Leonard Peltier: Lest We Forget

Whether or not you are familiar with the story of Leonard Peltier, I recommend reading "Prison Writings: My Life is My Sun Dance". It provides a picture-perfect depiction of what it means to grow up Aboriginal in the United States. For those of you who might not know, Mr. Peltier was wrongly convicted of the murder of two FBI agents during a 1975 standoff and has been detained ever since. For more information, please consult www.freepeltier.org.

Allow me to share an excerpt with you from this particular book:

The American Indian movement through the years has sought every means possible to bring these crimes against humanity to the attention of the world, hoping that at least some of you would listen and scratch deep within yourselves for the humanity to demand that the U.S. government stop these crimes.

The destruction of our people must stop!

We are not statistics. We are the people from whom you took this land by force and blood and lies. We are the people to whom you promised to pay, in recompense for all this vast continent you stole, some small pitiful pittance to assure at least our bare survival. And we are the people from whom you now snatch away even that pittance, abandoning us and your own honor without a qualm, even launching military attacks on our women and children and Elders, and targeting - illegally even by your own self-serving laws - those of us, our remaining warriors, who would dare to stand up and try to defend them. You practice crimes against humanity at the same time that you piously speak to the rest of the world about human rights!

America, when will you live up to your own principles?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For your viewing pleasure, "Freedom" by Rage Against the Machine

Authority

“Great advances in knowledge necessarily involve the rejection of authority.”

This statement was from a past GRE exam. Contestants were asked to agree or disagree with it, then support their claims accordingly. As a matter of practice, I decided to formulate a response to this passage within the allotted forty-five minutes. Those of you who read me regularly can fancy a guess as to where I stand on this issue, so I need not share the response I generated. Besides, I feel it to be far too technical for my liking, though probably not technical enough to dupe the computer program that marks these exams.

I'm writing today wondering if this was inserted in a standardized exam as some sort of cruel joke towards students, who are trained to accept and succumb to authority from the moment they are thrust from the confines of Mother's womb into the cold, cruel, lonely world. Can we count on our young to be the great thinkers and entrepreneurs if we insist on having them think in line with authority? If we were to plot, on a timeline, our trying to figure everything out, then scaled backward, we would see, over and over again, how wrong conventional wisdom was, yet we insist on indoctrinating our lineage with the beliefs to which we, ourselves, submit, all in the name of picking a career to barely keep their heads above water.

The "authority" aims to coerce the rest of us to see the world through its eyes, rather than through our own. The "authority" sells us on the merits of war, or the free market, or ownership, or fear. The "authority" tells us what to think because either it feels we are too dumb to think for ourselves, or it fears our ability to draw our own conclusions and thus aims to deliberately dumb us down. The "authority" judges us, grades us, assigns monetary sums based on how well we measure against the standards it creates. Frankly, I'm sick to death of all of this.

I have a profound aversion towards judgment. For all the years I've been on this planet, I've been assessed according to someone else's standard on how I should act, what grades I should receive, what words should be in my vocabulary, what job I should have, and so on, and so forth. So long as I was racking up the 80s and 90s on my report card, I thought nothing of it, for I had that warm and fuzzy feeling that accompanies achievement, until I asked myself if I really need validation. My best friend in elementary school, the city chess champion at the time, is now sitting in a jail cell fifteen years hence because he didn't measure up to the curriculum and was subsequently rejected by it. A dear friend of mine, a gifted musician and generally adept and astute being, struggled through school because she didn't measure up to the curriculum. The world is filled with brilliance that is suppressed by the standards of the "authority".

Personal accolades, though highly touted as a means to amass some money or prestige or any other form of self-gratification, are irrelevant, for it doesn't take an academic or a politician or a CEO or a clergyman to know how the world is: all that is required is for one to see.

I wonder if any of the kind folk at the ETS office in New Jersey happen to be reading this.

Putting Fear in Perspective

Before I begin, I wish to express my hearfelt condolences to the families and friends of those whose lives we lost as a result of yesterday's bridge collapse in Minneapolis. Those of us in Canada may have been reminded of the overpass in Laval that collapsed this past September, taking the lives of five individuals, a wound still fresh in many of us. These two events have me thinking about what most of us fear, that is to say, what we're supposed to fear.

An individual of the Muslim faith clad in traditional garb, a youth of African origin in baggy pants and a ball cap, a haggard-looking street dweller: these are the images that strike fear into our hearts, yet the vast majority of us do not think twice when merging onto the freeway at over a hundred kilometres an hour, or entering an elevator to ascend three dozen storeys. Our paradigming of so-called "foreginers" - we do the same to our indigenous population, despite our being the "foreigners" - as savage peoples bent on our destruction seems to have diverted our attention away from the fallibility of our very own technological advancements. If you've been paying attention, you may have seen recall notice after recall notice appear before your eyes and ears: children's toys containing lead paint, contaminated processed food, faulty automobile parts, exploding laptop batteries - wares apart of our everyday lives - are hazardous to our health when they need not be.

Face it: you're more likely to be killed by a car - yes, even the very car you drive - than a "terrorist". You're more likely to meet your end in your poorly constructed condominium than gunned down by a "gang banger". If you're worried about your daughter being at the mercy of the city streets in the wee hours of the morning, consider yourself fortunate she lived to see the streets instead of lodging her little finger in a wall socket when she was just learning to crawl.

I'm not asking you to shun your gadgets and gizmos, sell your cars and cut your electricity supply - nature will take care of that for you when we've used up all her resources - but I'm asking you to think a bit about them, about how they made their way into your possession, about how you make use of them, and how they might fail you. Great care must go into the design of these intricate objects of convenience; unfortunately, these days, this has taken a back seat to the profit margin. Would you sleep well knowing someone skimped on the materials used to construct that roof over your head in the name of saving a few bucks? Are you still afraid of "terrorists" now?

My goal in life is to cease being afraid. I should not have to live my life in fear, nor should any of you, but we do, and we well, so long as a certain few of us have much to gain monetarily from it.

Now, before you hole yourself up in a cave, as far away from technology as you can get, remember that one day, for you, this is all going to end, so there's no point wasting your time being afraid. Be vigilant instead. Show these fearmongers on the hill you refuse to put up with their shit. Let honesty, integrity, compassion and love - what we were taught to be virtues - rule the day. Don't let fear win; our children and their children and their children deserve better than for us to leave to them a world of fear and loathing and ignorance.

Keep safe, everyone, but fear not life.