Shaking the Pillars of American Democracy

 

I’m so thankful we are not China.

 

Unlike in Chairman Mao’s reign of 1966-1976, we have a democracy upheld by three co-equal pillars of our government. The truth-finding power (judicial branch) is separated from the law-enforcement power (executive branch) and the law-making power (legislative branch). Truth is not a matter of opinion, bias, or preference which can be manipulated to serve tyranny. Truth must be based on legal evidence subject to scrutiny. A few months ago, from lower courts up to U.S. Supreme Court, allegations of fraud in our democracy were found to be meritless at best. At worst, they remain a conspiracy to remove power from local officials in counties and states, to silence the voice of the people, and to give power to outsiders to determine whether or not an election is rigged. This is the worst of Chinese communist ideology. It doesn’t belong here.

 

“I’m here for your help, Mr. David,” spoke a well-dressed man at my door at XiHua University, near Chengdu, Sichuan, China, winter of 2002.  China’s federal government had directed university attorneys in constitutional law to contribute chapters to a legal policy document required for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). He, the lead attorney on our campus, was assigned to submit his writing on capital punishment. He had called earlier to set up an appointment, and had emailed me his document to peruse.

 

We sat down and progressed through the “Chinglish” elements I had highlighted. He was cordial and articulate. We began contrasting the American trial-by-jury with China’s trial-by-judges, as applicable to various capital crimes. I had studied the standards applying to sedition, speech against government, as prohibited in China.  I saw a huge hole allowing powerful officials to condemn critical speech, a capital crime there.  To my non-legal mind, his writing on sedition left evidence standards broad enough to drive a truck through. I told him this. He launched into a speech on why trial-by-jury could never work in China because peasants cannot understand evidence.  He said “It’s possible this works in America, but never in China. Jurists who have the lives of citizens in their hands cannot be common people here.” I was shocked. So only the powerful have the right to determine what is true, even the right to continue living.

 

I could understand some of where he was coming from. He divulged his opinion that up to 40 million people perished as a result of China’s “Cultural Revolution” That holocaust was fed by Chairman Mao’s big lie: “Counter-revolutionaries are everywhere around us, even in families; they have secret thoughts against me! They must be rooted out and eliminated!” (see documentation in Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang, friend of a professor friend of mine at XiHua University) Families were divided against families, children against elders, parents against children. Out of loyalty to their leader, they betrayed each other to be tried, sent to forced labor, and even executed as enemies of Mao’s revolution. 

 

Later that spring, we strolled off-campus with a half dozen students to find and visit a farm family. An elderly couple was home. We were cordially received, and our students talked at length with them. Three of us were invited into the farmer’s bedroom to see his most prized possession. It was a solid silver etching of a stern, life-size Chairman Mao, peering down above the farmer’s bed.  I knew my students were schooled in the new “Deng Xiao Ping” thoughts on democracy in China, rejecting Chairman Mao’s thought control. I heard a bit of tension in their voices. They explained to me later that this farmer could not possibly abandon his loyalty to Chairman Mao, because it was a religion to him. 

 

Elderly farmers continue to admire Mao today, even though they suffered under his oppression. Mao had set up production incentives for farmers in that county to prove the success of his authoritarian communism. Facing food shortages, farmers fudged their production data to win needed provisions. They easily exaggerated production rates. But this determined the following year’s taxes: in bags of rice. Officials cleaned out farm commune granaries, far exceeding their acreage capacity, because they falsely inflated their production the year before. He said the farm population of those who died in Sichuan from starvation exceeded counter-revolutionary executions. I asked, “How many total across China died?” He said it was more like 40 million lives lost during Mao’s reign. Yet decades later, loyalty to then the world’s greatest liar remained strong.  

 

Maybe it connects with Montana Republican politicians who still succumb to our former president’s lies.  He repeatedly cited twisted evidence of “massive fraud” on social media, echoed by political pundits who are not legally required to present truth. Fox News lawyers argued in court that “no reasonable viewer of ordinary  intelligence” would expect Tucker Carlson to tell the truth, even after saying, “Remember the facts of the story. These are undisputed.”(McDougal v. Fox News, 2020). The facts he cited were not facts. They were easily disputed, and he knew so at the time. With a lie carefully cultivated by a respected FOX commentator, and repeated often enough and widely enough, even our Montana leadership refused to speak the true evidence they also knew. 

