The Sunday paper tells us of an odd phenomenon:  a number of young people report

falling deeply in love with their chatbot-- an imaginary person taught to talk by 

Artificial Intelligence (AI). These reports include the admission that the chatbot 

is not a real person but one that is animated by the person who loves them. The 

attraction is often also sexual even though a sexual relationship is not a possibility.

These lovers of imaginary persons acknowledge that they are unable to have loving 

relationships with real persons. This  is not an unusual experience. I remember as 

a young person being so needy that I could never give a new relationship the time 

it needed to grow and develop to see whether a deeper friendship was possible.  

Having met a person who seemed interesting, my next thought was of marriage and a 

lifetime commitment. I could not even wait for another encounter to see whether 

the person remained interesting after meeting more than once.

The neediness of those falling in love with their chatbot manifests their lack of 

self-esteem, their sense that they cannot live a successful and enjoyable life 

without an intimate relationship with someone else. Their worth as persons derives 

from being loved completely and unconditionally.  Their lives, by themselves, are 

barren and filled with sadness. Somehow they seem empty and pointless. They need 

For myself, I was fortunate to grow up and to learn to enjoy a life not enveloped 

in an intimate relationship but rendered enjoyable by different friends and 

different sorts of friendships. Perhaps that will also happen to the people who 

today console themselves with loving imaginary beings. But now they think they need 

to depend on loving a creature of their own making with the help of their computer.

But what, if anything, does the story tell us about life for young people in our 

society? Is our culture failing them by leaving them without robust confidence in 

their own being, potential victims of the self deception of loving an imaginary 

creature? Are we leaving them isolated , unsure of themselves without a solid 

confidence of their worth and how they deserve love and affection? 

These are questions that need to be taken very seriously.

 Environmental Ethics 

This should not be a strange topic. Everyone knows that the environment is in 

trouble and the victim of many threats. Environmentalism is the concern of many. 

There are only too many questions about methods of saving the environment. 

In the western states such as California or Washington there is a real threat 

of wildfires every summer and, at the same time, there is a serious shortage 

of water to put out those fires, to irrigate farmland, and to maintain 

astonishingly green golf courses. Different parts of the country face different 

threats but nowhere is the environment safe. 

But are these problems problems in ethics? Everyone, whether they live in houses 

or in apartments or in rooms are admonished about the safety of the spaces they 

live in. They need smoke alarms; the windows need to open easily and, in the winter,

they need to shut very tight. Would you think of these as ethical commandments? 

No, they are just reminders of what safety requires. It is in everyone's best 

interest to obey rules like this. Ethical rules tell us what we must do, whether 

it is in our immediate self-interest or not. 

Suppose your car scrapes the fender of another car as you leave the grocery store 

parking lot. Should you just leave, or leave a note on the other car with your 

name and telephone number? What is in your self-interest? What is the morally right 

thing to do? You could just leave and hope that no one sees you. Or you could 

leave your address, name, and telephone number so that the owner of the damaged 

car can be in touch. 

Often what ethics demands is that you do something that is not in your immediate 

best interest, that you would rather not do. If you try to sell your house, 

ethics demands that you not misrepresent it to potential buyers. If you make an 

offer of marriage to a person, you must not lie about yourself, your past, about 

possible reasons why you would not be a good marriage candidate. Don't forget 

to mention that you spent years being addicted to alcohol or that you have been 

married and divorced three times before. 

You must not misrepresent who you are. 

It is clearly in everyone's interest to reduce how much coal or oil we burn 

to generate electricity. But if you have money invested in a coal mine or an oil 

company, it is in your interest that this company make a sizable profit by selling 

more coal or more oil. Taking good care of the environment is not in the best 

interest of many citizens, such as all the elderly whose savings, that now support 

them, may well be invested in coal, or oil, or natural gas. 

Environmental ethics tells us not to profit from products that further damage our 

environment, already threatened by excessive heat in the summer, by major droughts, 

overwhelmed by rain storms and floods. Around the planet farmland loses its 

fertility and the families it once supported are now moving to countries that 

are very reluctant to accept them. Millions of persons are on the move because 

their homeland is no longer able to support them. 

This situation confronts us with a serious ethical dilemma: Shall we withdraw our 

money from investments that further damage the environment? What shall we do with 

our life savings that must support us for our waning years? Or shall we ignore the

terrible damages these investments do to millions of persons in Africa and Asia? 

