise to the supposed principles of the Republic.  Lip service and rhetoric only increase the danger.
              We don’t have to possess exactly the same perspectives and beliefs, only agree that our goal is not to loose unnecessary and unjustified evils upon the world merely to preserve a standard of living that will be impossible for the rest of the world ever to share.

"Goodness does not thrive in the absence of vice.  Selfishness, greed, vanity, arrogance, hatred, and jealousy are continually present in human beings.  True goodness only emerges in the threat and presence of shadow--nestling in the crook of its arm, whispering in its ear, until the shadow goes mad and men relinquish their fears to cry once more for compassion and the creative spirit."
 
 

The Myth Of A Democracy(Republic)

        The two longest continual running democracies are, at present, the Icelandic Republic and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
        The United States has never been in the game.  All the dictionaries that have been quoted to argue the question of whether it is a republic or a democracy simply prove one thing--neither has ever existed in this country.
         A democracy and a republic require that "the People" be represented in some way, either directly or through representatives.  But in neither case does it say "part of the people" or "one group" of the people.
        My Greek interprets res publica, not as law of the people but as interest of the people. The founding fathers vision of the "People" were white male English descendant landowners.  No exceptions, RSVP necessary.  Indians could not play, nor blacks, nor women, nor landless men. It was, and still is, an exclusive club, convinced of its racial and social superiority and of the manifest destiny of its experiment. In these modern times a hand is occasionally extended to those outside the mainstream club, mostly to present a veneer of equality to fulfill the mythical promise of high school history and government texts.  But in the larger issues, the clubs are exclusive unless one assimilates in every way.  And at the inner core, the pristine racial and social characteristics of the descendants of empire builders are alone.
        The first priority of the propaganda machine is to garner the consent of a dangerous citizenry by pacifying it with polls and meaningless elections designed to give that citizenry the impression that its views have been examined and considered.  The effectiveness of that machine can be observed by asking a normal citizen what they think of politicians and then turning around to ask them if they trust their government to tell them the truth about important issues. Contradictory beliefs will emerge.
         Indigenous americans know what democracy means.  It has nothing to do with freedom.  It has only to do with responsibility.  The interests of the People. We think that in order for a democracy to survive for more than a few generations the people need to have blood and filial ties.  If they don't, the result will become exclusive, manipulative, overbearing, and capable of developing loyalties not in concert with the interests of the people.
        When a government, which pretends to be responsible to its People, undermines or opposes those best interests to support the bottom line of corporations pouring money into elected representatives coffers, that government has abrogated its responsibilities and no longer fits the dictionary definitions of democracy or republic.  Big Tobacco is a perfect example.  Big Chemical is another.  Now, even our Supreme Court appointed President has replaced the former byword of manifest destiny, "Progress", with a politically correct, fuzzy-warm call to the siren song of "Democracy" in order to achieve (surprise!) our every melodramatic, big screen, technicolor, white hat, good guy, God's on our side, (colonialistic) desire.
        As Seig Heil Adolf said, "All effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities, and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas."  "...Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd."
        How many times in the last years have you heard the repetition of simple and similar phrases, faithfully reprinted in the press, one of which is-- Democracy?
        Democracy in the U.S has always been a distant promise, idolized and unrealized.  During the original days of the Union, it was less a republic of representation than it was an absence of government in the lives of citizens.  Those circumstances continued until the early 1800's push for eastern industrialization, at which time economic interests got involved and the "representation" of the people took on new significance--notably the continual identification and pursuit of resources for the enrichment of industrial society and its supporting institutions.  These two words have been consistently used as unifying symbols to build a nationalistic fervor and give unrelated peoples--with uncommon pasts, dissimilar values, and separate individual and collective goals--an idealistic description of their imaginary power.
        Our Indigenous Peoples have experienced, over and over, how the rule of law, even the Constitution, is interpreted and altered as needed...
       We need to forget the semantics of political debate and settle down to the question of responsibilities.  If we wish our elected representatives to be responsible first to our best interests, then we need to recognize the difference between responsible local capitalism and the uncontrolled menace of the national and global corporate elite.  Their obvious ability to manipulate the decision-making processes of our elected representatives makes them the enemy of Democracy.  These are some of the most dangerous terrorists we face today.
       The meaning of the word Democracy does not contain an endorsement of only one brand of economics, or religion, or political system. Its meaning is simple and direct.  It describes a People, or their representatives, acting in concert to make decisions in the best interests of the whole People.  If it does not mean that, we don't need it.
 
 

Turning The Soil

"In history, we find answers for the present, and directions for the future."