 

Republicans can save us. They are just now beginning to question what remained unquestioned in this farmer’s mind on Chairman Mao. Our nation needs free elections.  Remember the thin blue line of Capitol police, who stood in protection of the true pillars of our democracy back in January 6? And some gave their lives? It can inspire a return of the Republican party to the values of our nation. 

 

Fortunately, corporate losses from our media lies are large. Lawsuits are looming against right-wing mistakenly-labeled “conservative” media giants refusing to come clean from, for example, falsely discrediting the voting machine reliability in Georgia. It was Republicans, grounded in our government’s judicial pillar of democracy, who began strengthening our pillars in Georgia. May truth spread among us, and may confidence in our American democracy return here in Montana as well.

A Covid Blessing

It doesn't make sense but it's true. Families are working together, eating together, preparing meals, cooking, cleaning, and taking in family members who lost their place to spend the night. I’ve been watching the children. Many are getting into the healing happiness of the covid blessing. We can heal with them.

 

Of course, the increase of interaction with family members can bring out the worst too. Many of us are bothered with so much relationship stuff.  We live in a culture that has demeaned family work to meet physical needs. It’s why we like school cafeterias, fast food, and propane deliveries. Now more of us are finding ourselves close to fires we build together, and rebuilding broken relationships is not easy. We are accustomed to easily walking away from the circle when the going gets tough, and conflicts rear up.  And now with covid still around, that’s more difficult, and more dangerous.  So many of us are swept into a family circle. Is it broken? Can Covid turn out to be a catalyst for healing?

 

Our collective memories have lost power to hold intact the ancient circle of Apsaalooke, German, Irish, Mexican, Asian and more heritages that once functioned here. They once kept our families together for the good of all. The power of the circle once was there because it included everyone. Not just because we would feel guilty sending anyone away, but because we were needed to keep our real needs met. Everyone had a role in some of everyone’s needs. And it was not only physical needs. It’s our need to be needed. And our need for emotional, spiritual, physical, and social connection.

 

A friend of mine had a brother who was incapacitated in his youth.  The tragedies led to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Father, grandfather, and the two brothers took up a challenge to be helicoptered into the remote wilderness in the North Canadian shield. It was weeks walking distance from the planned point of access to safety. They prepared carefully for the risks, gathering equipment and tools for an extended time. They were conscious their need for each other would far outweigh the possibility of anyone being “on my own” during this expedition.  And that itself was scary. The risks were high of being together in a family fraught with trauma, even ancestral trauma. A family history of conflicts in relationship does not make such a venture easy to enter. To make a long story short, by the last week of the venture his symptoms were gone.

 

In “civilized” America, more of us than ever before can choose to survive on our own. It’s not easy to see interdependency as useful. We seem to have a culture built on easy escape from distasteful or even violent symptoms of trauma still engrained in our family system, from back when escape was not easy as it is now.

 

And now, covid has been putting children together with their elder relatives in ways that demand their loyalty and care for one another. I’ve heard it’s happening: the gift of covid.

 

For how many of us is this a terrible twist of covid fate? Can it be turned into the blessing the Creator may have intended?  Many of us, with ancestral trauma history, have difficulty opening our minds to this. Family dysfunction has become normal, as well as the normal ease to escape to another state. Now that escape isn’t so easy, we maybe could benefit together from a well-designed free program to heal together.  First see or read the story: thetraumatizedbrain.com/the-legacy-of-hollow-water .

Then look up hidden water, the new healing way built on science supporting what happened with Hollow Water: https://hiddenwatercircle.org/origin-story.

 

Or better yet, contact your local behavioral health provider, and ask for a human systems approach.

