Signs and Portents

Signs appeared yesterday in Paso Ancho advertising a property for sale. The property in question has been inhabited for years by a family with whom I am friends. The first sign I noticed was affixed in front of their vegetable garden, which is where they grow the food they need to survive. The parents are hardworking and deeply devoted to their children. The children are charming: whenever I walk by their home,

they start shouting my name with glee and circle around me so we can laugh and play together; as a volunteer I have also taught them in the local primary school, and know them to be excellent students. One of the boys, Isaiah, loves to talk with me about his hopes for the future of his life. One of the girls, Lized, has often helped me in my first efforts to learn the Guaymi language.

Around the corner from this family is another family with whom I am friends – again, hardworking parents and five delightful little children with the most beautiful smiles. These children I have cared for, with the parents’ permission, and a friend has, also with their permission, provided medical assistance to them. Whenever I walk by these children too, come running out with exuberant joy, hopping up and down in their happiness to see me.

A new house is being built across the calle from their home – and there couldn’t be a greater contrast between the vast proportions of the castle under construction, obviously to attract gringo money, and the simple shack put together from cobbled materials in which my friends live. The man in charge has expressed aloud his considerable distaste for my family of friends, saying the unsightly view of their house will be unacceptable across the road from the mansion he is overseeing construction of. He has put up metal fences right next to their home and has made it clear that his intention is to squeeze them out.

What these two families have in common is that they are Guaymi, Native American. What they now also have in common is that they are unwanted, and are being forced off the land that is home for them, where they have lived, poor but comfortable, raising their children for years. What is being used to get rid of them is not legal – I have been told that there is a law on the books in Panama forbidding forcible eviction of Native Americans who have lived on a property for a significant period of time, but the law is rarely if ever seriously enforced. What is being used to get rid of them is pure muscle: intimidation and threat.

What I am seeing right now, here in Panama, is the past repeating itself. Before this country became the land of Panama it was entirely Native American territory. Everywhere was home to the people who lived here. But now, like the Indians of North America, the Aborigines of Australia, the Tibetans of Tibet at the hands of the Chinese, and formerly the Jews and still the Romany and Muslims of Europe, and many other peoples, they are being expelled in such a manner that they will have no home anywhere. These local forces in Paso Ancho, and their equivalents in other communities throughout this land, just want these Indians gone. They don’t care about where they go, and they don’t care about the fact that – since the powers-that-be in every other Panamanian community is doing the same thing – there is no “where” where they can go. This is not their concern; they simply want these Indians gone. They simply want these Indians to disappear into thin air and never be seen, heard, or spoken of, again.

The term “Panamanians”, if you do not recall, refers to local people who claim to be of pure Spanish ancestry, though their features and coloration show clearly that most of them have plenty of Native American blood. Yet, in their quest to set themselves in a class of society separate from and unquestionably above the Native Americans, they refer to the latter as trash, as worthless people, and the Panamanians say the Indians are nothing but squatters who, when they see a piece of land not in active use, build their homes without permission or legal right.

Squatters on the land? An interesting proposal, considering the fact that these Guaymi once held this entire land, from ocean to ocean, from horizon to horizon. This entire land was home to them. They still have in their hearts and in their culture the understanding that this land is sacred, and that Creator has given to them the right to live in it and care for it. It was wrested from them by force. And now they have no real home. How can these good people ever feel a sense of “home” again? They are being thrown out of their properties like refuse – just as local Panamanians customarily throw their garbage over the fences that edge their properties – so rich gringos can come down here and dig in like potted plants into their estates, their transplanted plots, of Holland or the United States or whatever.

History is repeating itself here, even though many Americans would like just to forget the lessons taught by history. There are those in the United States – of European ancestry, of course – who say the past is gone, and it’s more than time for Native Americans to forget about whatever injustices were done and become mainstreamed as Americans. Bryan Fischer, a right-wingnut (already famous for such bons mots as his statements that Islam is Satanic and homosexuals are evil) recently said on his broadcast talk show: “Many Native Americans to this day continue to cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition instead of coming into the light of Christianity” and seeking to be assimilated into mainstream culture. He went on to say that the best thing Native American parents can do is “get their children off the reservation” such that they can become a part of “Christian culture”.

Put aside the fact that people have every right to worship, or not worship, exactly as they choose. Put aside the fact that the Native American spirituality is, as I detailed in my book The Circle of Life, a worthy and dependable path into the Sacred. What we have here is the final chapter in the efforts of political, economic, religious, and educational power in the United States to destroy Native American culture.

