reply to EWTN “Women of Grace” blog: Is Paranormal State TV for Real?

EWTN “Women of Grace” blog: Is Paranormal State TV for Real?

Vun, the Spirit of Fire, is the portal to the Ancestors
in the Dagara tradition of West Africa.

http://www.womenofgrace.com/blog/?p=14401

My reply to their post  is as follows- “waiting for moderation” (ok fine, it is more than the one paragraph that they suggest, but then there were more than one in the accepted comment on the page....Susan Brinkman can come talk to us here if the WOG blog can’t handle the bandwidth...I’d love to continue the discussion of such things with her and any others so interested and inclined, but I progress):

I have also noticed the great proclivity for drama to be a constant creation in shows such as these, as it is in most, if not all (sur)reallity tv.  This is the first mistake of shows like this.  The connection to human spirits who have passed over can be unsettling as those spirits can be truly unsettled and frustrated and in our midst, but the melodrama around it is not helpful to understanding out traditional responses to assisting those spirits, our Ancestors in their successful passage to the realm of the Ancestors.  Thank you for pointing out one of the fundamental problems with these types of programs in general.

There are, though, problems with the above characterization of these spiritual dynamics:

"First, let me say that I believe homes can be haunted and that spirits can toss around frying pans in the middle of the night. But I don’t believe that these events are due to the behavior of the deceased owner of the house who got lost somewhere between here and eternity and is roaming the halls looking for peace. This is pure theater. Disembodied souls don’t have voices that can be recorded on EVP meters, not only because their voiceboxes have long ago rotted in the grave, but because our God, who loves us beyond our comprehension, doesn’t let any of his beloved creatures “get lost” on the way to eternity."

If we take spiritual energy as purely that (and we know the implications are deep here), we know that energy is conserved, transformed, not deleted or destroyed.  Why then is it impossible to conceive that that human energetic imprint or spirit can not then have a corporeal effect, still, on the potential energy in the movement of objects or emotions or human sensation?  It only makes logical, rational sense that that would be entirely possible, in addition to the multiplicity of occurrences outside of televisual narratives that confirm these dynamics, especially in traditional and indigenous  contexts (even modern ones where people have not shut down their full range of human energetic awareness) where many thousands of years of communal energetic learning, awareness and experience give grounding to such experiences in a functional and integrated way.  This is why so many, many indigenous cultures have traditions, rituals and ceremonies for engaging and reconciling energies and spiritual dynamics in the Ancestral continuum.  Malidoma Some' asserts eloquently in "Healing Wisdom of Africa" that we are in such grave straits in the modern world precisely because we have forgotten and neglected (and been terrorized away from) our Ancestral relationships.  

In addition, the multi-dimensionality of the universe must be taken into consideration when we speak of being able to hear spirits or Ancestors, those that have died.  Of course they don't have voice-boxes.  That's a simplistic argument, but it is wholly dismissive of energetic reality to suggest that we are limited to the creation of sound pressure only in the normal physiological sense.  This is why we call it SUPERnatural or metaphysical!  Nor should we assume that our human ability to hear is only limited to the ear.  Again, that is simplistic in a world that largely agrees that we can see with the mind's eye.  The learned (and coerced) limitations that many of us acknowledge are exactly why we dismiss Ancestral energetic dynamics in the face of "rational", "scientific" objectivism.  It is pure folly and ignorance to relegate ourselves to "Avatar" science, thinking based upon the requirement to have energetic dynamics show up on meters or machines to be real or reliable.  Clearly, though, study and experience shows that this can happen, but it is not the only way that these dynamics can be substantiated.  I am sure there are countless Roman Catholics who can speak to the presence of their deceased loved ones in their midst with great assuredness and clarity.

The other issue that can and must be engaged here is that so many cultures do have the experience and awareness of souls being "lost" if the correct energetic work is not done or if our relationships to them are broken or out of balance.  The cultural perspective from which the Roman Catholic viewpoint is derived is not the only valid one on the earth.  To wholly dismiss the tens of thousands of years old (and beyond) cultural perspectives, wisdom, experience and knowledge of indigenous peoples would be clearly arrogant and ethnocentric at best.  That primary human legacy cannot be undone with the writings of one particular culture, just as the rantings of the Sanhedrin and the Pharisees did not necessarily make Jesus's statements and perspectives wrong.

We are on the right track with critiquing television programs that misappropriate and distort spiritual phenomena, but we are gravely mistaken when we provide narrow and simplistically dismissive filtered reads to time-proven, functional and expansive human cultural narratives.

[reposted also on my facebook page]

Reply to WGBH's "Civilization" written and narrated by Niall Ferguson

I am surprised that such a "sweeping" documentary series on westernism, capitalism and imperialism lacks a more functional and empathic critique of exactly those elements in the face of the gently implied irksome nature of environmental degradation, cultural destruction and outright holocaust of aboriginal people so Turtle Island and Africa.  Not only was the documentary highly dismissive of the fundamental nature of indigenous humanity and sensible connections to history, but "Civilization" seemed to do nothing more than semi-gently and semi-cleverly champion the support of a struggling, though still ideologically powerful economic and cultural system, completely minimizing the social effects of some of his "killer apps" (aptly put, I'd say; i.e., consumerism) and the fundamental dangerous nature of empire as expressed by Europeans seeking nothing more than a beneficent (sorta) hierarchical dominance in a world quickly running out of food, water, natural resources, biological diversity, cultural diversity and sense - precisely because of Europe's, the west's particularly pernicious form of "civilization".

One of the greatest mistakes humanity, at least those humans in dominant, western, highly-militarized "civilized" nations being made is underestimating the wisdom and technological culture of indigeny.  It is precisely the indigenous cultural perspective that has been warning and resisting the "civilizers" and their destructive nature since the initial introduction of criminal Columbus to the Tainos and Arawaks on the islands of Amerique. At the very least, Ferguson puts a pretty face on one of the most destructive and oppressive cultural mistakes known to humankind.  At the most, he seeks to convince us that no there is no viable, worthwhile challenge to this destruction and oppression.

I suggest he tell it to the Awa of the Amazon, the Kogi, the Lakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation AND the Azanian people in the peacefully, wonderfully and harmoniously westernized (aka "civilized") settler-colony of South Africa.  If their stories are just an inevitable part of the deification of Euro-everything, then I want no part of "Civilization" or civilization.

This is a disappointing piece of work especially for WGBH (an insult to the producers of the likes of Independent Lens and POV) and has the same understated and dismissive arrogance as Robert Barron's "Catholicism", but that's another story - well, actually, it's pretty much the same.

(All right.  WGBH's interface isn't uploading my comments yet and is not indicating that there is any moderation on such.  Hmmmm....)

How Can That "G-O-D" Be A god Of Redemption?

I have yet to see how a religion brought by an invading colonizer, used as a weapon of confusion and cultural devolution by that colonizer, manifested as a direct ideology and embodiment of colonization, somehow proposed as an exclusive path to "salvation" by that colonizer can be in any way, shape or form any kind of truly long-term functional agent of liberation for those that have been colonized.

