We Shall Overcome

 We are in an unimaginable crisis as a nation. Yet we have enormous strength. We were gifted with confidence that our democracy and constitution can rise to overcome the worst oppressions humans can suffer from each other. Now we have a complex conversion of crises. Martin Luther King’s birthday is a time to remember that the crises he said we shall overcome “someday” are not yet overcome. We need his vision for insight since the enemy, in different form, is back again.

 

It’s the biggest lie then and now, that some of us are less worthy than others, permanently unqualified for full protection of our constitution, for the best jobs, for leadership in our nation, or to simply live. The obvious lie of our mentally questionable president has been powerful to open a path ahead. Yes he did not lose because the election was rigged against him. He lost because the people voted him out. We can be thankful it wasn’t close. We as a people have chosen against the lie about the results of our election.  

 

But there is this other lie. The famous Big Lie Hitler sold successfully to Germany was that Jews are enemies of all citizens of the “fatherland.” But more important, They were called bad people, and eventually far worse. Of course, the big lie had an unquestioned small truth: many Jewish families owned shares in German banks. And among them, as in all segments of human societies, criminality sometimes occurred. Unacknowledged was the truth that this criminality occurred, if anything, more often in the rest of German society. But the big lie led to rampage, rioting, “kristallnacht,” and genocide. The big lie remains, that humans are not endowed by the Creator with equal rights. But they are. It’s in our constitution. That’s truth.

 

We don't want our nation repeating the history of Germany’s holocaust against the Jews. Our democratic values are stronger. We will destroy an insurgency with patience and strength of truth.  It depends on our capacity, now that the vote is clear, to keep valuing and nurturing any small voice, rational and legitimate, raised in protest to be heard and respected. The small true voice was hard to hear in the loud mob violence of that event. But Consortium News reports it January 16.

 

The demonstrators did plan the portrayal of a possible insurrection, but, Chris Hedges says. Their plans may really not have intended murder, kidnapping, or hostage-taking. The message clearly  overstated was, “it can happen.” He quotes a demonstrator, “We gotta change it. They f…g abuse us. They laugh at us. They steal our money.” Last Thursday Hedges wrote further, “one can decry their politics, the racism among many, and their tactics, but their pain is real in a system that has shrunk the middle class and debased workers across the nation. What happened at the Capitol cannot be condoned. But unless Congress defies its oligarchic backers and serves the interests of (all) average Americans, who also fund them, a real insurrection may be inevitable.  Instead of the reforms to defuse that and bring more economic justice, we are witnessing a crackdown that will only further inflame the country.”

 

There is no equivalency in the lies and the loss of voice, deadly violence, and generations of abuse between the January 6 White demonstrators and the Black Lives Matter demonstrators. But there is one common ground. Both sides are still set to lose, like they did as our president watched, hidden in cowardice, as the violence unfolded. An item not reported is the strength of American values stopping the carnage when a leader demanded “leave her chair alone, don’t mess up the papers” after forced entry into one of the congressional offices.  The presence, regardless of how small, of respect for our constitution and our elected leadership can defuse our president-inspired polarity. The biggest lie is that  some of us, any group of us, are more expendable, low life, too old, too young, wrong gender, wrong color, too poor, too addicted, too redneck, or not worth hearing or caring about. Unraveling that lie is our common need. And it oppresses both sides of the polarized divide.

 

The nation’s most visible enemy affecting us in Montana is not the visible lie about the election itself. It’s not congressmen like Cruz and Hawley who still promote believing the lie. In my home county, the battle against our Big Lie is carried by our Montana Missing & Murdered Indigenous People (see it on Facebook). It’s a more hidden form hiding in our good families across Montana, and in my very own family too.. It expresses itself in our souls, touched by singer Bob Marley’s words, as “mental slavery.” It defied and eliminated the fairness doctrine that used to guarantee dialogue and debate with civility on our media, voted out 20 years ago. And we can and will recover, as we define and excise our mental slavery, regardless of victimhood or perpetrator roles.

 

Black Lives Matter, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, are ahead of most of us past those lies. The “Proud Boys” and “Q-Anon” have members who can agree on this truth, seen by millions when George Floyd was killed. We need both sides helping unravel it all. It’s mental slavery at the root of job loss, unlivable wages, the pandemic, broken families, addictions and incarceration. These issues can now unite against our departing government gone awry with intentions to inflame and ignite our polarity into violence. We can build a new direction with careful Republican pursuit of the many ways Democrats can also misuse the power entrusted them by our votes. Republicans who continue the president’s false conspiracy theories should now start losing.

 

Let’s trust God and his way, the words and life of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the record of nations in our Bible. It culminates in the stories of Jesus. Let’s read it and follow it. That’s the best way forward for anyone claiming “Jesus Saves.” For us all, pray for courage to allow our religious traditions to cleanse us from any elements of mental slavery.

