It Is High Time

The following is just one example of so many well known messes around the Earth over thousands and thousands of years one could not count them in a lifetime. And that fact ought to stimulate a reader.

I am watching a film about the movement west in the building of a nation called America in the Nineteenth Century. This film is just like all the others I have watched since childhood. It depends upon my willingness to pretend to be stupid for its purpose.

Here is the story: It was 1874. The nation was in a severe depression economically because greedy railroads had gone bankrupt that had promised prosperity to all who came to America to work hard to realize it. Many were out of work. There were still many disastrous consequences of the terrible Civil War that had just been over a short time. Lots of hatred prevailed on both sides under harsh conditions. Politicians believed the answer might lie in the movement of many people west as soon as possible to get them busy and away from the memories of that war with a chance for a new start claiming unsettled land where at present only what were considered to be uncivilized Indians lived as they had lived for centuries. The push was on.

Gold was discovered in the Black Hills of Dakota. Problem was, the American government had promised the Black Hills to the Indians as an undisturbed place to live forever after having taken already by force from those Indians much, much of the land that lies between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, always with promises to take no more. Now, here is the part that stands apart as ridiculous-the makers of the film want me as a viewer to accept without question that the nation's best cure for its existent economic woes had to be to get that gold from the Black Hills; the only consideration being how best to accomplish that. I am not to even ask myself the question: who made the mess? I am not even to ask the question: what other ways might be open to the people who at the time called themselves Americans to address the needs of many of them to attain the means of enjoying an adequate level of material prosperity? I am to pretend I do not know there were many ways other than the option to mine the gold of the Black Hills which had been given to the Indians. I am to ignore the obvious truth that to the Indians who had no hand in the bringing about of the Civil War nor any share in the greed that brought on the economic depression back East gold was of little or no value. In addition, I am to ignore my clear understanding that to see only one option is blindness of a huge magnitude and the best name for that is greed!

The film blithely continues to unfold its story in ignorance of more very important facts:

1. The goodness within all human beings that will move them from greed to love in a heartbeat.

2. The resourcefulness of a free people to save themselves.

3. The willingness, the desire even, of people to endure hardship brought about by their own failures rather than to break a promise made in good faith.

4. A natural humility which is a human necessity to ask another for mercy and receive alms. At some time everyone of us will be down and in need.

5. It was, and still is, the selfish interests of politicians and those who own them who call the shots that make wars. Most of us want peace. But, we are too weak and lazy to insist upon it.

I am just saying it is high time we make a new beginning-all of us all around the globe- and insist upon telling the truth about ourselves.