I have studied, seen and been told how Africans used "the church" and the church buildings for radical and important actions of political movement and strategic planning.  I have seen how the broken-hearted souls of disembodied indigeny have gained some semblance of energetic rejuvenation in the face of seemingly insurmountable imperialistic odds (have you seen a 70 year old woman get "sanctified", get the "holy ghost" in a baptist church in the African community here on Turtle Island?!).  I have seen scores of suited, tied, fancy-dressed indigenous peoples from North and South America, from Asia and India, from Africa show up in nice, big cars and european hair cuts, "good english" drizzling off their tongues, sure to go to nice "jobs" on monday folk flooding in and out of churches, rosaries dripping off their fingers, bibles clutched to their sides as if their lives depended on them for air.  I've felt the economic weight of the millions upon millions of hard-earned dollars pouring - no - raining tempestuously into church coffers feeding the predatory impulse of the cultural debacle of "mission".  I have heard the anguish in the voices of the "saved" as they declare their allegiance to a Jesus who doesn't look like them, clamouring for some semblance of self in a world that continually seeks to wipe their Ancestral memory from the face of the earth.

I have not seen any of these people speak to the nature of redemption of the most heinous crimes of genocide, colonialism, settler-colonialism, neo-colonialism, neo-liberalism and fascism.  I have not seen their book nor their god smite any of the colonizers down in their tracks.  I have not seen the fiery uprising continued unabated in those church buildings nor in the fetid catacombs that we can now call "the church".  I have not seen these people, so somehow empowered by their new colonial god-man, speak or act in accordance with the needs of people on earth in such a way that suggests that they are anything but insane, at the very least insane enough to think that a tool that was brought by their historical conqueror is anything but a tool of continued conquest and cultural genocide.

I have seen them pimp starving, dying children in African villages to raise money for "mission" work (see the 'work' of Jim Robison et al).  I have heard them unapologetically refer to indigenous missionary targets as "savages" (see EWTN's "Life On The Rock" live world broadcast during World Youth Day - 47:31 in on the DVD).  I have seen THEM refer to the process of proselytization and mission work as "imperialistic", while their white privilege declared that they "respect" other (non-european) cultures (see Pathways International blog post on "cultural contamination").  I have seen them disrespect African and indigenous culture on their young adult tv programming (see "Knights of St. Michael" on EWTN, the roamin catholic cable channel).  I have seen them BE the "1%".  I have seen them claim in word and deed that north and south America should be a "christian continent" (see papal statements on the Knights of Columbus website).  I have seen them aggrandize and deify the name and legacy of one of the world's worst, most beloved (by them) and most correctly maligned international criminals, Criminal Columbus.

It is somehow possible that this "G-O-D" is a god of colonialism?  I have seen many claim "Columbia" as the goddess of freedom.  Was she not the european image of the viral wave of Manifest Destiny?  Why is it that this "G-O-D" and the people who claim him as the highest expression of truth and righteous existence truly have no message of redemption or salvation or liberation against a globalizing corporatocracy gone vampirically mad on the black blood of the earth's bowels, of the now clouding, clotting blood of the riverine arteries and capillaries of the ailing Earth Mother? 

