posted on Apr, 23 2012 @ 04:53 PM
Sadly, regrettably, shamefully, and disturbingly... our country was founded through some of the worst evils seen on this planet.
And it continues today... albeit in a "tamer" fashion. Native American populations have the highest rates of rape, obesity, alcoholism, poverty, and
so on of just about any other group. And STILL, as a total SHAME to our name, we let them decay, live in squalor, and STILL seek to screw them over
more by STILL ignoring treaties. We let our various corporations/industries/militaries run amok destroying indigenous lands, peoples, waters, foods,
and so on. We are STILL stealing their lands/resources (even though this nation stuck them on some of the WORST land in the country to begin with) in
the name of our civilization, government, Capitalism, domestication and industrialization. It's disgusting beyond words and ought to be stopped,
reversed, and punished.
A few relevant quotes:
"In our cultural mythology we see ourselves as having left tribalism behind the way modern medicine left the leech and the bleeding bowl behind,
and we did so decisively and irrevocably. This is why it's so difficult for us to acknowledge that tribalism is not only the preeminently human
social organization, it's also the only unequivocally successful social organization in human history. Thus, when even so wise and thoughtful a
statesman as Mikhail Gorbachev calls for "a new beginning" and "a new civilization," he doesn't doubt for a single moment that the pattern for it
lies in the social organization that has introduced humanity to oppression, injustice, poverty, chronic famine, incessant violence, genocide, global
warfare, crime, corruption, and wholesale environmental destruction. To consult, in our time of deepest crisis, with the unqualified success that
humanity enjoyed here for more than three million years is quite simply and utterly unthinkable."
- Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization
"Wherever civilization emerges, tribalism withers and is replaced by hierarchalism. Hierarchalism works very well for the rulers but much less
well for the ruled, who make up the mass of the society. For this reason, the few at the top like it very well and the masses at the bottom like it
very much less well."
- Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization
"During our three or four million years on this planet it can hardly be doubted that thousands of cultural experiments have been made among
humans. The successes have survived--and the failures have disappeared, for the simple reason that eventually there was no one around who wanted to
perpetuate them. People will (ordinarily) put up with being miserable for only so long. It's not the quitters who are extraordinary and mysterious,
it's we, who have somehow managed to persuade ourselves that we must persist in our misery whatever the cost and not abandon it even in the face of
calamity."
- Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization
"Crimes are what the state defines as crimes. Trespassing is a crime, but interrupting is not, and we therefore have two entirely different ways
of handling them--which people in tribal societies do not. Whatever the trouble is, whether it's bad manners or murder, they handle it themselves,
the way you handle the interrupter. Evoking the power of the state isn't an option for them, because they have no state. In tribal societies, crime
simply doesn't exist as a separate category of human behavior."
- Daniel Quinn, The Story of B
"The people of your culture imagine that the treasury was completely empty when you came along and began to build civilization ten thousand years
ago. You imagine that the first three million years of human life brought nothing of value to the store of human knowledge but fire and stone tools.
In fact, however, you began by emptying the treasury of its most precious elements. You wanted to start with nothing and invent it all, and you did.
Unfortunately, aside from the products (which work very well), you've been able to invent very little that works well--for people."
- Daniel Quinn, My Ishmael
"We're experiencing cultural collapse. The very same collapse that was experienced by the Plains Indians when their way of life was destroyed and
they were herded onto reservations. The very same collapse that was experienced by countless aboriginal peoples overrun by us in Africa, South
America, Australia, New Guinea, and elsewhere. It matters not that the circumstances of the collapse were different for them and for us, the results
were the same. For both of us, in just a few decades, shocking realities invalidated our vision of the world and made nonsense of a destiny that had
always seemed self-evident. For both of us, the song we'd been singing from the beginning of time suddenly died in our throats."
- Daniel Quinn, The Story of B