Environmental ethics tells us clearly that we must do everything we can to minimize 

the damage we do in many countries because we burn so much coal and oil. Self-

interest tells us to maintain our investments in those damaging industries. 

How will we respond to the demands of environmental ethics?

Mass Shootings-- What do they teach us?

Mass shootings are a familiar phenomenon but in the last month they have become terribly common. Questions about the causes of all these frequent murderous attacks on a number of people have become more pressing. We want to know the causes of mass shootings. What is the matter with the persons committing these crimes? When we ask that question we are likely to receive different answers. A number of them are obviously self-interested. Religious leaders will blame mass shootings on the decay of religious institutions in our country. Pro-life advocates will point the finger at the moral decay that allowed abortions to be legal for 50 years.

Neglect of their favorite values will be offered as explanations of mass shootings by other groups. But these answers are made up to promote a particular outlook or institution. Much more interesting are the answers provided by persons who have studied this phenomenon of mass shootings and have looked closely at the persons who committed them. They have been looking for facts. The common bond they find among Mass Shooters is despair: the shooters feel threatened in their relationships or perhaps are all alone. They have financial problems; their boss fired them. They have no friends and have not talked to their family in a long time. Their lives are miserable; they have nothing to look forward to, to accept putting one foot in front of the other and trying not to cry in public.

Mass shooters, of course, often die in the course of the massacre. They may turn their gun on themselves. But if they die, they are not the only one, they go having taken revenge on their society by often killing people they don't even know.

Their sadness converted to anger, they are able to act, and able to kill several persons, often including themselves.

The next question is unavoidable. This is America, the richest country in the world, the home of free institutions where it depends only on the effort of the individual to reach the life they have chosen for themselves. " Home of the free .…", how does our wealth and our freedoms create a world of sadness, of despair, of persons whose lives are devoid of hope, of persons for whom the future holds boredom at best and at worst desperation?

The answer to these questions is not hard to find, but many Americans resist that answer because it forces us to stop deceiving ourselves with the sappy misrepresentations of what it means to live in the United States today. Not everyone is wealthy. For those earning the minimum wage life is difficult because their earnings don't always last to the end of the week and feeding their children is a major challenge, never mind eating themselves. They solve the problem of extortionist rents by moving frequently. It is not difficult to imagine the humiliations felt when you are never able to pay what you owe. Being unable to pay your debts, let alone have money left over to provide yourself with reliable transportation, in spite of working really hard, cannot fail to make a person feel that they are the victim of many injustices. Moreover they are the innocent victim and as a consequence they are a very angry victim. Can you blame them?

It requires an impartial look at the society in which we live and which takes shape according to our decisions. There are many people whose hard work does not produce a comfortable living but leaves them at the margins of the economy and therefore at the margins of the society. Once we recognize that, it is not quite as puzzling why elderly men (as in the last few shootings) should aim their guns at people they work with or perhaps at utter unknowns. Too many years of feeling humiliated by their life at the margins finally explode in wordless rage costing the lives of equally marginal victims -- workers who have also been at the margins for many years, who's hard work was not recognized, who were not acknowledged to be upstanding citizens but were humiliated by a less than living wage.

 
Why do they pass a lifetime without earning a living wage? Your own work experience enables you to give an answer. Think of the unearned advantages--your parents' wealth, social standing and connections to persons with influence, your early educational experiences and advantages that allowed you to set goals for yourself--medical schools , law school--which are not realistic goals for many other children. Hard work will move some people ahead in our society and confine others to minimum wage jobs.

You can now understand why there are frequent mass shootings.

 

White Supremacy: Who Controls the News?

Long before the Coronavirus Pandemic and the national uproar over racism in the US our local schools came under fire for disproportionate punishment, suspension and expulsion of children of color. The superintendent of schools replied to all these criticisms by asserting that her School Department had no problem of racism.

It is now a year later and Black groups in our town have been complaining about racist and unequal police practices. Following the shining example of the superintendent of schools, the police chief insists that there are not and never have been racist practices in our Police Department.

Members of the Black and Brown community complained about unjust and racist treatment of their children in the schools; members of the same Black community are complaining about racist behavior on the part of police officers. The leaders of the schools and the police deny that any such thing is true.

The town's leadership, the mayor, the city manager and the City Council could have responded in a variety of ways to this controversy.

They could have proposed an inquiry where each party to the controversy was given a chance to tell their side of the story and make some effort to find what is most likely closest to the truth.