 

We in Montana can find God’s way for our nation together. We shall overcome.

Good news

 

Good News

 

There’s a way through the darkness of our pandemics. It’s in the values of liberty, freedom and justice for all in our nation’s foundation. That’s where we’ll find restoration of respect for all our rights to exist. That’s the rights all of us feel endangered, across our polarized boundaries.

 

We can secure them together. It depends on seeing our common enemy hidden in the middle of our families’ fascination with social media. It’s the commandeering of our attention capacity for outrage for profit, without regard for the destruction of our liberties, our values of democracy, and the strength of our family life in America.

 

This fascination for outrage fired up the crowd that terminated in a violent mob our Capitol this January 6.  It has also drugged our children via handheld screens into a secure bubble of common outrage against all sorts of real and imagined ills in our society. Hooked for long periods of time, even our children turn into products of public attention for advertising, to be sold for profit. It’s the big reason most digital technology experts in Silicon Valley keep digital screens away from their children well into high school age.

 

This is the other, more real and dangerous conspiracy behind the January 6 breaking and entering our nation’s capital. Google and Facebook, yes, did likely aid and abet the election rigging story behind the outrage the mob shouted in breaking and entering our capital. Even worse was the money to be gained in children’s and adults’ minds around the country with face time with a trusted avatar of outrage, face time that easily turned into advertising time. The psychological research into keeping a child or adult in that bubble, away from normal family engagements, was and remains profitable.   

 

Most remarkably, the outraged disinformation flood is lessening. Two years ago executives of Google, Facebook, Twitter and other digital platforms gathered together with Netflix leaders to create documentary, The Social Dilemma. It’s been on Netflix since a year ago. It predicts our insurrection January 6, and sheds valuable light on how our business economy grew Google and Facebook upon untruth, up to six times more profitable than truth.  

 

As it stands now, Google search words “global warming,” for example, brings up glaciers melting and seas rising in one user’s phone, proving global warming is real. On another they bring up evidence of a total natural set of phenomena, proving global warming is a hoax.  Each individual user’s secretly stored record of clicks and attention time determines the results of a search. It also determines content of notifications, pop-up ads, and even email message ads. 

 

The Social Dilemma documentary has evidence of the cost of  in teen addictions, mental illness, suicide, loneliness, and extremism is rooted in the addictive nature of our social media and artificial intelligency. It’s manipulated by a neglected crack in our worldwide social media platforms led by Facebook and Google.  On that day, that crack turned into a cavernous crevasse dropping into a torrent of fabricated outrage that the election was rigged. The same torrent directly undermines our families and damages the minds and growth of our children. It works against  progress being made in Missing and Murdered Ingenous Women, in Black Lives Matter, and in reversing the job loss in the energy crisis in Montana and here in Big Horn County.

 

Since our nation’s foundation we have come a ways toward respect for all.  Is it possible we could thank the marchers of January 6 for unwittingly opening the light of truth with their outrage leading to five citizen deaths? What do we see now, that such obsession with outrage, driven without real trusted human relationships, can go to terrible places for our children and our nation? And that it comes not from some mysterious avatar or matrix, but from the reality of social media platforms and artificial intelligence designed for profit over truth? It’s possible we can learn from the marchers and their victims that day.

 

Outrage that the election was fraudulent fueled the violence, because media messages ignored truth. The outrage itself is now proven fraudulent. Thankfully, it could not forge a way through the defenses our nation has built to protect our government of the people, by the people, for the people. But the corporate interest in citizen outrage to build profit remains entrenched and codified into our digital world of artificial intelligence and social media platforms. And outrage peddling for profit remains almost totally unregulated, even peddled by secret invasion through social media into our children’s minds. It will continue lying.

 

Sophocles, as quoted in The Social Dilemma, said thousands of years ago, “nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.”  We here in rural southern Montana have the courage, tenacity, and intelligence to act to avert the curse of our vast digital empire, reclaim it under human control, and restructure it like we have placed organ donor icons on our licenses to legally prevent profit from our deaths. It’s time to stop the profiteering from the likes of that attack on our Capitol, our democracy, and our children all originating from our dysregulated digital social media.

Child discipline the original nations' way

Child discipline the original nations’ way in Montana. July 1975. 

A thunderstorm was brooding over the Wolf Mountains off to the southwest that July evening of 1975. It was my first summer after a year of teaching children of the Testsestahse, the Cheyenne nation in Montana at Busby School. I had arrived at a field south of Lame Deer where lots of cars were parked around an open arbor with a pole in the center.