        We're lying in the hold of Christoforo Columbus ships, waiting for the morning to bring an end to the lives and cultures of millions of indigenous people.  We know our Leader has come here for gold.  We know our fellows can't wait to begin raping and killing and building their harems of ten-year-old Arawak girls.  We hear the exhortations that God is with us, and that this is the destiny of our race.  What will we decide our course of action is to be?  For most of those lying here with us, no such decision is required--they will follow faithfully to the end, and their souls will be corrupted.             
         As every sun rises--it is our choice.  Some will argue that the circumstances of our time are different, but the truth has never been allowed here.  Just as most americans would read the preceding paragraph and consider it the ravings of an anti-american lunatic, only bits and pieces of freedom and justice have been made available to select groups of the population and the bloody face of continued colonialism peaks out from behind the masks our leaders wear.
         It is their last gasp to hold to the imaginary vision placed in their minds by their forefathers, but even they will not admit to knowing the secret.  Behind the scenes, America has never been guided by an honorable vision.
         There have been many honorable men and honorable women who have believed in, and done good things in the name of that american myth, but the guiding forces have always reflected classes of priviledge, institutions of personal greed, and an unquenchable thirst for power disguised as progress.
         Why are so many Americans more devoutly committed to the patriotic rationalizing of the American ideal than they are to their supposed spiritual life?  Perhaps it is because those who have led in politics and business for the last three hundred years have stripped the guidelines of their spiritual beliefs from having any relationship to their daily decision-making.  They have manipulated their spirituality to allow them to justify whatever vice they desire as the will of the Creator.  They have put aside their faith, resurrecting it only to assure themselves they still adhere to the value of conscience.
          For American Christians, the historical Jesus and the smattering of his original teachings left to study are subverted in layers of discussion, interpretation and argument. The ethical supremacy of his revolutionary rejection of authority, institutionalism, and arrogance of judgement is ignored--and the swirling bullshit of nineteen centuries of formal mythmaking waters down the strength and purpose of his visionary epiphany.  Our political leaders quote scripture and verse not to enlighten us to a moral and spiritual imperative but to discourage idealism and aspiration toward the purest virtue.   If pressed, they fall back on their dark-age historical perspective and mumble platitudes about human nature and the American myths they have come to worship.
          The United States, as empires go, has most certainly not been the worst-- but it's climbing up  on the list.  If not for the painters, poets, and authors that created the basic symbols American patriotism relies on, the truth might have emerged a century ago.  Until well into the 18th century, American meant Indian.  Cris Columbus and the host of European sailers said to be first in the routes of discovery were actually far down on the list and hundreds of years behind.  The greatest cities of the 15th century were in the Americas, not Europe.  The first consensual democracies were in the America's six hundred years before the constitution of the US was drafted.  Medicine, mathematics, engineering and agriculture were flourishing in the Americas while Europe was suffering in the dark ages.  The Americas were not wild empty lands when the second wave of Europeans hit in the 1500's, but a charnel house of death.  There were more people in North America than in all of Europe until European diseases destroyed up to 95 percent of the humanity that resided here. When the Nina, Pina and Santa Marie arrived, the coastlands of America were not wild untended fallow forests but heavily developed agricultural areas with a decimated and dying populations.  When the American revolution began it was a rebellion unsupported by over seventy percent of the colonists.  About thirteen percent were publicly in favor of rebellion. Besty Ross did not sew the first American flag.  There never was a cherry tree and George Washington did not have wooden teeth.  The men at Valley Forge were not starving nor were they freezing to death--Washington used that story to cajol congress into giving him more money for the war effort.  Most of Washington's men were not the farmers and business men that comprised the colonists but mercenaries and poor immigrants hired to fight.  The Liberty Bell was no where near Philadelphia during the inauguration of the country.  Native treaties did not last as long as the winds blow and the waters flow.   The Gulf of Tonkin incident which began the Vietnam War never happened (my brother was in the Gulf at that time).  The forces of Saddam Hussein were not poised at the border of Saudi Arabia before the war in Kuwait, and he had already dismantled, traded, or destroyed his WMD's before the recent war. These are merely a handful of the myths America has incorporated into her modern quilt of nationalism. 
           Native America did not develop the phrase “forked tongue” to describe American politicians and businessmen for no reason. The US has supported ten times as many dictators and terrorists to serve the interests of corporate capitalism than it has genuinely fought for democratic principles in the world. US leaders, government, media, and corporations have been lying to their people and the world since their inception.  They destroyed the world of countless Native Nations in the belief that their race, culture, ethics, industry and religion was superior.  European-descended civilization, with an economic system dependent on never-ending growth and progress has promised that industry, science and technology will result in a more peaceful, bountiful, happy and healthy world.  Yet every day we see evidence of a decline in families, ethics, morality and the quality of life and environment worldwide.
           The entire dream of America was intended only to serve the upper class white males and their offspring.  The wealth that has made us all fat and complacent comes from the incredible bounty of the American geography and the willingness of our leaders to ruthlessly pursue resources over the world necessary to our benefit.  This is the reason that we are revered and envied, as well as hated and despised, by the populations of the world.   Those who dream they have a chance to use our methods, or ride on our coat-tails--support us.  Those who realize they don’t have the resources to be us, or who do not wish too--oppose us.
          We are a modern empire, whose vulnerable underbelly of hypocrisy has been exposed; whose glorification of comfort and greed dominates our desire for an honest spiritual heritage so that our citizens turn to sex, violence and entertainment for their comfort.  We are a modern empire whose consumer ethic has turned into a system that produces unconscionable excesses and uncontrollable and dangerous wastes while 40,000 children worldwide die of starvation every single day.
          I hear the laughable American cliche, “America-love it or leave it”.  But I was born here.  This is my land.  The government and the civilization are simply a thin temporary veneer drawn over the landscape. The bones of my relatives will be the grass long after the United States has passed into history.  I love the land and its people, and I continue to honor any veteran who has put him or herself in harm's way--but the land and its people are not the government, nor are they its symbols.
         Those who demand obediance to patriotism are indistinguishable from other empires that flourished calling for the sacrifice of their young.  A call not in-service to the protection of their families and the truth but for the preservation of corrupt and self perpetuating systems that treat human beings (and the earth) as if they are less important than patriotic rhetoric and unrealized ideals.   Ideals serve humanity in action, not in speechmaking.