They could've appointed an independent citizens committee to try to find out how we should think about fairness in the schools and in policing.

They could have encouraged public or private conversations between the leadership of the schools and the police and representatives of the people of color.

They could have appointed a group of religious leaders to encourage and manage such conversations.

There are many different ways in which the city leadership could have given every party to this disagreement the chance to tell their story and to make an effort to bring to light what is actually happening in our town. All of these would have been different ways of opening up important conversations about issues of race. They would have been genuine contributions to peace among all citizens.

Instead the leadership of the town chose to do nothing whatsoever. The complaints of people of color in our town have been rejected as baseless by the leaders of the town – the Chief of Police and the Superintendent of Schools two of the most powerful persons running the town, both of them white. The Mayor, City Manager and City Council implied that the spokesperson for the Community of Color are malcontents, persons who exaggerated or even misrepresented actual events. They took it for granted that the stories told by White members of the city leadership were more reliable than any of the critics. No attempt was necessary at finding out whose story was correct. Of course the White story was the true one.

Here is one more example of systemic racism and of White supremacy: wherever there is disagreement about facts, White leadership will put their full confidence in narratives provided by Whites. The story of people of color has intrinsically less credibility.

Whites reassert their power by controlling the news. Their view of the world is the correct one. Their message is clear: "We are still in power. We do not need to listen to your complaints. We may pretend to do so, but we do not need to take them seriously."

Nothing convicts officials more decisively of being racist than their denial that racism exists in their organization.

Systemic Racism

In the last two weeks we have witnessed the astonishing phenomenon of one very large, very rich corporation after the other announcing their commitment of millions and millions of dollars to an effort to combat systemic racism. In their statements the leaders of these corporations suggest that they have been enemies of systemic racism forever but I think we are allowed to be somewhat skeptical of that claim.

This sudden commitment to antiracism is surprising and, we should of course add, welcome. Also surprising is the commitment to oppose systemic racism. This is a relatively new term and it is worth a bit of time trying to figure out what it means.

What makes racism systemic?

The phrase suggests that the injuries black Americans complain of are not inflicted by individuals but by systems – social, economic and other systems. That sounds as if racist injuries are not perpetrated by individual persons, by you and me, but by this whole other kind of entity, a system. If that is true I do not have to feel guilty about racism because I am not responsible. It's the system, stupid.

But what are these systems?

Perhaps if we look at a concrete example, we can figure this out. In the town where I live, sociologists at a state college studied the rates at which children of different backgrounds are punished and are sent home from school. They found that black children and Latinx children were suspended at a much higher rate relative to their numbers in this school population, than the white children.

Clearly the suspensions were imposed on specific students by specific teachers. So far the racist situation – that children of color were suspended much more frequently than white children – was brought about through the action of individual teachers. We have not found the system yet.

We encounter the systemic nature of this racist situation only when we look at the entire school department, the popularly elected school committee and their reaction to this crisis. It turns out that both the school administration and the elected school committee are not troubled by the uneven rates of suspension of children of color and white children. They accept this as perfectly normal.

The standards for punishment and specifically for suspension from school applied to different groups of children are different for children of color than for white children. The educational system – the School Department and the elected School Committee – accepts racial inequities as fair and normal. Racist disadvantages are built in to the educational system in our town. The actions of individual teachers in applying these unequal standards are simply executing the disadvantages the educational system imposes on children of color.

These individual teachers are, of course, responsible for following the racist rules set by the educational system. They cannot deny their responsibility. They are responsible for not seeing the injustices they perpetrate, for not speaking up, and resisting. But they are only partially responsible. They say "I don't make the rules--I just work here."

In order to address the systemic racism, the rules of the system need to be addressed and changed. Most likely the process by which the rules are produced also needs to come under scrutiny and be improved.

But where do these systems come from? We have schools, we have businesses. Cities must be run and for each of those there are administrative systems. What makes them racist? Why are there so few teachers of color in our schools? Why is City Hall lily white? Why do our businesses have so few leaders of color?

Why are rules applied more harshly to children of color than to white children? Why are black children perceived as threatening where the same behaviors of white children are not? White teachers and administrators read black children differently from how they interpret stances and attitudes of children of color. Whites share a subtle and complex method of interpretation specific to children of color which they often are not fully aware of.