"Yea, that we must look up to the lord(s).  Turn ye heads away from that demon earth that pulls ye from a lord on high.  She is a barren harlot.  Raise your voices to him that loveth you best.  Turn your heads from the demon Ancestor that your heathen ways claim as your false creators.  Yea, shall you bask in the warmth of G-O-D that runneth down your sinful body, ignore that that warmth be your very own blood as the cross of your redeemer has been thrust into the flesh of your sinful back, now bowed and weary in righteous supplication to the lord(s).  When your blood of original sin is finally drained from your vessel, it is then that ye shall be saved, for thou needest saving.  Forget ye your demonic past.  Your truth is in the Book, the Word spaketh by the lord(s) himself.  It is so, because.....that book says it is so."  Coyote 3:14-21

~~~~~~~

" In 1863, a Catholic priest named Jean de Smet, after sojourning illegally in the Black Hills, reported the presence of gold there.  In short order, this incentive proved sufficient to cause Washington to violate the new treaty, sending Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his elite 7th Cavalry Regiment (heavily reinforced) to explore the Hills. [emphasis mine]" - Ward Churchill, pg. 70, "The Earth Is Our Mother", as in "From A Native Son: Selected Essays on Indigenism, 1985-1995", South End Press, Boston, MA, 1996

"Indigeny & Energetics" - Primary Literary Supportive Texts:

Healing Wisdom of Africa - Malidoma Some'

Introduction to African Civilization - John G. Jackson

God Is Red - Vine Deloria, Jr.

Voice of Indigenous Peoples: Native People Address the United Nations - edited by Alexander Ewen, The Native American Council of New York City

Recovering the Sacred - Winona LaDuke

Original Instructions - Edited by Melissa K. Nelson (Bioneers)

Dreaming the Council Ways - True Native Teachings from the Red Lodge: Ohki Simine Forest

Secrets of the Talking Jaguar - Martin Prechtel

[Ward Churchill book(s) removed from list, 6/12]
[ http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/ictarchives/2009/05/15/churchill-should-not-be-reinstated-84649 ]

In the Absence of the Sacred - Jerry Mander

The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe - Hilda Ellis Davidson

All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life - Winona LaDuke

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

Cultural Survival Quarterly

Columbus and Other Cannibals - Jack D. Forbes

Modernity In A Minute

If human history was lived out in one day,

modernity will have existed for about a minute -

on which we now base our uncertain future.

 



Trees

Trees breathe out what we breathe in. We breathe out what trees breathe in. We should do more to preserve the life and safety of trees.

John Henrik Clarke - christianity before christ

This video is offered as information for support and discussion of indigeny, Africa, white privilege ("Patterns of Privilege"), predatory christianity, colonialism and imperialism.

The Eagle and the Condor in Prophecy: Where Does Columbia Stand?

A number of sources point us to the prophecy of the eagle and the condor, in which and when the eagle of the north (the capitalist, intellectual, technological, brain-based USAmerica) will fly the same skies, in harmony with the condor (the communalist, wholistic, spiritual, heart-based indigenous cultures of the "south", South America). This is an important and telling prophecy that comes from the spiritual awarenesses and visions of peoples that hold life dear, that hold people dear, that hold nature and Spirit dear. This is a prophecy that has seen unity not only of just the "north" and "south", of the United States of America and South America, but of all peoples in a world showing deep rifts between technological globalist corporatocracy and indigenous and marginalized (people taken from their land/spirit/culture-power-base).

Problems with engaging this beautiful prophecy, if even the eagle north is willing and able to see the necessity for unity, change and wholistic harmonious life, come up simply in the popular notion that indigenous peoples hold no real and functional wisdom that the capitalist, modern, digital-technological world can and should learn from and thereby enact change because of. Repeated, constant, persistent disrespect and devaluation of indigenous ideas and cultural practice, the infantilizing of modern "noble savage" is a deadly pattern that stands in the way of the capitalist north fully embodying the medicine of the eagle.

Current review of pagan writing, dominated by Europeans (and understandably so, but oftentimes the obvious must be stated) speak of a connection to the goddess Columbia. Hellenist blogger Cara writes the following:

"From the beginning, when Columbia was first revealed as the Goddess of this land, She was seen as a guardian of freedom and a generous granter of plenty. In early depictions of Columbia, she wears the cap of freedom and holds a cornucopia. The eagle and the rattlesnake are sacred to Her."
http://politics.pagannewswirecollective.com/2010/07/04/columbia-patron-goddess-of-the-united-states/

Simple questions arise here. What's inside that cornucopia? Where did the bounty come from? Who harvested it, this bounty from "America's" bosom? What does the eagle mean to her, to her adherents? Is the eagle's medicine the same as that as revealed to the Native peoples who revere the eagle with more sacred knowing than the colonists old and new who would destroy the eagle's populations and habitats? If Columbia (reportedly named after Criminal Columbus) is a guardian of freedom (though reportedly named after Criminal Columbus), why has she been so silent in the throats of those to whom she revealed herself in defense and liberation of the Native Americans and Africans who would be crushed under the weight of the nation that claims her name in its capitol.

What troubles me about the above quote and the continuing article is that it implies a pagan (indigenous?) perspective that allows itself to join the politically disintegrative, destructive energetic of the USAmerican colonial imperative, laying itself over the indigenous Native American cultural dynamic that is primary here in this land, a sort of paganized manifest destiny. It seems that Cara and other pagans are joining the "this land is your land. this land is my land" chorus while merging their spiritual ideology with USAmerican capitalist and colonial ideology. This is not to say that some Native Americans haven't joined that ideological thrust for their own survival or through their own blind complicity born of the same political violence and disrespect that has energetically affected us all. Africans have done this, too. The European populace has done this in spades and continues to walk the earth of Turtle Island as if they are actually in ownership of it. I am saddened by people who say they love "America", but haven't spent even a day walking on its back in harmony with its sacred energy.

A Blackfeet chief has said, as from the book, "The People: Native American Thoughts and Feelings":

"Our land is more valuable than your money. It will last forever. It will not even perish by the flames of fire. As long as the sun shines and the waters flow, this land will be here to give life to men and animals; therefore we cannot sell this land. It was put here for us the Great Spirit and we cannot sell it because is does not belong to us."

This is deeply instructive to us, especially as Indian Country Today Media Network has this year reported on how and why the Lakota persist in refusing the billion dollars being offered for the sacred Black Hills.

"Sioux Forgo $1B, Continue Fight to Reclaim Black Hills" (ICTMN Staff February 15, 2011"

(http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/02/sioux-forgo-1b-continue-fight-to-reclaim-black-hills/)

The BBC also covered this story stating:

"Why the Sioux Are Refusing $1.3 Billion

Members of the Great Sioux Nation could pocket a large sum set aside by the government for taking the resource-rich Black Hills away from the tribes in 1877. But leaders say the sacred land was never, and still isn't, for sale."

(http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/north_america/july-dec11/blackhills_08-23.html)

This continued, indigenously informed Native American perspective speaks to the embodiment of the condor consciousness and challenges directly the idea that the capitalist and mercenary ideology of USAmericanism is a foreign concept to this land, Turtle Island, and its people, those who have been here longest and best (do we really still need to say this out loud?). It also points us to a fundamental dissonance with some of the stated dynamics of the engagement of Columbia and how her adherents are patriotically supportive of the exploitative politics of the state that has overlaid its politics, culture, religion and people over that of the original inhabitants.

Cara goes on to state the following:

"From the beginning, when Columbia was first revealed as the Goddess of this land, She was seen as a guardian of freedom and a generous granter of plenty."

Which and whose beginning does she speak of? Who was Columbia revealed to and have they heard her spiritual message clearly? This anwers are up for brisk debate. I can only imagine what the Native peoples might have to say about this. Neither Cara nor the other pagan writers except for Galina Krasskova (who has recently and not so recently leveled similar critiques of this confusion) has even mentioned the presence of importance of their relationship to indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.

It is clear that even the rank and file "(US)American" is unaware of the deeper symbolism of eagle medicine and how it calls us to higher, clearer and more spiritual understandings of ourselves and our relationship to Spirit. "(US)Americans" veritably pimp the conceptual eagle as they destroy the energetic, living being. The USAmerica populace is still struggling to get to a place where it can even live out the prophecy of its eagleness fully, though as far as I understand the prophecy and how it's been communicated, the indigenous people are being remarkably kind to those who carry this allopathic, symptom-submerging "medicine" of the northern eagle of this hope-filled and powerful prophecy.