 

Might this be a way for the convergence of covid tragedies here with the Creator’s way to recapture the hope we once had in each of our ancestral pasts? Can all the varieties of heritages, languages, and religions here be an asset for healing?

Heart learning reposted revised

Fall of 1973, I walked into the new tribal school in  Busby ready to teach music.  Soon, I was discouraged. My students weren't listening or following my directions. They seemed resistant to learning. Worse, parents didn't seem to care about compliance; some actually seemed to value rebellion, offending my German ideals of child discipline. I shared my frustration with my trusted friend, a Cheyenne elder and grandfather of several of my students, and he turned my perceptions upside-down. The Cheyenne, he explained, enjoy seeing children physically active, not sitting down, holding still, being quiet. Adults pay attention to children, and children are expected to pay attention to adults. It builds respect. Children learn through games, dance, song, and stories--real life events. I didn't notice that resisting my demands for their attention showed strong heart, grit and courage. It took me a long time to see heart-learning as the foundation of education, not as a distraction or rebellion to be overcome. 

 

Outstanding new scientific research into effective education for life supports ancient wisdom. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL, or CASEL) in Montana's current standards and teacher training has made amazing progress back to the foundations for early learning, but progress is difficult in changing toward better systems in Montana. Under current benchmarks and resultant disempowerment of child upbringing accountability to the child’s circle, the very reasons for writing the standards remain unfulfilled. Our achievement gap, and quality of family life measures, remain unchanged.

 

Many programs outside Montana get it better, like Circle of Security International, Escuela Nueva Foundation (their “learning circle” program”), and the “phonemenon-based” learning promoted it Finland. It’s time for Montana’s early childhood programs to allow at least one alternative parallel path to credentialing of family, school, and individual caregivers through programs like the Association for Child Development (ACD) or the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). Many states have at least one now. 

 

LifeWays North America is being used in one preschool in Montana, in Red Lodge. Here children and their parents/caregivers are empowered to teach and to learn. Instead of initiating instruction, teacher learns and designs structure and scaffolding to invite children’s collaboration across ages with the whole heart, hands, body, and mind. Cognitive engagement is often not verbally directed by the teacher. Children are engaged with real stuff, with each other and with the teacher verbally and non-verbally with age-old normal rhythms of quiet play, food preparation, story sharing, eating, cleanup, rest, celebration, with songs and circle time activities at transition points in each day and through the week. The child can fail and try again, and learn trust of the teacher to collaborate with others, go exploring with full release of the caregiver, and full confidence the caregiver will be there when needed. Instead of unnatural age stratification of children, focus of Lifeways pre-schools is for -birth to age 6 or 7, a cross-age rainbow in the school that easily builds social and emotional learning with a caregiver trained in one of these ways.

 

It reduces teacher preparation load because it empowers the child. If a child’s heart learning foundation is applied to teacher education, lesson planning will be more the child’s job in collaboration with others across ages and generations. Teachers have rewarding community connections in heritage practices of food, shelter, celebration, space, and spirituality to their learning circle. Worry of meeting academic outcomes is replaced by ways of learning proven more effective even academically in later school years.

 

A 7th grade math teacher Finland was asked, “what is an important measure of success in your students, since you don’t have standardized tests?” He replied, “I want to know if my students are having fun. The rest then is easy.” Fear-based external mandates by outsiders are counterproductive to restoring the ancient learning ways of life. Many educators trained now as evaluators can be trained in building bags and boxes of materials and practices that work with the old ways of handling heritage life ways. Our emphasis on benchmarks and evaluation schemata with lists to check-off to determine accountability has been undermining acquisition of the very skills the lists were meant to measure. Any process of accountability with the child and that child’s expanding learning circle from birth is the right accountability. Any process that undermines this circle’s agency to explore, learn, and evaluate, needs to be questioned. The standards themselves are more useful when applied and owned in the child’s circle of family and teacher.

 

Culturally Sustaining and Revitalizing Pedagogies (CSRP) can be found in workshop sessions offered by organizations like LifeWays North America, at the Lakota Waldorf School in Kyle, South Dakota, and the indigenous pedagogy research in Canada, reveal many good options. These and other organizations are practicing heart learning in schools and preschools with success.   Heart learning can recover our Creator-intended learning systems and turn right-side-up our schooling and child rearing priorities here too. Join us in finding funding for an alternative learning program here.