Our present situation is remarkable because white people – some white people – are beginning to be willing to give a frank answer to all these questions: it is because white people believe that they are superior, that they are entitled to privileges that most persons of color do not deserve. Because white people are superior, they should have the leadership positions, they should have the jobs you can do from home, and people of color should have the hands-on jobs and should be the people who are ordered around by white supervisors. Given their beliefs in their superiority, white people – all white people – support racist rules in their different institutional systems.

The members of each of these systems need to reflect carefully about the ways in which they have supported in the past and still support rules that are clearly unjust and that do not acknowledge the full equality of all citizens regardless of the color of their skin or their origin from different parts of the globe.

From the very beginning of our history, we have been officially committed to the equality of all persons. At the same time we have treated persons with dark skin as inferior. They have with admirable tenacity gained a certain amount of recognition for their full humanity. White people have been persuaded to see the justice of their cause. We need to continue the work to make real our guiding principle that "all men [and women] are created equal."

In the last two weeks we have witnessed the astonishing phenomenon of one very large, very rich corporation after the other announcing their commitment of millions and millions of dollars to an effort to combat systemic racism. In their statements the leaders of these corporations suggest that they have been enemies of systemic racism forever but I think we are allowed to be somewhat skeptical of that claim.

This sudden commitment to antiracism is surprising and, we should of course add, welcome. Also surprising is the commitment to oppose systemic racism. This is a relatively new term and it is worth a bit of time trying to figure out what it means.

What makes racism systemic?

The phrase suggests that the injuries black Americans complain of are not inflicted by individuals but by systems – social, economic and other systems. That sounds as if racist injuries are not perpetrated by individual persons, by you and me, but by this whole other kind of entity, a system. If that is true I do not have to feel guilty about racism because I am not responsible. It's the system, stupid.

But what are these systems?

Perhaps if we look at a concrete example, we can figure this out. In the town where I live, sociologists at a state college studied the rates at which children of different backgrounds are punished and are sent home from school. They found that black children and Latinx children were suspended at a much higher rate relative to their numbers in this school population, than the white children.

Clearly the suspensions were imposed on specific students by specific teachers. So far the racist situation – that children of color were suspended much more frequently than white children – was brought about through the action of individual teachers. We have not found the system yet.

We encounter the systemic nature of this racist situation only when we look at the entire school department, the popularly elected school committee and their reaction to this crisis. It turns out that both the school administration and the elected school committee are not troubled by the uneven rates of suspension of children of color and white children. They accept this as perfectly normal.

The standards for punishment and specifically for suspension from school applied to different groups of children are different for children of color than for white children. The educational system – the School Department and the elected School Committee – accepts racial inequities as fair and normal. Racist disadvantages are built in to the educational system in our town. The actions of individual teachers in applying these unequal standards are simply executing the disadvantages the educational system imposes on children of color.

These individual teachers are, of course, responsible for following the racist rules set by the educational system. They cannot deny their responsibility. They are responsible for not seeing the injustices they perpetrate, for not speaking up, and resisting. But they are only partially responsible. They say "I don't make the rules--I just work here."

In order to address the systemic racism, the rules of the system need to be addressed and changed. Most likely the process by which the rules are produced also needs to come under scrutiny and be improved.

But where do these systems come from? We have schools, we have businesses. Cities must be run and for each of those there are administrative systems. What makes them racist? Why are there so few teachers of color in our schools? Why is City Hall lily white? Why do our businesses have so few leaders of color?

Why are rules applied more harshly to children of color than to white children? Why are black children perceived as threatening where the same behaviors of white children are not? White teachers and administrators read black children differently from how they interpret stances and attitudes of children of color. Whites share a subtle and complex method of interpretation specific to children of color which they often are not fully aware of.

Our present situation is remarkable because white people – some white people – are beginning to be willing to give a frank answer to all these questions: it is because white people believe that they are superior, that they are entitled to privileges that most persons of color do not deserve. Because white people are superior, they should have the leadership positions, they should have the jobs you can do from home, and people of color should have the hands-on jobs and should be the people who are ordered around by white supervisors. Given their beliefs in their superiority, white people – all white people – support racist rules in their different institutional systems.

The members of each of these systems need to reflect carefully about the ways in which they have supported in the past and still support rules that are clearly unjust and that do not acknowledge the full equality of all citizens regardless of the color of their skin or their origin from different parts of the globe.

