"For America to Live, Europe Must Die"

Via Information Clearing House

That link goes to a speech made by American Indian activist Russell Means in 1980. For a man who distrusts European education and language so vehemently, he uses language as well as I've ever heard, and he makes a powerful and impassioned point. That the European mind set - the mindless focus on production at any cost, the complete insensibility to our connection with Mother Earth - has to end for the world to survive. He's not talking about Caucasians or European people - he's talking about the way of living in the world as if we are not a part of the world. He acknowledges that there are people who are white on the outside and red on the inside - like my friend Doreen - and others who are red on the outside but white in their thinking.

He's talking about he difference between resistance and revolution. He's talking about all the "-isms" that we talk about in books and universities that have no real difference among them when it comes to right relations with each other and our planet. In the end, all the political, religious and social theories and movements that originated in Europe and are in play throughout the entire world have served only to "de-spiritualize" our experience as humans and cut us off from ourselves. Anything that seeks to replace Goddess with anything else, including ourselves, won't work.

Right now, tribal lands are under attack by the US government because it turns out there is something of value in those barren lands after all - Uranium. And if the government goes after that Uranium, the Res and anyone still on it will die. Your government thinks this is an acceptable loss. Personally, I think Native Peoples in this country and around the world have lost enough to greed and mechanistic, materialistic thinking. We need those cultures to survive. We need to realize that nuclear energy might be a quick fix, but there's nothing safe or environmentally sound that comes from it.

We need to get it into our heads that the Earth is a living being, and She is not going to let us destroy Her - it just doesn't work that way. We can live in harmony with Her, or She'll get rid of us in order to survive. It wouldn't be the first time.

We are taught in this culture that the world began pretty much with the beginning of Christianity in the Greek and Roman worlds. Nothing could be further from the truth. That was the end of civilization - everything we do now is just remembering things that have been known by other people in other times. There's physical evidence that nuclear energy existed in what we would call pre-history, and that civilization has arisen and killed itself off at least twice before us.

Are we going to do it a third or fourth time? Is this part of a natural cycle that is the logical result of the egos of humans or are we going to smarten up and use science to benefit the Earth as well as our pockets? Can we learn to just "be"? Is there an attainable compromise we can reach by us before Earth has to get rid of us?