By Burl B. Hall
With Meredith S. Hall
A Native American chief in the 1800's, named Seattle, made a speech expressing a philosophy of interconnectedness. From the European perspective, his words were received as a joke. We couldn't believe their naivete'. We didn't listen to Seattle, smirking because we were so sure that our way of seeing things was much more sophisticated and advanced. But the joke will eventually turn on us divisive, reductionist Europeans. (By reductionist I mean breaking things into parts, while negating wholeness).
Consider the following Integrative speech of a unified diversity he made regarding we of European descent:
Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch.
http://www.halcyon.com/arborhts/chiefsea.html
Now that we are under the regime of Donald Trump, how do Seattle's words relate to our current world? Are we truly what Natives referred to us Europeans as: "the walking dead?" Does this definition fit Trump? I hate to say this, yet I don't see any real life in the man. To me he is but the trump card of our McDonald culture.
More poignant, does the description fit the citizenry and system that put Trump in power? My answer is "yes." The earth we have desecrated cannot respond "lovingly to (our) footsteps" for our rapacious touch has been so far from "sympathetic."
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