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The
United States and the world have spent this last week in ceremony and in an
international celebration of this nation. This ancient land cannot be
measured by any one man, or any one idea: Watching the scripted and solemn
requiem, that concluded a week long ad for "How the West was Won"
sent me back, to another leader of other people, back to the original
occupants of this place - and to how Americans dealt with him and with his
people in that much different day and time.
That story I've attached is also
one of conquest and of a people's search for freedom in the long shadows of
history, with one major exception. This story from the late 1800's has the
reality that was missing from the eulogies of this past week.
What happened to America last week
was the longest political commercial ever made. It was scripted and
reinforced at every turn, then dipped in contrived nostalgia for a way of
life that never really was. Ronnie, 'the man that was revered,' was the
same one who filled the streets with mental patients, addicts and the
homeless, because he said, they should take care of the problems
themselves, and not the state. It was one of his "shinning
ideals." If fact, his goal was the privatization of all such
facilities, and had nothing to do with those directly affected-their lives
were not in the script.
The weeklong love-fest left out
most of what this leader did, in his time as "leader."
The life the world was shown last
week, was only as real as all those films that the Great Communicator made.
There was no grit in him, no depth that rested on convictions deep or
shallow-he was only there to play a part. And he did that very well indeed.
But that "show" has
ended now-bigtime! Now we have the dark side of the same bright shiny coin,
and we must deal with what he's brought. Bush has never told us any truth,
on anything he's undertaken-his entire life and legacy are as filled with
lies and deception as Reagan's was with fantasies and scripted actions that
kept us all off course.
Ronnie's task was to insure the
death of all that had been worked for, in previous centuries. Reagan came
to stop progress, and to enshrine the ideal of the good life for the rich,
and only for the rich. He had no use for people, except as the audience he
needed, to make it all look real.
What was completely lost in the
nation's love affair with the actor-was the long forgotten truth that life
is hard for most, and very hard for far too many. The changes Reagan came
to make will take us back to Dickensian England; back to child labor, back
to unchallenged corporate rule over all commercial enterprise, back to a
time when women and minorities had no rights at all to anything. And, if
one took the nation's temperature last week, it might seem that America at
least, had bought it all complete with all the hollow shadows of the truth
which those emotions generate.
John Neihardt, lived in a very
different time, ruled by very different standards, and he missed the final
stages of the lives he wrote about, by only a decade or so. Yet those times
were not really so different, from the nightmare that exists today. There
are good people and bad people in all eras of history because all of us are
flawed. The story he wrote was about a part, of how we got to be this
nation. It is not about perfect individuals, or absolutes of any kind-it's
about a way of life that died, and the spirit of a people seen through the
death of one of theirs.
Life doesn't change, the plots and
scripts may vary, but the substance beneath the words, and behind the
spotlights cannot be denied, despite Ronnie's weeklong festival of lies. We
might want to remember, at the end of this week of morning, how it came
about, that there could be this place we call the United States of America.
For this country did not rise unopposed, nor was our acquisition of this
land a noble thing to know or understand.
Please read the excerpt from this
prose poem, of the death of one who was a mighty and a noble warrior. A
leader, who sought to lead his starving people to a better life. Their
world wasn't made of shining cities on the hills of men, but of the wonder
and the bounty of this land they dearly loved. And like so many nations in
the world they too sought freedom and a just existence, but they were
buried in our race toward Manifest Destiny, and so became part of that
rutted road we made, to take us to that shining Western shore.
The parallels between this chief,
and the one who was once our president are many, right down to the people
that each cared most about. 'Terror' makes a brief appearance, and fear of
course creates the whole of this misdeed. But the treatment of people then,
seems very like the camps in Palestine, or the prisons in Iraq today. While
the setting for this story may be distant, human nature hasn't changed a
lot. What's clear is that much has been lost by people everywhere, since we
took this land from those who claimed it as their own.
The end of this man, in history,
was brought about with treachery, deceit and lies. So long ago it was, and
yet it seems we're back to that again-with those who seek to lead us all
into the chaos of unexamined plans, and the global chaos that will come
from that.
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