Wednesday, August 30, 2023
In bed at 10, awake at 3 & moved to brr, and up at 3:38, unable to sleep. 55°, high of 66°, mostly sunny day ahead, with continuing high waves & dangerous currents on Lake Michigan. AQI=24! with the wind N at 13 mph, 8-13/21. Sunrise at 6:13 at 77°ENE, sunset at 7:30, 13+16.
Yesterday's Yo-Yo ride was a bad one, laid low. I got to wondering whether I've been down since that one week in February 2022 when Putin invaded Russia and Kitty died. The invasion and its horrors are a constant reminder of what we did in Vietnam and my stupid - I struggle for an accurate descriptor - participation in it, and Kitty's death, words fail me. A rough year and a half, but I can't really believe it was that terrible week that triggered my yo-yo emotional swings. One day up, next day down, one day out and about, next day ferkrimpter. One day focused, next day muddled. One night sleep, the next up at 3. One day complicit in all that is bad especially my own failings of courage or will, , next day oblivious. One day bemoaning loneliness, next day savoring solitude. One day compos mentis, next day meshuggeneh.k Age, age, age.
Two feature pieces on Indian schools in this morning's papers: (1) NYT: ‘War Against the Children’,New research reveals the vast scope of the Native American boarding school system. Students had to give up their names, their labor and sometimes their lives. and (2) WaPo: More schools that forced American Indian children to assimilate revealed, A nonprofit Native American group has found details about 115 more Indian boarding schools in the United States. There can be no serious question about the guilt of the United States in genocidal practices against the country's Indigenous Peoples. One of the first acts of the then newly-created United Nations was the adoption in 1948 of the Genocide Convention. The vote in the General Assembly was unanimous, but nevertheless the U.S. did not join in the Convention until 40 years later, in 1988, led by Wis. Sen. Bill Proxmire (whose political campaign treasurer was my law partner John Finerty.) At least this sorry show is better than the U.S.'s persistent refusal to join the international treaties on the use of land mines and cluster munitions.
The Convention defines genocide as ". any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Arguably, all those acts except (d) would apply to America's treatment of its Indigenous Peoples. From the beginning, European settlers/colonists have viewed the indigenous peoples as beneath them, witness, e.g., the words of T. Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence: "[King George III] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." The country's genocidal warfare against 'the merciless Indian Savages' continued long after Independence and included the the terrible history of the Indian Schools, decribed in these 2 articles and many other sources. It is especially noteworthy how religious organizations, including Catholic relligous orders like the Jesuits, were complicit in the effort to " to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group". i..e, the indigenous tribes, through the supposedly benign effort to assimilate them into White majoritarian culture. At least 523 institutions were part of the sprawling network of schools.
From the NYT article: "Wherever they were located or whoever ran them, the schools largely shared the mission of assimilating Indigenous students by erasing their culture. Children’s hair was cut off; their clothes were burned; they were given new, English names and were required to attend Christian religious services; and they were forced to perform manual labor, both on school premises and on surrounding farms. Those who dared to keep speaking their ancestral languages or observing their religious practices were often beaten."
One thinks of the 'war crimes' howl agains the Russians who have been forcibly moving Ukrainian chidren to Russia to be assimilated.
American Nations, calling a spade a spade. From the book: "The Founding Fathers of the Deep South . . . . .did not come directly from Europe. Rather they were the sons and grandsons of the funders of an older English colony: Barbados, the richest and most horrifying society in the English-speaking world. The society they founded in Charleston did not seek to replicate rural English manor life or to create a religous utopia in the American wilderness. Instead, it was a near-carbon copy of the West Indian slave state these Barbadians had left behind, a place notorious even then for its inhumanity. Enormously profitable to those who controlled it, this unadulterated slave society would spread rapidly across the lowlands of what is now South Carolina, overwhelming the utopian colony of Georgia and spawning the dominant culture of Mississippi, lowland Alabama, the Louisiana Delta country, eastern Texas and Arkansas, western Tennessee, north Florida, and the southeastern portion of North Carolina. From the outset, Deep Southern culture wa based on radical disparities in wealth and power, with a tiny elite commanding total obedience and enforcing it with state-sponsored terror. Its expansionist ambitions would put it on a collision course course with its Yankee rivals, triggering military, social, and political conflicts that continue to plague the United States to this day."
Activities.
Geri had lunch with Caela and Liz Breuer, came home with a new coyote whistle.
I got a haircut.
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