It was President Andrew Jackson who coined the term “Final Solution”, later adopted by the Nazis, who based and justified their genocidal war on Jews on the United States’ Indian policy. Jackson, despite a United States Supreme Court ruling that his action was unconstitutional, force-marched Eastern Native Americans out of their reservation lands, coveted by whites, in the Trail of Tears. In his time mission schools were established, sanctioned by United States government, where young Native Americans were caged, shorn of their hair, beaten if they spoke their own languages or worshipped as they had been taught, all with the objective of turning them into dark-skinned white folks, into Christians like the masters who beat and raped them while stealing their families’ land.

Most of the territories now comprising the United States and Canada were taken not by fair fight in war, but by treachery and deceit – deliberately false treaties that were immediately ignored, treaties that the whites intentionally had signed by Indians who did not represent the people whose land was stolen soon thereafter. Waves of white homesteaders poured into land that the United States government had formally recognized as sovereign to the Native Nations, and that government did absolutely nothing to stop them. Moreover, Christianity and alcohol became tools of subjugation; when, for instance, the whites realized Native Americans have a genetic difficulty with digesting alcohol, liquor was generously provided to them.

Now I am seeing it happen here. Land is being stolen before my eyes. Christianity is being used to destroy an ancient culture. Alcohol is being used to sap the indigenous people of their dignity and strength. The manager of a company that oversees the harvesting of onions and their sorting and packing in twine bags told me that his indigenous employees work the hardest of any – yet, at the end of the day, not only does he pay them their nine dollars for working from dawn to after dark, but he gives each of them a little plastic beaker of gin, colorless odorless and therefore extremely deceptive in its power to destroy, continuing and hastening their ultimate decline as a people.

I, together with some friends, am attempting to contact officials to see what, if anything, can be done to help my two family-friends. While the Guaymi people I know are almost universally dignified and proud, always dressed in clean clothes even if they don’t have a closet full of options, always holding their heads high, they are not likely to fight this unfair, illegal pressure to get rid of them – they will just quietly move on, and move on again, and again, until, as the prophet put it, “there is no more room left for them in the earth.”

Sometimes I wonder what the rich gringos who will be living in these castles under construction would say if they knew how their land had been acquired. Based on what I have seen in the rich gringos already living here, I doubt they will care. But I, at least, wonder deeply: how was the land that I am living on acquired? What horrible tragedies were written in the soil of this beautiful country that will never be told?

Ron Paul Joins the Loudmouths

In the past I found Ron Paul a refreshingly intelligent voice on the American political right, one who seemed to have carefully thought through the issues and come to reasonable conclusions. I did not always agree with him, but I took him seriously.

But now he's starting to take a different tack - my hunch is that he found "being honest and sincere in one's beliefs" was not sufficient to be seriously electable. That determination on his part may have been reached at least in part because every supposedly serious presidential candidate these days (Trump, Gingrich, Palin, Santorum, etc.) gets lots of media attention for making wild, strident overstatements and indulging in at least implicit racist statements and calls to violence against the American left.

So now – and I say this with considerable regret - Paul seems to me to be recasting himself in the same mold.

Most recently he has compared Social Security and Medicare to slavery, and noted that they are not sanctioned in the United States Constitution as the business of government, and so should be dismantled.

Think about these comments.

To compare Social Security and Medicare to slavery is clearly absurd. Consider what slavery meant, that you were literally owned, literally property, subjected to the most inhuman conditions imaginable. There is no way people are, under Social Security or Medicare chained to servitude, and subject to torture and death if they try to escape it. Indeed, Medicare and Social Security are just about the best successes among all the federal programs ever invented. Without Medicare and Social Security, most of our sick and elderly would be reduced to the same pauper status that they endured before President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Those who receive these benefits worked for them and are grateful for them; the “benefits” of slavery went not to the workers, slaves, as Paul’s comment would suggest, but to others, the slaveowners. But those who need it most benefit most from Social Security and Medicare, not the ultra-rich corporate plutarchs.

Paul’s statement is also highly insulting to African Americans (and others) whose ancestors lived and died in those deplorable conditions, and who continue to feel the sting of institutional racism and bigotry to this day. The statement is moreover very possibly implicitly racist, a way of saying, "Well, you black folks experienced the chains and whips of slavery to us whites, but, hah!, we whites are “enslaved” to Medicare and Social Security!

To say there is no provision in the Constitution for Medicare and Social Security is blatantly ridiculous; to say they should be dismantled for that reason is to say nearly every federal program should likewise be dismantled – as a libertarian this is, presumably, exactly what Ron Paul wants. But there are lots and lots of other things that the federal government does which are not mentioned in the Constitution. So, if Ron Paul were consistent, that would mean an end to federal highways, to border security, to inspecting meat and milk and other foods, to countering the growing power of corporations, and a thousand other things that most Americans, and I’ll bet Ron Paul too, are very glad exist.