If the northern eagle is going to fly - respectfully and harmoniously - with the condor of the south, of the indigenous world, then it must engage the eagle in its fullness, not in the narrow, patriarchal and militaristic bravado-machismo that dominates pop culture. The people of the capitalist world must also learn something very important and seemingly very difficult from the condor. The condor (interestingly enough, still holding on here in the north after having been decimated in numbers to only sixteen birds at one point) is a bird that represents and embodies the medicine of purification and transformation, a powerful relationship between life and death, the physical and spiritual worlds. The condor looks death in the rib cage and pulls its sustenance from the rotting carcasses of that which, if left alone, would only spread illness and imbalance. The condor plunges is head into all that scares "(US)Americans" the most - that which must change for the good of all life, mortality and death itself, the visceral connection to Spirit that brings radical self-appraisal and transmutation of disease-state thinking and behavior so as to create new beings and lifeways in which imbalance and injustice are destroyed.

USAmericans in general and some elements of the pagan community in particular are still in dire need of understanding the nature and needs of the land upon which they stand, of the people who have sustained and maintained the sanctity of the land upon which they stand. There is little, but growing understanding of how people's behaviors are affecting the health of the earth and of nature and her human inhabitants. Even with all this northern, eagle knowledge and data technology, USAmericans seem to be blinded to the dynamics of their own presence, their destructive behaviors and ways of thinking and speaking. White privilege seems alive and well as USAmericans allow their government to opt out of and derail international agreements on climate change. It is alive and well as indigenous people come under arrest for protesting the Tar Sands oil pipeline (along with Darryl Hannah, James Hansen and other Europeans) and as they chain themselves to heavy machinery to halt the destruction of sacred forests and as they fight in courtrooms and boardrooms for access to Ancestral lands, waterways and mountains (like Mount Graham, attacked by the University of Arizona and vatican so that an astronomincal observatory could be erected).

The condor, the heart-centered indigenous energetic would call us all to do something else that is hard for modern people to do freely - to feel. There is a message of empathy and deep, reconciliatory observation and contemplation here, exemplified in the winged stillness of the condor on the rising thermals. There is a message, a call to see and feel more deeply, more fully here, to feel with fullness that which is of us and not of us, that which is physical and that which is spiritual, not just the data-driven religiosity that seemingly ignites the destructive nature of the DC40 predatory fundamentalist christians that have raised the hackles and fears of the pagan community in this current spate of activity and self-advocacy.

"The goal of DC40 is to effect “eternal change in our nation’s capitol so our elected officials can govern from a new position of uncompromising light and understanding as we change the spiritual atmosphere over Washington DC forever.” This effort is variously named DC40, Forty Days of Light Over D.C., and 51 Days of Reformation Intercession.

The change DC40 wants to make is electing leaders who fear the Christian God and “find that compromise is not the way” as it is impossible to “compromise with unrighteousness.” The “uncompromising light” refers to a statement released by Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network, which says God’s word should be the legal authority in the United States and Christians should acknowledge no other, “no power to purpose or accept any compromise of the promises of God, and we declare illegal in the earth any action or any people, Nation or nations that undertake what is contradictory to the Word of God.”

(http://pncminnesota.wordpress.com/2011/09/14/dc40-to-pagans-we-release-the-power-of-blood-covered-light-over-you/#comment-1273)

The pagan and the larger, more deeply developed indigenous communities have a valid reason for concern here, if only in the political realm. The pagan statements coming to the fore with regard to the DC40 initiative though are not ringing a bell of clarity and liberty in the face of the larger historical injustices created and sustained by people of European descent on and in the lands and cultures of Native Americans and Africans, those injustices that created the nation whose bombs now burst in so much of the air above this earth, whose amber waves of grain get traded off as economic and (im)moral leverage against neo-colonized nations and peoples hungry for food, clean water, sovereign control of their Ancestral lands and their own freedom and liberty defined their way as their goddesses and gods and spirits led them to define.

Europeans the world over, but maybe especially the ones now living in (spite of) Amerique (an indigenous term related by Jan Carew in his important book, "Rape of Paradise: Columbus and the Birth of Racism in the Americas", meaning the "land of the winds"), are challenged to get their minds and actions right, to look beyond the comfortable ramblings about red stated an blue state, beyond the minutia of conservative and liberal, beyond recycling and not recycling, beyond what level of standard of living they deserve no matter what effects that standard has on people the world over. Europeans, "whites" are in dire need of developing the will and ability to thrust their heads into the heart space, the failing rib cage structure, the rotting carcass of the nation they seem to think will last forever, the systems of racism, sexism and classism they seem to think will last forever, their modern lifestyles and lifeways that they seem to think will and must last forever even though they - mathematically, physically, spiritually, materially, ethically - can't. Other peoples who have followed this mistaken and misguided path of "unlimited growth", "better living through chemistry", destructive and short-sighted modernity have a similar task, though their path to clarity might have some different cultural dynamics in which to operate; their levels of cultural reconciliation may not be so abysmally deep.

Cara goes on to entreat Columbia:

I ask Her to guide us – our country seems to be at a crossroads and is facing difficult times. Our nation’s identity and ethics are muddled. "

On this I agree with her, but more than the nation, the people's identities and ethics are muddled. The "melting pot" and the "salad" have failed in their process of the amorphous unity they alluded or eluded to as they miss the very ground of unity that indigenous spirituality (energetics) helps us to understand. If we engage the spiritual dynamic of spaciality as Vine Deloria correctly suggests, we will have the ability to understand our environmental, ethical and social responsibilities. The Dagara inform us that it is the earth energetic that gives rise to our identity as indigenous beings in relation to All that Is. We can't ever assume to suggest that we "know" the land without the deep consideration and respect of the original inhabitants (who are still here) and how they have come to understand the land and how to live upon it. We can't ever assume to embark on political paths that continue to disrespect those upon whose lives and cultures the USAmerica has consumed and fed so fully, so gluttonously.

Columbia and those who revere her must reconcile themselves with the spiritual energetics of the land, still full of the Ancestral bones of the Native American nations and tribes. They can not place themselves in a position to alienate and injure their tenuous relationship with Native Americans and African by parading another, though more paganistic, symbol of manifest destiny over the bodies and cultures and histories and spiritual traditions and Ancestral responsibilities of the people who paid the highest price of survival here. The people of the north must embrace eagle medicine, must be clear about their lack of and hope for intellectual clarity. The people of the north must be able then to hear, respect and engage condor medicine, the winged path of the heart, the flight of the brave, able to come down to earth and plunge headlong into their own cultural shadows, that which must be changed into something else much less toxic to that which is and those around them.

"The earth was created by the assistance of the sun and it should be left as it was...The country was made without lines of demarcation, and it is no man's business to divide it...I see the whites all over the country gaining welath, and see their desire to give us lands which are worthless...The earth and myself are of one mind. The measure of the land the measure of our bodies are the same. Say to us if you can say it, that you were sent by the Creative Power to talk to us. Perhaps you think the Creator sent you here to dispose of us as you see fit. If I thought you were sent by the Creator I might be induced to think you had a right to dispose of me. Do not misunderstand me, but understand me fully with reference to my affection for the land. I never said the land was mine to do with as I chose. The one who has the right to dispose of it is the one who created it. I claim a right to live on my land, and accord you the privilege to live on yours." - Chief Joseph, Nez Perce ("The People: Native American Thoughts and Feelings")

Is the USAmerica, its people, the people of the modern north, the industrialized, capitalist world ready to engage the indigenous prophecy, the call to unity? Can these modern people see beyond their own privileged barriers to see a world that might look much different than the one they think they see now? Can the pagan community begin to see itself with much more spiritual and political clarity and use its powerful spiritual traditions to truly liberate itself from its own confusion and isolation? Is "(US)America" truly the land of the free and the home of the brave or is it actually the nation of the unwilling, the reticent, the narrowly-defined, the exploitative, the afraid?

What will become of the prophecy of the eagle and the condor...and where will Columbia - and her adherents - stand?

Letter to EWTN re: Doug Barry's "savages" comment on international television

August 22, 2011

Doug Keck

Executive Vice President

EWTN

5817 Old Leeds Rd.

Irondale, Al. 35210-2164

Dear Mr. Keck,

On August 18th, EWTN’s Doug Barry made an impassioned and inflammatory statement about the targets of roman catholic evangelism on the live “Life On the Rock” broadcast from Spain, referring to these targets of missionary work as “savages”. Only seconds before this antiquated, reprehensible and patently racist statement, Barry rhetorically queried a guest on the World Youth Day show, “We have a whole world to conquer for Christ. Don’t we?”. This sort of language is clearly a throwback to the pathologically criminal acts of Christopher Columbus’ 1492, not that of an enlightened and professionally informed and progressive 2011.