Ke’éehe (grandmother) of one of my students had invited me to a sun dance. I agreed to go with heavy questions on my mind. There were crises I barely weathered through my first year teaching in this formerly Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding school. So many children in my elementary, middle school and even high school classes were undisciplined, wild, and uncontrollable through that year. I could not see a way through the new requirement that we teachers stop using consequences, not post rules, stop marching drills, and no longer make students recite “I will…”  to motivate them to learn or behave. This was the new policy of the new local school board. To my consternation, the administration supported it. The parents had cited years of abuse and mistreatment by BIA teachers and was determined to find a better direction grounded in their own way of child upbringing and discipline.

This was before the UN charter on the “rights of indigenous peoples.” But many of the Cheyenne nation, led by my friend Ted Risingsun, were tired of sovereignty loss over child upbringing, and successfully voted in a local school board. BIA teachers and administrators left. The loss of BIA oversight meant the loss of discipline for learning, as I and many colleagues saw it. I had no experience then of indigenous discipline training, nor could perceive any problem with the European caste expressions in Montana connected with race and color, blinding me then to see a better way to learn discipline.

One expression was that Cheyenne children were raised with latent immaturity.  I mistakenly agreed they just lacked parenting skills. Sometimes I heard words deprecating Cheyenne culture as the reason. Evidence I saw was that parents did not train children to obey. Even worse, as I saw it, children came to school with a nonchalant disability to obey a teacher's authority, learned at home. They grew up rebelling against many of the dominant culture’s ways. This was the cause, in my frame of mind, of the abominable rate of incarceration and alcoholism. It did set up frequent conflicts in my classroom, especially in middle school grades.

It took decades for me to see how wrong I was. And it remains a frontier of opportunity for re-inventing schooling among American first people’s families. Montana still lags in this awareness.

The sun dance “Ke’éehe” (grandmother) was seated on a folding chair in the light of the fire, near the dance arbor, as I approached.  She was already speaking slowly in Cheyenne. Her voice had a clarity and strength that amazed me, easily unencumbered by occasional low rumblings of thunder over the southwest hills.  I had no idea she had this voice. There were no microphones. There were many more children and adults together than I could image being quiet and actually listening, knowing the lack of discipline to listen demonstrated in school. Smaller children were seated in the grass, with elders on lawn chairs right behind them, and much of the crowd was gathered standing quietly behind this circle. How could young children remain quiet through these increasing flashes of lightening and louder thunder? Could I learn and practice some of this discipline in my classes and summer’s end?

My discomfort rose with the storm bearing down. Subconsciously I took a cue from the quiet confidence in the entire gathering that everyone and everything remained OK. There was already in my heart a sense of spiritual confidence at this time and place impinging on our reality there.
Mostly it was the discipline of the children to stay put, quiet, and attentive in apparent danger I sensed from the coming storm. Transfixed, I couldn’t move.

During that half hour or more she continued speaking, she did not raise her voice above the thunder.  Toward the end, with louder thunder claps she just stopped, patiently waiting until it was quiet again. Her rising and falling slow, careful speech in Cheyenne language drifted up and over into the darkening of the cloud and the descent of the sun. As a gentle breeze began moving, the dim outline of the arbor and pole brightened in pink light.  I turned around to look opposite the storm. The setting sun was lighting a spot of rising clouds ablaze in the sky above the east ridge. Those clouds built, and the first lightning and thunder began on the other side of our gathering. The light dimmed and went out. Thunder intensified. A few drops disturbed the dust under my feet, and immediately stopped. The storm regrouped and moved off farther east. Only then she announced "hinne ha'ena"  (that's it; completed). Immediately her learning circle dissipated and the dancers and drummers began the after-sunset ceremonies. The afterglow from the sunset broke through the remaining clouds in the west, and lit my path to my car. 

 

In Crow Agency School Public School 2004, many years later, I fell in love with teaching music with kids K through 5. It happened because I invited Evelyn Old Elk, and later her daughter Dora and friend Joy Brien, to come into my music classroom. Along with Ted Risingsun many years before, they taught what remains largely missing to this day in teacher education and inservice classes: the heritage way of child discipline among the Apsáalooke and Cheyenne. I was very slow to learn their respect for children’s learning, and how to invite their respect. 

 

Some parents and providers are joining in an online class, meeting once a week and with mentors through the week, with Lifeways North America. This is beginning March 3 to April 3 this spring. Most of the cost will be covered by a scholarship for people who are caring for or teaching Native American children in our area of Southern Montana. Look up Lifeways North America, and contact 406 665-5714 or graberdb@gmail.com


David Graber, January 15, 2021

"...one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

 

Every school morning beginning in the late 40’s until my retirement, I spoke these words in class. They still ring true to our vision as a nation, despite increasing division over the past few years. With the violent attack on our representative democracy by our own citizens on January 6, 2021, we need our leaders to ring them out again with us. But that’s not all we need from our elected leaders in Montana.