For profit prisons returning public?

It’s true private prisons tend to have more violence, less public oversight, and poorer outcomes in recidivism. And it’s true that money for building the burgeoning private prison industry was raised in taxes.  Yes, even the facility here in Hardin, now back in government hands with more transparent regulations, began as a private investment for profit, on taxpayer money. Now even the Koch brothers’ stock options in private prisons for profit are losing (BuyUpSide: current percent return is -44.75%). It’s amazing, with all that cheap absentee-proof labor, we now have more Blacks in our nation than were freed by President Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation over a hundred years ago. President Biden is right to take this step.

 

But it’s a small step toward a fair, transparent, and far more cost effective criminal justice system. Let’s go on toward the evidence and wisdom of science, along with a few local elders who still know why the original nations of North America generally did not need or want a prison system.

 

Most of us born into the dominant culture still believe in consequences to control children from making wrong choices. I was raised in a family strongly believing that children (like me) need quick consequences early in life to learn to make right choices. We believe children will turn out good because we intervene with consequences, and punishment if necessary, for bad behavior.  Some still don’t turn out good. Too many in America, especially in Big Horn County.  That’s normal.  Or is it?

 

Sciences of human behavior, child development, and of brain studies give evidence otherwise.  Alternative paths are more effective in building the brain’s executive function, contributing to internal discipline valuing connection with trusted human beings,  not from fear of separation from those we hope love us. We need light to shine on our false faith in fear of forced breakup of families. This is not a long-term effective motivation to behave appropriately in society. Here in Big Horn County that’s what many of us unkowningly think. How many elders still with us know otherwise by experience? We have them right here among us. These practices of science-based alternatives to punishment exist even in igloos.  

 

At age 34, Jean Briggs traveled above the Arctic Circle and lived out on the tundra for 17 months, with a family of the Inuit nation.  She chose to do this to understand the astounding discipline, even with young children, to control outrage and anger. In her time there, she was often chagrined with her own habits of expressing irritation, not uncommon in such close quarters in winter igloos. She wondered how children, from early years up, learned to hold disappointment and anger in check. Look up “Inuit parents teach kids control anger,” or check out her book,  Never in Anger. After 17 months she was still left with a lingering question: How do Inuit parents instill this ability in their children? How do the Inuit take tantrum-prone toddlers and turn them into cool-headed adults? The answer came this way: She was walking on a stony beach in the Arctic when she saw a young mother playing with her toddler — a little boy about 2 years old. The child had been throwing rocks at the other children. The mom succeeded in distracting the child, taking the child to another area to play away from the others.  There she picked up a rock, gave it to her son, and said, "'Hit me!” The child did, and Briggs noticed he had no remorse.  She said  “Go on. Hit me harder,'" Briggs remembered the child finally harming her mother, and she exclaimed, "Ooooww. That hurts!" After repetitions, the child stopped, and refused to keep throwing rocks. Mom asked the child why. The answer, as the child came close, into her arms, was  “Mamma!”

 

Our national defiance of behavioral science reveals itself with a quick look.  Here we are, the richest nation on earth, with arguably the strongest tradition of democracy. Yet we have one of the highest per capita incarceration rates. We are not the nation of law and order we think we are. A popular congressperson last week was publicly promoting the assassination of another congressperson. A gallows and noose were brought to the door of the Capitol to the death-threat chants of a lynch mob, dead set on breaking in and trashing our Capitol.

 

Such language spoken by supposedly patriotic leaders opens a possible charge of felony assault. But what happened? Representative Greene’s threats were reinforced with gifts from her constituency of  $1.7 million. A federal government elected official came out west last week to recruit us to bring “Washington DC to its knees.” How can we have government officials shouting insurrection against the Capitol we the People of the United States occupy? it’s ours, not his personal possession. It cannot be brought to its knees without bringing us to our knees.  That’s what a tyrant, a dictator does. It happened just last weekend in Myanmar. Recent tyrants success in Egypt, The Philipines, and Russia are entrenched. We don’t want that here again. That’s what our revolution repudiated, in 1776.