Barry’s statement, though brief, was highly insulting and unbecoming of a supposedly educated and responsible telecaster. It was immature at best. One could expect nothing less than a formal apology and public retraction for daring to utter such a horrific statement about non-roman catholic peoples in a world still struggling for pluralism, tolerance, justice, understanding and compassion.

In 2010, a report was made to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues concerning the christian “Doctrine of Discovery” that validated the voyages and crimes of Columbus and other conquerors and their historical and current repercussions. That indigenous peoples were the object of those crimes brings clarity to the insensitivity and arrogance of Barry’s comments of August 18th. His statements come out of a history of oppression, privilege and violent coercion that are appalling and repulsive to an enlightened mind and loving and compassionate heart. His words are even more horrendous as they were uttered in front of thousands of young people, let alone the whole EWTN audience at that time. Because of the presence of the pope, the eyes and ears of the world were upon Madrid and sadly, possibly more so on your cable channel.

What is said in the confines of your rectories, churches, sacristies and board rooms is one thing, but the blatant disrespect and disparaging of huge swaths of humanity in front of EWTN’s audience is quite another.

Doug Barry’s comments are highly unethical, immoral and carry the verbal resonance of historical crimes against humanity. Clearly this is exactly the language that accompanied some of the most heinous of these kinds of crimes, many initiated by the works and likes of Christopher Columbus.

I am calling for a public and mediated apology for and retraction of his comments. Considering the deep insensitivity and lack of professionalism magnified by the international reach of EWTN’s broadcast, anything less would simply add modern insult to historical insult to colonial injury. If the vatican is to be considered a respectable member of the United Nations, its official and unofficial communicative functionaries must treat their international colleagues and other world citizens as though they are also due a substantive level of respect and consideration.

Additionally, the “Doctrine of Discovery”, from which Barry’s comments find firm foundation must be illuminated, engaged in media discourse and beyond and must be recanted and brought to reconciliation as was respectfully asked for by the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers in 2008 (who were, by the way, summarily dismissed by the same papal office from which EWTN implicitly derives its ideological, theological and moral mandate).

Women and men of deep, functional religious virtue and insight should normally need no external barometer outside of their connection to their own spiritual source and community to inform them of the error of their own ways. This letter is to serve as a reminder of the transgression that Doug Barry, the “Life On the Rock” production crew and EWTN already know was committed. Righteousness cannot be claimed where empathy and compassion and the possibility of genuine acts of contrition are not in evidence.

I look forward to your timely reply given the grave nature of the offense and to the quick and substantive engagement and resolution of these clear areas of conflict. Thank you for your time and principled consideration.

Yours in the quest for justice,

Ukumbwa Sauti, M.Ed.

Adjunct Professor, Cultural Media Studies

Initiated Dagara Elder

ukumbwa@gmail.com

cc:

Bay State Banner

Boston Globe

Boston Phoenix

Huffington Post

"...reconciliation..." (originally posted on "...how deep the water...", Jan.26, 2011)

...reconciliation...

...I sit here at a computer, projecting thought streams into a virtual world, terrestrium digitalus, one that gives deep homage to repetition, to sameness, that bases its very process, its very reason for being on only two numbers, nothingness and unity. Maybe those numbers point us to the essence of the world's diversity, to the essence of the world, the yin yang dance of complementary forces that call us into deeper question of our place within it all...and where we must someday more so be.

Outside the window, there on the other side of my digital portal is the actual world-wide web - of life, of experience, of feeling, of nature and Spirit and soil and bone and water and leaf, coyote, squirrel, hawk, raven and worm. Outside that window lies a frozen lake of tears, hiding a world's-age of memories inside the stone-cold casing that allows us to walk like that mythological ghost-man from Nazareth. Outside that window is everything we've ever wanted, everything we've ever feared and needed and destroyed.

But we play with that destruction, those fears, those wants and desires in our virtual worlds, echoes of what was once real to us as our bodies cry out for justice as we force them to live at the portal of the virtual. We carpally paralyze as our hands are made more for chopping wood, skinning rabbits, soothing babies and welcoming friends than diving into the shallow bay of repetitive motion, sending ones and zeroes into the constant scream of consciousness that may be merely beckoning us to do that act of modern resistance - to go outside and play.

My body finds in it a simple, but tenacious growth, a widening of the midsection that brings some of our deepest adolescent and uninitiated fears to bear in the pages of women's magazines and men's magazines and health magazines and late night infomercials, "as advertised on TV", our banner ads poking and prodding our waistlines and our now wasted minds left dormant because we forgot to keep them both engaged as we wallowed at the portal of the digitally unreal...or at the altar of televisual god, a nasty, vengeful, ubiquitous god. So we attack the midsection, battle the gut with wheels and electrocution belts and lipid-burning pills and life-system bypassing choke chains, melting creams, salves and solutions that send incendiary messages to the part of the body that is more the effect than the cause.

And at the altars of modernity, we lie in abject torpidity, tired-blood offerings to our own social pathological demons, beleaguered by what we think life is, or worse, what it was, raising inaction, inactivity, inactivism to new and lofty heights of deism that have never been seen before and would have been the very scourge of any sane and conscious society. But we wallow on, de-activating the brain in ever-quickening spirals downward, downward, downward because we can't actually fly, more so because we've forgotten our kinship to the crow than that our wingspan is insufficient to be carried into ecstasy on the breath of our Ancestors.

We watch our children, the innocents, the tender, beautiful ones, kill us. They break our hearts. We damn them for not knowing. We scorn them for not seeing. We malign them for not becoming. We report them for failing, for shooting each other with impunity and we impune them when they use the very tools we created for the purposes we made them. We scream at them, even in the silence of our neglect, to do as we say, not as we just did to them. We lock them up in prisons because they disappointed our expectations. We lock them up in schools because we've forgotten to trust, forgotten to divine that they already know what they need to remember. We lock them up in our faulty, dusty, moldy, rank and file expectations because we fear we will lose the life of that child within us, but who dies from that self-same prison imposed upon it by all of the children who drive cars and dig mines and build bridges and run stock markets and who brutalize motherhood who never grew up in the first place.

I see a vast wasteland of the bodies of what we would call, what we could call, what we should call women and men, mere and rotting echoes of the spirit within. They are the walking dead in the night of the living, crawling out of the shadows for their forfeited life-blood pacts with the Creator, slavering after the elixir of life at the jugular well. Our telescreens dance with images of the zombied and and the vampirical, the ones who can't live without the others, the last living things on earth, running from the light, from their own death, from that which will pass them into physical oblivion even though that is the only way life can continue. The sapling grows out of the cool humus born of old bark and branch. What kind of hell is it in which the tree of life eats its young?

True pathology is not born, it is made, even if it shows up in the twisted body-mind of a newborn terminator-seed baby. Atrazine cocktails, the insanity of pharmaceutical aquatic concoction, poison-water amalgams of experiments gone bad, but cheered in great pomp and circumstance like the naked emperor in his new clothes. What kind of twisted kool-aid have we conjured for the kids? Living lives of disconnected, not asked, not told fantasies of something long gone, but waiting in our hearts' shadows, beckoning the vampire to walk through its twilight and back into the substance of a new day. The crime of the centuries has been committed and the smoking gun will always be responsible to the one that forged the trigger.

And we've integrated the virus into our very lives. We have committed them to the eternal Inquisition, to the mawkish embrace of the iron maiden, chained her to the boiling cauldron of our own demasculinized machinations into which we daily commend her spirit. If she floats we will kill her. And if she drowns she has killed herself. She asked for it. She is mine. She is mined for the liquid gold of her tears, her fossil-fuel blood spilling, killing her children. She is raped in her ability to give life and we will sell her tears in the twisted, dime store narrative of our own tragic buffoonery, drink from her cup that runneth over with her own endless capacity for acceptance and the making of peace. We have walked on her moon and left upon it the garbage of our mechanism, the spawn of the ma(n)trix. Her pill will be blue and she shall consume it verily, thusly and without fail, without hesitation, without protest, without consideration. This is the word of the lord. This is the world of the lords.

The penis was never a license to kill or to blind oneself to the gift in the hand that fed you or to destroy the essence of that which gave you life with that spiteful, sybaritic, saline solution of scientific human blasphemy.