From the very beginning of our history, we have been officially committed to the equality of all persons. At the same time we have treated persons with dark skin as inferior. They have with admirable tenacity gained a certain amount of recognition for their full humanity. White people have been persuaded to see the justice of their cause. We need to continue the work to make real our guiding principle that "all men [and women] are created equal."

                                                                             The Pot calling the Kettle black

In the north of China live the Uighurs, an ethnic minority different from the dominant Han. Uighurs speak their own language; unlike the rest of the Chinese population, they are Muslim. Since 2016 the Chinese government has retained large numbers of Uighurs in re-education camps. Inmates are said to be forced to speak Mandarin instead of their native Uighur language. They are being indoctrinated into Chinese Communist ideology to replace their own traditional beliefs and religious commitments. It appears that the Chinese government has mounted a brutal campaign to eradicate one of the minority cultures in their country.

Western media criticism has been loud. Interestingly, media in the Middle East Muslim countries as well as in Turkey have noticed the internment but have not condemned it. Muslim countries do not seem to perceive the treatment of the Uighurs as a frontal attack on Islam. Perhaps Western media exaggerate to score propaganda points; perhaps Chinese influence in Muslim countries is more powerful than we had thought.

The well-being of the Uighurs seems to be seriously threatened. US media such as the New York Times are very critical of China for their treatment of the Uighurs. The Times regularly runs articles about the efforts of the Chinese government to destroy the Uighur language and culture and to produce instead a nation of committed adherents to the official Communist culture. Western media consider this campaign barbarous, violating human rights to the culture one is born into. In the background of the articles about the Chinese internment camps one can hear the boast that in the West such re-education campaigns are recognized for what they are: inhumane treatments of minority groups. Western government would not inflict such brutality on its minority groups.

No doubt these mass internment projects are deplorable, but Western governments have not hesitated to use similar techniques in order to destroy indigenous oppositional cultures. The public criticisms of Chinese maltreatment of the Uighurs are hypocritical. They are only reflections of techniques used by the US government and military in the 19^th and 20^th century to try to assimilate American Indians to the dominant White Anglo-Saxon culture of the US, attempting to make distinct indigenous cultures disappear.

In the 1830s, General Jackson, later to be elected president, moved American Indians from fertile lands to what were then remote areas on the United States. Thus the Cherokees were forced to walk from North Carolina to what today is Oklahoma but was then an unknown wilderness. Fifty years later, by 1879, wild land not desired by any Whites had disappeared, but the American Indians were still here and continued to be in the way. The government and military invented a new technique for making the Indians disappear. Children were forced to attend boarding schools, often a thousand miles away from where their parents lived. Fathers who refused to give up children to these Indian schools were deprived of government distributed rations. Families who resisted were punished in other ways. They were forced to surrender their kids.

The first of the schools was established in Carlisle, PA by Col. Richard Pratt who is reputed to have described the schools mission as “kill the Indian in him and save the man.” To that end children arriving at one of the many Indian schools immediately had their hair cut, a shameful experience for many youngsters from different tribes. They were forbidden to use their own or any other Indian language. Failure to use English was punished severely. Children were taught that their parents and other members of their tribe were “savages” and the Americans “civilized” notwithstanding the inhumane treatment the children received including abuse, sexual, psychological and physical and the frequently filthy conditions in the schools. Children died of ill treatment and disease. The Carlisle school operated between 1879 and 1918–39 years. 200 children died in those years; their remains were shuttled from one place to another by various administrators so as not to be buried in the vicinity of Whites, until some of them finally found a resting place near their families.

By 1978, the last Indian schools closed but the policy of destroying tribal cultures and Indian families did not end. In fact, it is still continuing. But the techniques used today were not those invented by Col. Pratt. Today Indian children are given out to adoption by White families at a much higher rates than children of other ethnic groups in the United States.

Racially-based separation of children from their parents is still a problem. The Department of Health and Human Services acknowledged in 2016 that black and Native children were overrepresented in the child welfare services. Many more American Indian and African-American children, than children belonging to other groups, have been adopted by white families even where functioning families existed and were ready to take in the children.

Whites first took the land and then took the children.

US media must cease claiming that we respect human rights more seriously than the government of China. Both the US and China have not hesitated to try to rid themselves of populations they found inconvenient. If the US government wants to claim superiority over China, it must acknowledge its brutalization of American Indians, it must acknowledge its past and present inhumane practices and make belated efforts at reparations.