          To change our perceptual reality we need only a revolution in thought; a questioning and reevaluation of everything we have been taught about the past, the present and the future.
           We leave you with this question, and a parable.
    
           How much would our world have to change to place the power of calling young people to war into the mouths of their mothers?

           In every earthly garden there are always deeply rooted weeds, that desire to dominate, which cannot be removed at the surface.  Our garden is filled with deeply rooted selfish patriarchal weeds.  The Earth is calling for nothing less than a deep turning of the soil of this civilization.
 

Individual Bones
 
Brave New World Revisited
Aldous Huxley   1958 Harper and Row

"No people that passes abruptly from a state of subservience under the power of a despot to the completely unfamiliar state of political independence can be said to have a fair chance of making democratic institutions work. No people in a precarious economic condition has a fair chance of being able to govern itself democratically."

Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of "Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty."

"However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation...one can be brief only by omission and simplification."
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Media

Jefferson:
            "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free it expects what never was and never will be...The people cannot be safe without information.  Where the press is free, and every 'man' able to read, all is safe."
            Of course Jefferson himself recognized that the media was capable of being
dishonest when he said, "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper."

Albert Speer  (Adolf Hitler's Minister Of Armaments)

"...Through technical devices like the radio and the loudspeaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought.  It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man...
 

Hermann Rauschning (1939)

"Hitler has a deep respect for the Catholic church and the Jesuit Order; not because of their Christian doctrine, but because of the "machinery" they have elaborated and controlled, their hierarchical sytem, their extremely clever tactics, their knowledge of human nature and their wise use of human weaknesses in ruling over believers."
 

Adolf Hitler

"All effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare necessities, and then must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas."  "...Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd."  the propagandist should "sytematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with."

"The demagogic propagandist must therefore be consistantly dogmatic.  All his statements are made without qualification. There are no grays in his picture of the world, everything is either diabolically black or celestially white.   He must never admit that he might be wrong or that people with a different point of view might be even partially right.  Opponents should not be argued with, they should be attacked, shouted down...or liquidated."
 

Dr. Erich Fromm

     "Our contemporary western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the innter security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love int the individual...who pays...with increasing mental sickness and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure.)))

They are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society.  Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness.  These millions of abnormally normal people still cherish "the illusion of individuality but their conformity is developing into uniformity.  Uniformity and freedom and incompatible, as are uniformity and mental health.

The difficulty with ordering large civilizations is that there are no strict guideless as to how much organization is necessary.  Too little--and unrelated citizens, lacking powerful unifying ethics and purpose, become lawless and anarchistic.  Too much--and individual creativity is suppressed or inhibited, leading to stagnation or despotism.  Liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely co-operating individuals but the demands of economics and order in large populations often co-opt the values of the people so that they settle for comfort and distractions instead of freedom.