Reconciliation is not the dizzny-fictional apparition of glowing castles, awakened walking-dead princesses or Powhatans and Pilgrims both marked as savages. How dare we act like this is so! Reconciliation is not the psychic-trauma-insult to colonial injury of some so-called truth panel pseudo-Khosa-celebre that leaves the crime yet unpunished, wounds bleeding out into continued township bloodshed and the sustenance of gated cities within nations of disenfranchised warriors who thirst for water, arable land and sweet succulent quiet soothing healing living breathing justice. Reconciliation is not the feel-good process that requires us to close our eyes to reality or to the corporeal nature of our own regret, frustration and grief. Reconciliation is not shallow forgiveness. Reconciliation is not giving up...or laying down...or giving ground...or giving in.

Reconciliation makes things real. It requires us to realize with real eyes what is, what was and what must be. We must be able to reconcile the dysfunction of a society that places great importance on the sustenance of virtual realities and in those same instances is destroying the balance of the natural systems upon which all terrestrial life depends, forsaking the real for the virtual, the actualized for the fictionalized, the Creation for the manufactured, the body for the robot, the ghost for the machine, the baby for the bathwater.

Reconciliation unifies experience. We must be able to unify our concerns for our own looks, our waistlines, our health, our lives and that our lifestyles are creating our wasteful styles and broadening waists. Our bodies are not the criminals, but we have criminalized, to some extent, the clarity that brings us to bravery that brings us to enacting the kind of change in what we eat and how we eat and how we move and why we move so that the beautiful ways we look and feel and are and become are born of the beautiful ways we treat each other and grow and cook and nurture food and nurture and grow life within our homes and villages, communes and communities.

Reconciliation requires the bravery and courage inherent in the execution of human responsibility. Reconciliation requires us to love the children more powerfully, most powerfully, who take up our arms and kill each other, whether in the villages of Uganda and the Congo, the inert-cities of Boston, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles or the quaint, peaceful, idyllic and idealized communities of New Hampshire and Colorado. The children, the truant students, the inattentive fifth-graders, the violent gang members, the pubescent mass-murderers, the disrespectful teens, the ignorant mall-rat vermin consuming our high-fructose commercialism are not the problem, but the symptom of our own inability to reconcile the history of the modern manufacture of commodified youth, the recipients of every neuroses and disease, social or otherwise, that we adults could blindly and sometimes not so blindly create for them. Reconciliation calls us to look our children in the face, beaten and bloodied by and with our own hands and weapons, and see ourselves.

Reconciliation is redemption. Reconciliation is the ability to put our own mistaken identities of childhood and adulthood into the solitary confinement of historical memory and to forge into a new relation with the child within and the child without. Why is it that modern culture refuses to consciously and compassionately initiate its youth into adulthood, that we leave them with cinematic visions of the back seats of '57 Chevies and six-packs of beer and HIV-free and nubile blanched bodies as opposed to concretized stories of bodies-become-battlefields and nations-become-decivilized-warzones and futures-become-forsaken-dreams of drunken fathers and mothers pimped-out for their thoughtless, thankless ability to love? Why do we not teach them to envision a world boldly beyond the confines of our own spiritual disability? Why do we not prepare them fully and courageously for the world that we have actually created, but for the one we still fantasize about, but don't tell them because we were too busy dropping them off at soccer, dance class or into the hands of the cult of surreality tv. We don't have time. We are busy. We create a vacuum of parenting, mentorship and elder guidance and direction and we will allow our children to be sucked into that vacuum, to fill it with their grief turned depression turned anger turned self-destruction turned destruction. Reconciliation requires that we stop "teaching" and start listening because we've learned to trust that children come into the world with things we need and we won't figure that out from the results of a bastardizing, standardizing test. A gift is a unique expression of the understanding of one life form to, for and on behalf of another life form. Children are a gift for us. Our communally responsible adulthood, our Eldership, is a gift we have kept from giving to our children as they require. We are the shit of the next generation and we can continue to be a toxic-body-waste or turn ourselves gently over in the cultural compost heap of history and allow the hope of future generations to be fertilized by the gift of our death and the gift of what then will have been a life of love and purpose, responsible to time and space, to the sublime, to grace.

Reconciliation is a river bed through which men will make fertile the sacred forest of their own desacration by the volume of their new-found tears. Reconciliation requires us to look deeply into the mythology, real and imagined, of masculinity, of the maleness, of men, of what they think and what they do. It requires of men that we be singularly and communally able and willing to hold our psychic phallo-weapon in one hand and embrace the body and soul of those victimized of rape in the other. Reconciliation requires us to see, in our mind's eye and in the flowering of our cultural expressions, at the same and simultaneous moment of plausible and achievable absolution our birth mother and our earth mother - that our birth mother is our earth mother and that our earth mother is our birth mother.

Reconciliation requires in all of us that we see the unity in our actions and inaction, in our thoughts and in our behaviors, in our statements and in our production, in what we say we intend and in what we see clearly that we have caused to come into being. Reconciliation requires us to make peace, but not simply take the privilege of power and tell the disempowered that they have access to power, but still make it ultimately and tragically impossible to live peacefully on the land or in a house or with people who love and understand them or drink clean water or grow and eat food that actually is alive and sustains life without selling your body and soul to a machine that does not know your name, but can map your DNA as if we were toys for genetic-rape, tools for patriarchy's prostitution of everything sacred and repositories for drugs so vile that we rob our children of their spirits, their childhood, the food from their lips so we could stay high for one more day.



Reconciliation calls us to write history books that tell the truth of the world that exists in reality outside of the pages.

Reconciliation demands that we tell and disseminate stories that have everything to do with not only the world that truly is, but also the world that we know must and can truly be.

Reconciliation brings us home to the realization that we can not espouse one idea and act in such a way that devalues and unravels, confuses and distorts that idea with dissonant behavior.

Reconciliation is the act of seeing something that needs to change and grow and heal and then creating and manifesting and sustaining that change, that growth, that healing.

Reconciliation behooves us to be honest with each other in ways that our modern, anti-cultural story says is dangerous, damaging and damn-near impossible.

Reconciliation means we may actually have to talk about religion, about religions and their place in our past, present and future and if they should have and hold that same place in our present and future.

Reconciliation will be the perfunctory destruction and dismemberment not only of the ideas and ideology of sexism, racism, classism, ageism and homophobia, but also the structural, social, political systems that validate, maintain and sustain these social diseases.

Reconciliation does not exclude the possibility that we must destroy something that we wish to not even fleetingly gaze upon for the deep, corporeal and earth-shattering emotions it engenders within us.

Reconciliation does not exclude the eventuality that the enslaved might have to set fire to the house of the enslavers.

Reconciliation does not eliminate the necessity for us to come out on the other side of the process slightly or wholly and fundamentally changed for all time.

Reconciliation will bring us to the realization that we ultimately and finally need each other - for everything.

Reconciliation is fucking hard.

Reconciliation must be understood, felt, touched, created, nurtured, created, remembered, enacted, made real, made now, made eternal.

Reconciliation is one of the qualities, one of the energetics, one of the sacred facets of the Spirit of water, Kuon, in the cosmology of the Dagara people of Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Ghana.

And so it is that reconciliation is yet another water story. The spirit of reconciliation is in the water. The hope of reconciliation, of peace, of unity, of clarity, the healing nature and spirit of who we are as humans becoming human as Spirit embodied - is in the spirit of water.



In the Spirit of Water...

Patterns of Privilege

The goal of this work is to address some of the challenges of privilege, inspired by the difficulty with which many people engage and make difficult the eradication of racist, sexist and heterosexist privilege and oppression. The dynamics presented below affect people deeply every day and affect also, deeply, on many levels, the lives of indigenous people.

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Patterns of oppression reveal people of privilege who feel comfortable and called to raise issues about that oppression, 'play' with the concepts of that oppression and then retreat back into the dynamics of their privilege, no matter what the effects on people who have been adversely affected by their momentary playfulness. Their privilege is the ultimate hiding place and ultimate insult to those they purport to educate or support with their conceptual rantings.

There is a co-opting of terms, of language, of the loci, the geography of transgression, even the bodies of the oppressed. The privileged lifestyle, the repeated destination of retreat, is marked by seemingly universal access to cultural production, means of production, increased levels of affluence, means of communication, communal, regional and global, increased access to electronic and digital/mechanical technologies, education, no matter how narrow, and, most dangerously so, to the very populations, especially their children, that have been at the more difficult, knife-like edge of that oppression.