Reconsidering Thanksgiving

               

Middle-aged, or older Americans remember their Thanksgiving celebrations in the early grades of grade school when some of the students dressed up as pilgrims, in pointed hats made of cardboard, and others dressed up as Indians with a feather or two in their headband and otherwise scanty clothes, enacted a peaceful and shared Thanksgiving dinner.. They often express surprise when they hear that seven and eight year olds in our schools today are subjected to the same pretend Thanksgiving rituals.

These celebrations were meant to convey a sense of our history, of the positive relations between the pilgrims and the American Indians living around Plymouth, MA. What happened in the years that followed between the inhabitants of the Eastern shores of this continent and the different tribes who had lived there for perhaps 12,000 or even 20,000 years was not discussed further. The meeting of the cardboard pilgrims with two-feather Indians in second grade often is the only mention of Indians in American history taught in our schools until the Indians reappear as they attack innocent whites trekking across the prairie in their covered wagons. No one asks what those wagons were doing there in the first place.

The colonists coming over from England regarded American Indians as primitive savages for no other reason than that they did not speak or read and write English, that they preferred to live in tents rather than in houses, that their understanding of ownership and possessions differed from that of the English (and perhaps that they were not Protestants). Ownership for the English meant that you had the right to dispose of, for instance, a piece of land as you pleased. You could farm a piece of land or let it lie fallow; you could sell it, burn everything that grew on it or turn it into a formal garden – what ever you chose. After all it was yours. For the Wampanoags land could not be owned in that sense. Some family or band of families occupied a particular piece of land for a time. They had possession of it--that excluded use by others without permission--they farmed it, fished its rivers, or ocean shores. But the land of course was not theirs, it was not anybody's because it was everybody's.

When colonists acquired ownership of a particular piece of land, often as a consequence of deceptive practices, all the Indians were giving away was possession, the ability to use a piece of land for a certain period to farm, to fish, to hunt, to do whatever was needed to sustain a group of people. This ownership lasted for a certain period presumably agreed on. It was certainly not permanent. The English, for their part, thought that they now were owners of this piece of land forever and had total control over it; they did not just possess it for a limited period. They could exclude all others—including American Indians from passing over, let alone make use of the land. Many bitter conflicts arose from these misunderstandings.

These profound cultural differences inevitably lead to terrible miscommunications however well-meaning the parties on both sides may have been. But both parties regarding the others as ignorant and incompetent – the Wampanoag did not possess a written language, the colonists would have starved during the long first winter (when many of them did die) if it had not been for the generous assistance of chief Massasoit of the Wampanoag. Both sides appeared to have reasons for looking down on the others; both sides were terribly mistaken.

After chief Massasoit died, about 55 years after the colonists first set foot on the New England shore, the son of Massasoit, Pumetacom, also known as King Philip, started a war against the English colonists which the American Indians lost. The colonists massacred several hundred Pequot Indians at the conclusion of that war. They cut off Pumetacom’s head and displayed it rotting away for twenty years outside the walls of Plymouth.

Whereas the first Thanksgiving celebration, so faithfully commemorated by our grade school children, did not start a tradition, it was not repeated; it was not significant, at the end of King Philip's war, in August 1677, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared a holiday of Thanksgiving for the colonists’ success in massacring the inhabitants of the area. From the American Indian perspective, this was the first Thanksgiving—a celebration by White Americans of their destruction of American Indian lives, peoples and cultures.

White Americans celebrate Thanksgiving as a family holiday and to give thanks for thriving on this continent. For American Indians Thanksgiving remains a lasting symbol of the widespread killing of original inhabitants of these lands that opened two centuries of having land stolen from them or taken by military expeditions that killed the people who had lived there long before we white people arrived.

For the last 50 years American Indians have gathered in Plymouth MA on Thanksgiving day as a Day of Mourning. White persons are allowed to attend this ceremony. But they are not allowed to speak. They are asked not to eat where there are American Indians who may be fasting on that day.

When white persons gather for Thanksgiving feasts in the coming year, we should also remember the intense grief and suffering our presence in America has brought to the people who have lived here for millenia. Even better, well-meaning whites should inform themselves about the history of American Indians on the American continent. We need to find out how ordinary American Indians live today. We should find the remaining Indian tribes where they live and try to arrange meetings to sincerely apologize and to explore ways in which white Americans can today try to repair at least a small part of the damage we have done over several centuries.