 

We’ll win again. Many around us, yes this writer included, looked into this mess attracted to the raucous humor then led by President Trump with great profit.  But this has gotten out of hand in a murderous way. We are fortunate to have bipartisan strength in the Mountain West to just say no to this rampage of irresponsible outrage. Those of us who lived through the civil right struggle in the South in the 60’s know the danger of humoring of evil thinking.  Those of us read our Bibles know Jesus knew this too. It’s a question of what’s true, righteous, and of good report. This unpatriotic thinking, regardless of the fun, has run its course.

 

We cannot simply stop the deeply entrenched retributive justice system we have in our nation.  But we can start to relearn the more conservative, traditional, older ways of raising children with strong discipline. Here in Southern Montana we have heritages with better traditions of discipline. We also have one of the highest incarceration rates among folks who started to school in our rural counties.  It takes an enormous amount of healing work, and needs the support of professionals to access strong evidence-based practices outside the current retributive justice framework.  It also needs our legistators’ support to put taxpayer money into the cost-effective outcomes-based restorative justice framework. There are amazing studies of this in our state and around the world.  

 

It’s a small step for America on a long journey to turn around the worldwide rise in authoritarianism and tyranny. It’s wise to stop our burgeoning private enterprise that has been hiding evidence of unlawful, abusive, and criminal practices against children and their families. Voices from those suffering abuse have filtered past the blocks of evidence of inhuman practices for profit. We are fortunate for this, and this small step toward transparency and human decency. It’s especially important here in Big Horn County, with a history of high incarceration rates among those who started school here. Our president made a wise choice to end the feeding of our taxpayer funds into incarceration for profit. Now we are on a path toward reducing taxpayer costs for incarceration, toward rebuilding our family relationships on our heritages and sciences of child upbringing, and toward a nation willing to address the real voices of despair in every outrage epidemic by isolating the truths emerging from the flood of misinformation and outright lies. We shall overcome.  Black lives matter, along with all of our lives, especially those of our children.

 

Resources:

"The New American Slavery" MA thesis by David Liburd, cuny.edu

1.     Many books by and about Dr. Martin Luther King, search with the words, “restorative Justice.”

2.     Books by Jean Briggs, first one with the above story is from her book, Never in Anger.  Also see NPR story, “How Inuit parents raise kids without yelling”   March, 2019.

3.     Returning to the Teachings, by Rupert Ross

4.     The story of the Hollow Water community, the documentary on sexual abuse and incarceration, with a new on-line introduction to their community healing training regime: https://hiddenwatercircle.org/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Looking back to go forward

Controlling our Outrage

Again.   

Revised December 14, 2020

Not long ago we had in place more controls over the passionate emotion of outrage. We can return to these controls to resolve our polarity now.

The Creator blessed us humans with the shared emotion of outrage. Throughout our past, we used it to collectively to unite around real threats to ourselves and others of our kind. The emotion blessed us. Misused, it has cursed us. Jesus himself encountered it from before his birth, and charted his way, recorded in the Gospels of the Bible, to defeat threats of uncontrolled outrage and thrive together. It’s an easily missed part of the first Christmas story.

 

We are again in a time of uncontrolled outrage. We have been watching trusted people collecting power to eliminate others of our own kind. These are no longer dangers of a rogue bear or tiger bent on human flesh. It’s time to direct our attention against uncontrolled outrage against our own flesh and blood (see NPR’s podcast “The Hidden Brain,” from last week).

 

Following is a story from an acquaintance of mine. I first heard him tell this story decades ago. Last week I requested and he sent me his own words of this story.*

 

When I was a young boy, my grandfather, father, and I travelled some distance from our home community to go fishing at a spot ‘known only to my grandfather.’ Having driven as far as roads would take us, we got out of my grandfather’s old beater, and gathering our gear, set out on the trail toward this favourite fishing spot. We soon found ourselves in the middle of a deep, dark woods making our way along a narrow trail where, with each passing step, the way ahead and behind became less and less perceptible. On more than a few occasions I expressed my concern to my grandfather; each time he sought to reassure me.