Too many times do well-meaning and not-so-well informed and empathetically empowered people attempt to raise issues of race, gender and/or sexual orientation from places of privilege and power without understanding the human cost of oppression, particularly to the oppressed nor their own part in sustaining and validating that oppression. It is one thing for people who share that social privilege and power to work out their necessary process amongst themselves, which has often been a suggestion of many marginalized populations. It is another thing for people of privilege and social power to project themselves into the culture of people who have been negatively affected by that privileged oppression without a clear idea of how their participation becomes a double-negative for the oppressed.

There are two elements that can help us to understand the complex nature of these relationships that obscure awareness of the simple, but often difficult ways of decreasing or extinguishing the presence and effects of privilege, if that is even the goal.

1) Discourse on privilege

Ignorant and insensitive discourse is a common way that people of privilege mistake their presence and possible eloquence for functionality. Having heard the stingy annual sound bytes of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech (or even having read a book about him, even if written by an African person) does not qualify one to innately and sensitively understand the conditions of the people for whom King was working nor the people who now still hope to reap the benefits of those who tirelessly continue to work on his behalf. "like"-ing King on facebook does not mean one can hold up their end of a conversation about race or class in the midst of people who have lived at the 'wrong' end of racism all of their lives. Even African, Native Americans or Latinas that live in large homes and/or "good neighborhoods" have most likely struggled, sometimes unconsciously, against the disempowering effects of racism and class expectations due to racial confusion.

People of privilege sometimes rightly wish to break down the structures and systemic behaviors and language. The way this comes across often displays an ignorance of the terms of oppression and a substantive lack of knowledge and will around what the dismantling of privilege actually means. Additionally, the oppressed have long asserted that those attempts are feeble, even when eloquent, and are not about a substantive restructuring in the first place. There is often leveled a charge that the privileged class will never give up, or better, share the instruments of power, access and control in a truly democratic and compassionate way, no matter how christian or spiritual-but-not-religious they claim to be.

This element of discourse on privilege is key as it often directs the actions and policies that people in power or who take power (as many oppressed people do and will always continue to do) exercise and enact day to day. The fundamental confusion of "reverse racism" and around "diversity" is an example of this. Again, talking about diversity does not create diversity unless the structures and systems of privilege are loosened, democratized or destroyed.

On another level, how people talk about race, gender and other issues is important for being able to engage people on multiples sides of the issues toward substantive change. Jokes about these serious issues are often unwelcome across the barriers of privilege and access and can continue to be harshly polarizing particularly when intended humor is not expected, appropriate, welcome or well executed. Creating effective context is necessary not only in the social relationship, but also to frame the statement as effectively delivered humor. Anything less is insult to injury or patent reinjury.

This reinjury is possible when ignorant, ill prepared and unempathetic people of privilege engage in serious debate with people from oppressed and marginalized groupings. First of all, there is a great likelihood that most people of privilege assume that everyone at the discussion table has gotten there under equal terms simply because everyone is present physically. They may forget or be blind to the closeness of oppressive energies to those locales. A woman may have just been eyed invasively, disrespectfully by men in the surrounding office. A transgendered person may have just come from the bathroom after cleaning the spittle from a born-again christian off their coat. An African woman may have just been stopped at the front door by a security guard assuming stereotypically that she was a member of the custodial staff. Obviously, much more pernicious events may occur in the lives of disempowered people, but the aforementioned are enough to raise the price of attendance for some and not for others.

While meeting at the table of social discourse, people of privilege often assume that their stories show up with equal energetic import as those that come from oppressed people. Their own privileged reactionism often send them running emotionally to conceptual safe havens, to talk of diversity without acknowledgement of their complicity with ethnocentrism and systems of exclusivity, to talk of gay rights without challenging their own fears, prejudices and participation in biased media portrayals in the simple, but profound act of supporting advertisers who sponsor anti-LGBT program narratives, to grand pronouncements that the discourse should or can not included emotions of anger or that the discussion is merely, but blessedly exploratory and non-binding on official structures. People of privilege often say good things and do no good things to challenge the systems and behaviors of their own privilege and power.

There is truth in the tome that the path to hell is paved with good intentions. And that path is paved also with bad intentions and poor execution of intentions. Africa is replete, if not complete(ly overrun) with predominantly European christian missionaries who televise images of impoverished and dying African children, having traveled there from some amorphous and abysmally high "ethical" road, without even a nod to humbly and correctly dismantling the colonial systems that created that abject poverty and third worldism upon which those hellevangelists now feed. Less continentally, roman catholic schools make bold assumptions that education and salvation can come successfully bundled along with white jesus, racist textbooks and a faculty that may not look anything like the student, internally or externally.

Likewise, discussions of abortion, sexual harassment, rape or feminism/women's empowerment in general easily become reactionary, retorted to with misplaced and injurious jokes, social references and out and out ignorance to the quantitative and qualitative effects of sexism and patriarchy's intimate proximity, frequency and ubiquity. When one realizes at a particular point in his life that all the women he knows have been sexually assaulted in one or more ways, shapes and forms, it should not be assumed that that might be an isolated occurrence. This kind of awareness illuminates another facet of discourse, getting out of the way and listening.

Privileged people live in a society where their stories, message and philosophies and ways of processing information are dominant. Televisual and cinematic entertainment features far more stories of people of economic means by percentage than those people actually exist in society when compared to oppressed, poor or marginalized groups. This dynamic may, in fact, be a good partial definition of what it means to be marginalized or on the other side of the barrier of privilege. This access to and control of popular culture bleeds over into the societal culture in a way that leaves discourse on privilege largely unfulfilling and unfulfilled. Stories of or by people in poverty, grounded narratives of or by women and their socio-political challenges and of or by the LGBT community are more difficult to interject into and hold in the mainstream as space is not frequently made for these stories, partly due to persistently negative economic consideration and when they do, they are often filtered through the minds and sensibilities of people in privileged positions, gatekeepers, rendering those narratives co-opted and off the mark.

Likewise, even personal and group conversations can be hijacked by the larger mediated conceptual forces and by overvaluation of even particular communication modalities (why African parents have often disciplined their children to "speak right" when in the non-African community...would Obama have been groomed as such and elected if he had spoken just as eloquently in "ebonics"?). Privilege empowers the privileged to speak and speak often, again with the dust of the elusive ethical high road all about their wingtips. Privileged people feel very confident, if not called, to set the tone, define the agendas and guide conversation. In deed, they most likely own the building (or city) the meetings are held in or run the organizations sponsoring the gathering.

People who have experienced trauma, disrespect, oppression or systemic disenfranchisement are often keenly aware of where they are, sensing quickly whose house they are in or where their feet are. Body language, vocal tone and the temperature of the inner environment often communicate powerfully and quickly who is in charge. There can be a simple, but complexly executed solution to this discursive power disparity. Privileged people must be able and willing to listen, to get out of the way, to forego their fantasies of social eloquence and functionality to allow for the voices, narratives, ethics and actions of the oppressed to come forward, if indeed that is the goal.

Privileged people often take umbrage to that suggestion, overestimating their global self-worth and undervaluing the globally liberating power of something that they clearly do not know enough about, but could if they only took the time and space to truly build empathetic skill in this area. A particular online discourse revealed a man of European descent and a certain level of access to productive economic industries, to be markedly discomforted at the suggestion that much could be gleaned, learned and advanced from his simply being quiet, being in a place of receptivity, merely allowing someone else to have a turn to speak so that a new, unfamiliar voice, to him, could be heard. His reaction was not surprising and was sadly familiar. He was in a place of discomfort and related it to censorship, however distantly. If he had been willing to entertain more than the thought of that suggestion, and he wasn't, he might have entered into a powerfully cathartic experience moving through that discomfort that is just the barest breeze compared to the constant buffeting hurricane winds of oppression and multiform violence, to enter a rite of passage through his own self-maintained portal of privilege that may have opened not only his ears, his eyes, but also his heart.