Indeed, one thing Mr. Paul overlooks is that political parties, too, are not set forth in the Constitution, and so they should be dismantled. I do not expect Ron Paul to agree with me that political parties should be disbanded. Political parties represent a political power-grab - your elected representatives to Congress, and to state and local legislatures, vote not according to the collective will of their constituents, but of party bosses who trade votes to get their own way. Hence, if they were eliminated, we would have political candidates speaking their honest individual views, rather than the pompous prejudiced platitudes put into these political puppets by party potentates.

Ron Paul himself used to speak his honest views (whether or not listeners agreed) before apparently throwing in the towel and recasting himself as just another lunatic teabagging wacko.

Is it Possible for Persons of Color to be Bigoted?

Retch Limburger, on his radio bigot show, has claimed that African-American parents all teach their children to “hate America”. In response to this, one white man said to me, speaking as an individual, that he is not a bigot. Here is my reply:

Nonwhites can be angry, can castigate the white subspecies, but it is not possible for the objects of racism and bigotry to be racist and bigoted themselves. That is because bigotry can be defined in terms of a simple mathematical formula: prejudice + power = bigotry. Minorities do not have the power that is needed to be bigoted.

If one is white, one has never personally experienced bigotry. It is not possible for a white person to experience bigotry. I have experienced it "splashed" on me, when in the past I accompanied one or another black ladyfriend here and there in public and not just witnessed but felt viscerally how they were treated simply for being black. White people have not been rounded up in their homeland and exported by the millions fo work as slaves. White people have not seen their continent(s) forcibly subjugated and exploited and their people ravaged and exterminated. On the other hand, persons of color, worldwide, have memories; they know what was (and often still is) being done to their own people and their own homelands. They know that they are forced to speak Western languages and use Western money and articles to survive, and to worship the Western deity, and are put before Western-style justice if they are deemed to have infracted the rules. Knowing these things, they are very capable of cultural anger toward whites, but this is not bigotry, since as I say bigotry = prejudice + power.

It is easy for a white person to say, as an individual, “I am not bigoted.” And that statement is very often true. The problem is that white people, bigoted or not, enjoy the benefits of living in a land that was largely built on the backs of slaves – coolies who built the railroads, Native American slave-ironworkers who built the bridges and iron skeletons for skyscrapers, black slaves who farmed the farms and cleaned the public toilets. Still today it is migrant workers who do the hardest work on U.S. Farms, Latinas and Asians and African-Americans who serve as the nannies, the gardeners, and the cooks. As individuals, white people may not be prejudiced, but it is sad when they turn a blind eye to how their people – not necessarily their ancestors or relatives, but their people – raped other continents for slave labor and cheap raw materials, and built their vast and powerful economies on that base.

Retch Limburger has prejudice + power - and he holds the microphone of bigotry in his hands – his microphone is his power, and he uses it to spew bigotry. And when a white person replies, “Well, I’m not bigoted myself,” that white person ignores his or her failure to demand that Retch Limburger and his ilk SHUT UP.

He has a huge constituency, which is why he earns millions of dollars a year spewing his poison. And that constituency, need I note, is exclusively white. So it simply does not do for a white individual to say "I am not bigoted." Whites need to show some responsibility for standing together in opposition to bigotry from among their own people. The sad thing is, people of African, Native American, Latino, and Asian ancestry, gays and lesbians, Muslims and Jews, and others, DO stand together – but, when they stand together in opposition to bigotry emanating from the putrid mouths of people like Retch Limburger, white folks say they're being bigoted against whites. No, they’re being bigoted against bigots. White folks should learn from them the importance of standing together in opposition to bigotry. Instead, the growing solidarity of white people that I see, led by Retch Limburger and his ilk, is one of white folks standing together to spew the filth of their bigotry.

War on Terrorism or War on the Roots of Terrorism?

More people, by far, die of chronic malnutritionhan than die in terrorist acts.

More people die of diarrhea from a lack of clean drinking water, by far, than die in terrorist acts.

More people die of AIDS complications, by far, than die in terrorist acts.

More people die in wars supposedly intended to root out terrorism, by far - than die in terrorist acts.

So how about a war on hunger? A war on poverty? A war on polluted water? A war on AIDS? A war on war itself? Let us not be distracted from the real killers!

The Afghan War is now the longest in U.S. history. It has cost billions of dollars and an uncountable number of lives -- servicepeople and innocents on the ground caught in crossfire. And all for -- what? Ostensibly to "get" one man, who has now been "gotten". Maybe the real reason behind the war is to control the oil and poppy fields. Who knows.

But, meanwhile, every day, every minute, someone is dying of malnutrition, someone else is dying of diarrhea, someone else is dying of AIDS complications. Every ninety seconds a mother somewhere in the world is dying in childbirth -- and we are worried about terrorism?

