Thanksgiving 2013

In a previous blog I mentioned the book by Howard Zinn about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I was struck by the naked brutality employed by the police and local sheriffs departments in the Deep South to resist the efforts of black teenagers and college students, and their white associates, to integrate lunch counters, buses and bus station waiting rooms, and to take brave Black farmers to town to register to vote. The young men and women were arrested again and again, and emerged from the jails bleeding after savage beatings. The federal government offered little protection to them. It did not mobilize itself until Martin Luther King himself was arrested and threatened with violence in Albany, Georgia.

Zinn cites "what Newsweek writer Karl Fleming was told in an Alabama city: 'We killed two year old Indian babes to get this country and you want to give it to the niggers.' “ An extraordinary statement for many reasons. It testifies to the long memory of the conquest of the South. The Native Americans had had their land taken with great violence a century before the revolution in the South in 1950ties and 60ties.

The Sheriff's statement is also an open admission of how cruel a process that had been. In addition, the statement also recognizes the moral burden Southerners assumed with their cruelty. The Sheriff seems to be saying “We committed terrible outrages in order to acquire dominance in this land. Having paid such a frightful price, we will not surrender our lands to anyone, let alone to Blacks.”

Today Native Americans are in terrible shape. Especially those who live on reservations often live in abject poverty. On some reservations unemployment is more than 60%, alcohol and drug addiction are rampant, health care is difficult to get and life expectancy is significantly lower than that of other underserved groups, let alone that of whites.

But all of that is completely hidden. We have MLK Day, and streets named after Dr. King. The killing of Trayvon Martin arouses a great deal of comment. Native Americans are not in the News, their suffering is not noticed, they must bear their pain in silence. The responsibility of white society for that suffering is never acknowledged. Few give it any thought.

This despite the fact that their ancestors have been on this continent for 10,000 years, that they developed more than 100 languages and the distinct cultures that went with them. Some of the tribes invented democratic institutions that were a definite influence of on our “Founding Fathers.” Many, as for the instance the tribes that helped the English immigrants through their first winter and their first years, were much more giving and generous than most of us. Some constructed cities and great religious monuments. Others were fierce warriors and as capable of brutality as the most notorious Southern sheriffs.

As we very slowly and often reluctantly try to overcome the heritage of racist brutality, we must also be more deliberate about bringing the plight of Native Americans to public attention and to take responsibility for our bloody history in relation to the original inhabitants of this continent.

Bullying

This Sunday's newspaper ran two long articles about social scientists discovering that many persons, bullied as children, carry those wounds into adulthood. Do those results surprise you? I thought not.

I suppose it is useful to provide some scientific evidence for what most most of us knew all along.

             But two much more interesting questions still remain to be addressed:

             1. We know what happens to children bullied. But what happens to the bullies when they grow up? There are a lot of opinions about that. Many people believe that bullies end up as crimnals. Others believe firmly that the authoritarian boss at work--man or woman--was a bully when they were school kids. But little carefully checked information about this is available.

             We clearly need to know much more about what roles adults play who, as children, were capable of exceptional cruelty to other kids: Does the society suffer when bullies grow up to be school teachers, coaches, or politicians? What kinds of parents do former bullies make?

              2. Why is our society so tolerant of bullies and bullying? Four hundred years of oppressing persons of color may well have made us callous to the pain we inflict on others. Our children are paying the price for the hypocrisy of their parents and grandparents who said that their black cook was “ a member of the family” but ate in the kitchen.

                 No doubt, our tolerance of bullies is also the fruit of 450 years of fighting against the native inhabitants of this Continent. Our histories record at least 37 major “Indian Wars” between 1622 and 1900. Not included are smaller skirmishes. In those slightly less than three centuries, we were at war more often than at peace with indigenous Americans.

                 We have become careporting the discovery by llous in a capitalist society where almost every transaction is a competition and we are constantly taking what others want. We have learned not to care about the pain we inflict on the losers when we win competitions. At the same time we have become resentful and angry from all the competitions we lost.

                Women still earn significantly less than men. Women are regularly victims of rape, and murder, and physical abuse. America still treasures the image of the “real man” who proves his manhood by callousness toward women, by dominating through physical violence. In relation to women, the image of the “real man” is that of a bully.

                Bullying, you may say, is not limited to our society. Similar or greater cruelty is manifested by citizens of other countries. That is, of course, true. But that does not imply that bullying, cruelty and heartlessness are unalterable elements of “human nature” as many people conclude from cruelty's ubiquity. Different cultures learn to be cruel in different ways in their separate histories. However common, bullying is learned behavior.

                 What we learn we can also unlearn.