 

Finally, unable to hold in my anxiety, fearful about what lay ahead of us, even more anxious that the way back would never again be found, I tugged frantically on my Grandfather’s arm. “Grandfather, Grandfather,” I cried out, “We’ll be lost! We’ll be lost!” Sensing the rising fear in me, my Grandfather knelt down, and after reassuring me more fully, taught me a lesson, one that has guided my thinking and actions from that day to this. In the mixture of languages that was his habit of speech, he told me that each new trail we take could seem like it leads along an uncertain path; the way back can seem unclear, obscured by the landscape. “But,” he said, “When you set out on a new trail, if you spend twice as much of your time looking over your shoulder at where you have come from as you do where you are going; if you fix the landmarks behind you in your mind the way they will appear to you when you turn to take the trail back, you will never become lost – you will always be able to find your way home.” 

 

That day my grandfather gave me the ability to find my way to and from all of the various destinations in life that would lie before me; all of which, as I set out on each new trail, were initially unknown. Contemporary societies – not just North American – are no longer used to looking at where they have come from. They are far more fixated on an as yet unknown and unknowable future – on what comes next. Rather than use the past to help determine where they are on the trail of life in relation to where they started, they plunge ahead, frequently blindly, expecting that the future will correct any mistakes they make in navigation.

 

How can we recover the good use of outrage, as felt by this child? Might this be a late night topic this holiday season? Join the conversation on my blog:

Greenwoodback40@blogspot.com

 

 

* Terry LeBlanc, a Mi’kmaq-Acadian, is founder and Director of NAIITS, An Indigenous Learning Community as well as adjunct professor at several Canadian and American seminaries. He holds a PhD in Theology and Anthropology from Asbury seminary. Terry has worked in a variety of roles equipping Indigenous people for leadership in their homes, communities and places of faith. Working with Elijah Harper at the Sacred Assembly in ’95 Terry co-authored the event’s “Reconciliation and Principles” documents. He is an award-winning author, speaker and professor, teaching about Indigenous peoples, cultures in context, anthropology, missions, and the church.  

 

Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2016 1

 

 

The following additional paragraphs have possible discussion points:

 

1.     We are peaking a centuries long trajectory of tyrants increasingly gaining power over other people. They have been building outrage against other human beings to the point of extermination. It’s a dangerous emotion even for a child as portrayed here. It was undermining his confidence in the most trusted adults in his life. The emotion blocked his normal ability to see evidence his father and grandfather were trustworthy. 

 

2.     Why didn’t they present his confused distrust with the facts? They knew he couldn’t see it by being corrected. That’s where we are now as a nation, with a sizable portion of our population unable to see evidence, unable to receive correction. And a sizeable portion of us believe this outrage-generated falsehood: “All we need to do is force the truth as a weapon against those who refuse to believe it, and our power over them will get them to believe truth again.” 

 

3.     Fortunately, we Americans have the world’s best judicial system­—the father and grandfather in the story—with a possible process to arrive at evidence-based truth. It allows acting on the truth more than trying to attack the lies. But it is a new for us, old for indigenous culture, way forward. 

 

4.     What steps can help us navigate away from the no-evidence outrage endangering our nation from both sides of our polarity? 

 

5.     What can help us past the outrage fanned by President Trump’s continued aggression against even victims in his own party? 

 

6.     How can we support the discredited professional Republicans who have found the courage to stay on the evidence track for the good of all of us? Are these not our real heroes: our police, teachers, healthcare providers, election workers and attorneys who help us access responsible, caring ways to grasp us lovingly, turn us around, and point us to truth that frees us from consequences of unregulated outrage? 

 

7.     How can we answer words of outrage with love, like Jesus did, and ignore the evidence-missing outrage still emanating from too much of our political, news, religious, and entertainment media.