Granted, terrorism is a scourge. But there are greater scourges.
I've heard it said that the West needs to fight terrorism because it represents a potential threat of thousands of people dying sometime in the future. My answer is that thousands of people, at least, die every day of chronic malnutrition, diarrhea, AIDS complications, and so on. Not potential deaths, but real deaths.

However, sadly, these deaths do not make headlines in the West. White Americans and Europeans are but vaguely aware that there are poor people in Africa. Their news media are focused on the Northern Hemisphere, on the wealthy and, for the most part, predominantly white countries - the United States, Canada, western Europe, Japan, and perhaps Australia. Other countries are only in the news when there are major disasters or terrorist uprisings. Most white Americans and Europeans don't have any idea that millions die every year from these scourges.

Billions of dollars have been spent on the Afghan War (now the longest war in U.S. history), not to mention the wars in Iraq and other countries. Many human lives have been snuffed out in these wars -- American and allied servicepeople, and innocent locals caught in the crossfire. And finally the ostensible objective of the Afghan War, "getting" Osama, has been accomplished. But it has not ended terrorism -- Osama is now a martyr, and he will be championed and avenged.

Now imagine if those billions of dollars had been spent on eradicating chronic malnutrition, diarrhea, polluted drinking water, AIDS, and petty military dictators killing their own citizens as if they were swatting flies. These scourges could be gone from now if we had spent our billions on that!

Next, think what it is that is so appealing about terrorism. Terrorists gain converts who see how their fellow citizens are suffering and dying from all the scourges of extreme poverty, while people in the West get grossly bloated from overeating and throw tons of food away every day, while they exploit their third world countries for cheap labor and raw materials, dumping pollution in return.

Yes, thousands died in the terrorist attacks of September 11. But, while I mourn every one of those needless deaths, the fact remains that those thousands are but a minuscule proportion of the population of the United States.

Also dying needlessly are millions of people in the Third World. And these millions are, in fact, a significant proportion of the populations of their countries! We care about our own people who die needlessly. But, if we are truly devoted Christians or Jews or Muslims, then we care about all people who die needlessly. Let us take away the vast appeal that terrorism wields by conquering these far greater enemies!

If we eliminate chronic malnutrition, diarrhea, AIDS, etc., terrorism will have no appeal -- we eliminate terrorism too! If we continue to fight fire with fire, to try to destroy the symptom, terrorism, instead of the root cause, malnutrition/diarrhea/AIDS, etc., we will only continue the appeal that terrorism holds for those whose lives are desperate.

Cheering for Osama bin Laden's Death

I am an absolute pacifist. I do not believe humanity should take life -- only G-d. I grieve the lives Osama took, but grieve his death as well. I leave it to G-d, not humanity, to decide whether and how to punish him for what he has done. I also point out that he, like the Taliban, Ngo Dinh Diem, Ho Chi Minh, the Shah of Iran, Noriega, and a host of others, was created by the United States and was a puppet of the United States, and only became a monster after the United States decided no longer to use him as a puppet. I further point out that -- like the Hydra in Greek myth -- if you cut off one "head" of terrorism, a dozen more will appear in its place. I pray that Osama's death does not lead to more violence and bloodshed.

To these people celebrating murder, whether they are in the streets of Tehran or Washington: Jesus said put up the sword lest you die by the sword. He said love your enemies. He said judge not lest you be judged. He said turn the other cheek. He said forgive seventy times seven times. The Qur'an says if you take one life it is equivalent to having killed all humanity.

There is nothing in Christian or Muslim teaching to justify murder, except perhaps in clearcut cases of direct self-defense. Even if the murdered one was a murderer; in that case, put him on trial. There is nothing to justify killing Osama rather than giving him his day in court, and then claiming that the United States is exporting democracy. There is nothing to justify "burying him at sea" and denying his people a chance to grieve, and then complain that the families of the Twin Towers victims were denied the same thing.

Tracking him down and killing him cost many lives -- American and allied, and local people -- and billions of dollars that could have fed the poor. It has cost the United States and its allies a great deal in fostering yet more hatred directed toward the West -- and now will cost even more in that way. Was it worth all this to kill one man?

There are questions even as to the veracity of this report of Osama's murder -- first it was reported that he was killed by an unmanned drone missile, then supposedly in a firefight with U.S. servicemen. Or was Benazir Bhutto right that he died years ago of lung disease -- she was assassinated soon after saying that. And now, within a day of Osama's alleged death, Musharraf has been charged in Bhutto's murder. Too much for coincidence here.

The short-sighted will celebrate this day. The long-sighted see how this will only lead to further violence, further tragedy, and further grief.