The narrative of oppression and the narrative of privilege and power are particular stories in the larger narrative of humanity creating its next great fruition. The imbalance of privilege and power exerted by well-intended people is a tremendous block to the process of not only substantive enlightenment, but to the practical manifestation of liberating ideas and behaviors that will ultimately bring peace, respect and real empowerment to those that some of the people of privilege are perceived to care about so very deeply.

2) Emotional blockages

The second element that reveals the challenges of privilege yearning for change comes in the area of human emotions. When people of privilege get challenged to face and hopefully transform their imbalance of privilege, invariably emotions are raised, ranging from anger to anxiety to fear to sadness and embarrassment. They can also feel pressured, pushed, squelched, dejected, isolated and hurt. These emotions and feelings and often contextually new sensations are important to face, move through and strive for clarity and deeper empathy with. What many, if not most, privileged people fail to realize is that they are simply beginning to tap into the range of emotions created first and foremost by the systems, structures and behaviors that they have recreated and continue to sustain. Privilege, born of racism, sexism and heterosexism, is a wholly dysfunctional and devolutionary energetic way of being that is destructive to all humanity.

Secondarily, and importantly, the responses and emotions of the oppressed are subjugated, reviled and repressed by people who were trained to think that their reality is fundamental and primary, a fallacious premise at best. As stated earlier, privileged people usually subordinate the narratives and actions of the oppressed. Additionally, privileged people are resistant to learning, understanding and deeply taking into their consciousness that they are just beginning to see and sense the tip of the iceberg or, better, volcano of emotions and feelings that oppressed people have lived with all their lives, missing and misunderstanding yet again, their emotional relationship with the oppressed and constantly presuming the level to which they expect the oppressed to be required to care for them in those instances.

The oppressed are not required and should not have to be required to attend to the burgeoning emotions and stories that are bound to, duty bound to come from the minds and hearts of people of privilege. Neither should marginalized people be constantly required to tell their stories of violence and oppression, reentering that emotional nexus, simply to help privileged people get to their next level. Again, being open to that message, patiently and compassionately, can help reveal those stories in the best interest of the oppressed (which privileged people must learn to realize, and this is fundamentally important, is in the best interest of everyone).

There are many, many marginalized people who respond with abject anger and disdain at the suggestion that privileged people are having "some feelings" about learning about oppression, their complicity in it or the feelings of the oppressed toward them. This is bound to happen. Why should they be required in any moment to care for an attacker who seems penitent, but still holds the weapon in their hand? History reveals this to be an old and tiring story.

Also, there are many recipients of oppression that feel called and make the choice to hold space, to witness the transformation of privilege to a deeper humanity. This cannot be required of any person or it will turn into yet another privileged power play. Additionally, powerfully, there are those that will actively engage and support people of privilege in their necessary process of transformation, renewing, redeeming their relationship to humanity and themselves as a whole. These, generally fewer, people have made a choice not only to move forward on the decidedly difficult path of privileged people, but also to own and hold their own stories and integrity as they do so. The privileged must understand this, that these people have chosen, powerfully, to do this double-duty and, to some degree, take on the slings and arrows of a dysfunctional segment of society that most likely became dysfunctional while slinging arrows at them. Their openness and willingness and human ability to assist in this process may be limited and often requires them to advance into the larger world of growing consciousness where they necessarily might need to reengage their own process, yet again, but with people who truly understand them and can support them to the fullest possible extent.

So, in retrospect, oppressed people may have, at least, these three responses to the awakening consciousness of privileged people coming into a more deep and full humanity: 1) anger, revulsion and disdain ("I don't give a damn what they feel. They're on their own."), 2) a passive witnessing or space-holding presence ("I hear you, but I don't want to get into with you. Now what movie are we going to see?"), 3) open, active support and engagement ("What can I do to help? Let's do this the right way."). All of these are possibilities, options and choices for oppressed people and any one person or group may go through this range of responses at or through any given time. It may be completely safe, wise and productive for people in conditions of social and economic privilege to assume that their path to a deepening humanity and more compassionate human relations will not include the direct help of oppressed and marginalized people.

Heterosexuals should be about the business of first finding other heterosexuals who are expanding their awarenesses. They should be willing to search farther and longer and wider for those educational resources, books, videos, documentaries, podcasts, speeches and lectures that will bring them new clarity in their search for new meaning and new sensitivity to others' and their own sexual orientation. They may not be invited into the LGBT inner sanctum, if you will, and if they are, they should be grateful and realize that their lives and the way they live them must necessarily change.

Men should be about the business of finding other men who are expanding their awarenesses and have some substantive facility with the real, grounded issues at hand with regard to sexism, feminism, patriarchy, chauvinism and misogyny. They must be willing to avail themselves of the great body of academic, anecdotal and historical work on these issues, giving way to the easy attachment to the gender status quo, an illusory safety that affords real power to no one since it subverts real power from so many. Men may not be invited into the inner sanctum of general or specific womyn-space, but they should be grateful, humble if they are and appreciate the opportunity to come into a deeper manifestation of their wholeness.

Europeans, caucasians, Whites must be about the business of finding others who are expanding their awarenesses around issues of race, culture, class and privilege. There are growing numbers of organizations dedicated to exploring the real, historical, political, spiritual and emotional dynamics of being and projecting whiteness in the world. There are numerous Europeans who are doing the necessary work to deepen their concepts of themselves and their identities in the interest of being equal players on the stage of human development. Privileged whites, Europeans must be willing to hear hard stories, difficult narratives and be willing to move with and through their own possible guilt and hurt in a new way, beyond disrespect and reinjury of the oppressed and/or people of color toward a new socio-political maturity that includes a necessary gutting and restructuring of particularly entrenched systems and practices that have previously afforded them great, but impermanent benefits and fortunes. History books must be rewritten, history not revised, but truth finally and powerfully told without the insecure, immature filters of the quasi-mindset of privilege and imbalanced concepts and systems of power. Europeans, Whites, caucasoids may not have doors freely flung open for them into the inner sanctum of the rich and varied cultures of those we call people of color, even if they are Harvard anthropologists with more Ph.D.s then common sense. But Europeans should be highly grateful when those doors are opened, no matter how narrowly or briefly, as it affords them a rare look into the greater totality of the human experience and allows them an opportunity to step more fully into their own humanity, previously seriously squelched and limited by the false sense of superiority and a thousand other pathologies that racism foments. These particular people of privilege must ready themselves for fundamental change they've never seen the likes of, actively, constantly formulating and manifesting with or without them like the fires mysteriously broken out in the kitchens of the plantations of chattel slavers. This change will require massive, difficult, but refreshingly liberating restructuring of social, political and economic systems and behaviors and relationships that have become horribly entrenched through centuries of human folly and particularized myopia.

People of privilege have a lot of hard work to do and deeply. The necessary nexus of most of that struggle may be in their own circles. It is after that time and work that currently separate circles of human culture can truly combine, conjoin and unify. Their expectations must change. Their behaviors must transform. Their willingness to accept and validate the experiences of those on the other side of their privileged barriers must develop into a deep, vital part of the total necessary process of the destruction of their patterns of privilege toward the creation of a new social paradigm of unity, harmony and true respect and freedom.

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Frances Cress Welsing and others on White Supremacy

The following 3 videos are of Dr. Joy DeGruy Leary on Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome:

(The above videos are parts 2, 3 and 4 of 19 videos. I skipped part 1 as it was mostly the introduction of Dr. Leary. Please consume all of these videos)

Chris Hedges: African-Americans and The Failure of The White Liberal Class: