on henry dawes and the american culture,
in the 1880s the politician henry dawes visited the cherokee nation in oklahoma where there was no poverty and more than a little wealth as well as universal education, health care and suffrage. not a person was in debt, everyone owned their own house. more than a few were mansions, some were millionaires, today they would be considerably more than millionaires. all of this in a population of under 50,000 people. dawes reported back to washington that they were followers of henry george and would never progress further until the "common" was broken up and "every person learned the virtue of selfishness" which dawes considered to be the root of all human progress. ten years later the federal government used dawes' report not only to justify breaking up the cherokee lands but to dispossess all indigenous nations of their lands and self government. they created the state of oklahoma and after giving a pittance to each indian citizen they dispersed the rest in a land rush to the local alien european "immigrants" and former african slaves. after the state of oklahoma was formed it was the cherokee lawyers who formed the oklahoma bar association and not the "immigrants." the same was true for the medical doctors, teachers and the state's baptist newspaper which all came from the then defunct cherokee nation and culture. i asked several years ago how we (my cherokee ancestors) were followers of henry george, and his california follower explained it. however, i would say that henry george was "following" us considering that our structure was older but nonetheless it did seem to be the same. george was our "nephew" and not a very sophisticated nephew at that! dawes was at least right about that. i did not realize how hostile american society was to george in the 1890s. i would suggest that it might behoove economists to study the cherokee nation from 1846 to the congressional curtis dissolution act in the 1890s. they could learn just why global corporations and the information revolution are such delicate affairs. that it is the foreign policy of governments that have destroyed the best ideals of utopian thought and schemes. companies do not have that possibility even when they have yearly budgets that exceed the budgets of most world governments. indeed china has a limited gdp but its land and people mass could obliterate bill gates small universe if he was placed in competition without outside governmental help going to gates. would the soviet union have collapsed if it had not had a virtual embargo by the west for almost the entire seventy years of its existence? how about cuba? have we had a fair competition with any of the communist systems compared to the capitalists without government embargo and military pressures applied thus far on both sides? do we truly know the potential of either? do we truly know what is better for the whole life network of the planet? there is very little atrocious practice by any of the communist countries that was not practiced by this country in its first seventy years of existence. would the u.s. have collapsed on itself if it had not committed genocide for its frontier expansion and had first an owned work force from the beginning invasion to 1860 and then an oppressive apartheid policy to protect the european minority in the south from 1865 to 1954? would the south have been america's chechnya? with hostile legislatures elected by the black majority across the south and thus driven the europeans north, west and east? would these reverse carpetbaggers have created a hostile underclass (in the north, west and east) that would have devoured the democracy from within its white ranks and created the kind of cynical laissez faire attitude that is prevalent in russia today but without the cultural glue thus driving the wealthy back to europe from whence they came? well, just some thoughts on these issues, i would suggest that another "traditional" process might be in order for many of the problems that have been discussed thus far. recently there has been a revival of religious programming in the u.s. with even the medical profession suggesting that prayer, can heal people who are connected to each other. this might seem strange to some that i would suggest a possible answer within such a thought but nonetheless i am offering the thought. it is said that meditation is the highest form of prayer amongst my people. i would suggest a meditation on the balance of things for this society. meditate on your neighbors, not from the standpoint of conversion to your way of thought, but with the idea that a healthy neighbor is less likely to be a destructive one. if you pray for the balance of human societies, the health of their children and the development of their potential and then you do the same for the rest of life on the earth and for the earth itself, then at least within yourself you will grow more aware. and who knows what will happen if we all grow more aware and less anesthetized by both the pace and demands that we have decided to dream into place up until the present? the last undoing of the old "hired hand" on the assembly line that henry ford instituted. ford used buddhist and reincarnation metaphors for his workers. "work" was to hire the hands, home was for the mind and family values. "put in the time!" time spent on the assembly line may very well constitute an alpha brain meditative state of heightened awareness. an artist friend of mine, who was losing her eyes, used the job of "short order cook" to work with the issues of "letting go" of the artist obsession with perfection. she told me that at a certain point she entered into a meditative flow where she had heightened awareness and attention but a calm, contentment and relaxation. if work for these people constitutes what is called a "peak experience" or "one's best experience of shallow simple virtuosity, performance in terms of feelings of ease and mastery of execution, joy in working, confidence, loss of ego, and a sense of oneness with the job" (which is what the ford assembly line had), then you might have a problem that only a military educational solution would solve. i simply raise the question. REH 2011
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