 

I heard the dirty yellow Plymouth drive up and honk. I walked over from my Bible school class with kids we hauled from North Gulfport to our church grounds. I still remember the driver’s angry gaze breaking through the early morning heat that Mississippi summer of 1965. He mumbled curses about human beings of color I prefer not to remember. I remember the words “pedophile ring” and “miscegenation going on here with our n…s.”  I told him “You must have driven in here by mistake.  I have no idea what you are talking about.”    “But you got N---s here!” I heard the shout as he drove off, spraying my legs with gravel.  Later we had another a bomb scare, also not unexpected, but still stressful in the political tension of the 60’s. I do remember thinking how powerful lies are when even a few people proliferate the outrage lies can generate.

 

But now, under the spell of digital media gone wild, we have a virtual flood of lies generating outrage between political enemies, inspired by enemy nations, motivating a rising militancy against our principles of law and order built on truth and our court system. We are losing and demeaning a judicial system among the best in the world. It’s vital importance is because in our nation, truth is not to be decided by a mob, by social media, or in the court of public opinion. Lies are to be confronted, and liars prosecuted to find truth. Without this tyranny looms.

 

Truth—legally speaking for our nation—is determined in a court of law. An allegation is brought forward. It must be supported by solid evidence, meeting legal requirements of validity. A judge examines the allegation and the evidence. If there is legally valid evidence to support an allegation, then the allegation is tried in a court of law. This is to guarantee any lawsuit allowed into court has legally certified evidence enough to follow through with the judicial process to determine truth.

 

Knowing that justice in the hands of humans inevitably will be imperfect sometime, our founding fathers created a process of appeals. This is because we all know that power corrupts, and we must always strive to protect citizens from an abusive government acting under the corruption of power.  When our President lost the election, he had every right to file lawsuits in state courts wherever his attorneys sensed rigging, errors, or outright fraud.  They did so, in 62 courts. None of the lawsuits, even in those states where Trump’s popularity was high, found adequate evidence to justify court action. The lawsuits were refused because factual evidence was missing. The president cannot legally overturn his loss in the election.

Joseph Goebbels, Nazi advisor to Hitler, is quoted as saying, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

 

Christians believe in a truth that stands outside of personal preference. That’s why our pledge includes the word “under God.” Satan, leader of the opposing spiritual realm, is the father of lies. Majority beliefs do not get us there. The false prophets of Israel outnumbered God’s prophet Elijah 450 to one, but Elijah was proven true in 1 Kings 18. To be under God means to seek truth, even when it’s costly

 

On January 6, thousands of protestors gathered in Washington D.C., fueled by a narrative that our national elections were rigged against the president. The lie was compounded by conspiracy theories fed on digital media. They invented lies of malicious dark powers, steeped in evils like pedophilia. They still are claiming this is at the helm of our Democratic party, falsely attacking real patriots for turning our nation into a socialist communist tyranny. Our powerful digital media, unhampered by normal human conversation, generated their toxic soundbites picked to be transmitted by Christian pastors, online preachers, pundits and TV commentators.  It has paved an unconceivable way in our nation to reject what “The People have spoken” last November. It has generated millions of dollars in profit from contributions to the Republican party, and to President Trump personally. And it defies and discredits the states’ power to elect our president, and to conduct a reasonable investigation when evidence of fraud warrants it.

 

Moments after the President declared falsely a landslide victory had been stolen, and told the crowd they can do something about it, they marched towards the Capitol. As citizens watched in horror, a group of extremists rose to the crest of the wave and broke violently into the center of our representative democracy, our capitol building, leaving death and destruction, the fruit of lies.

 

Defying the independent judiciary of the courts at our state capitols attacks the core of our democracy.  It’s astounding that most of our top elected Montana politicians continue such defiance. Senator Daines was asked about the President’s outrageous words encouraging the crowd on the way to the Capitol. He diverted to claim the upcoming 2^nd impeachment is the real source of outrage, and should be stopped. That bothers me, because truth is hidden and a lie remains in power.

 

What bothered me in Mississippi a half century ago bothers me now. Our Republican government officials refuse to acknowledge the current lie about our election. It’s the same refusal that allowed many in our congress to deny the constitutional authority of the states to affirm the election. The character assassination of our Bible School staff was totally false, and had a political agenda to say Black lives do not matter in our nation. Truth is truth. Our president’s 62 lawsuits examined in state courts settled it over and over.  Our American system of government of the people, by the people, and for the people is proven solid again. We the people can govern. But we need our Montana leaders to apply what patriotism they have, and uphold our American values of arriving at truth for this election. Our "Pledge of Allegiance" requires it.