What's The Matter With Our Indians?
"Never criticize someone else unless you walk a mile in his moccasins."
- Lakota Sioux proverb
To begin, let's examine the title.
Five hundred years after Christopher Columbus (Christophe Colomb, an Italian cartographer of some considerable renown) defrauded his Spanish sponsors into believing that he had discovered India--naming the inhabitants he found "Indians"--many people still call the aboriginal peoples of North America Indians. By the way, Columbus didn't "discover" the Americas. Being a map maker, he had spoken on many occasions with Norse map makers who had been to North America many times with Norse fishermen who had been visiting the continent for hundreds of years. Thus began the great North American fraud, but more on that later.
The aboriginal people of North America sometimes call themselves Indians, but they aren't serious about it. African Americans sometimes call themselves "niggahs" too, but as a people they don't care for the moniker any more than the aboriginals like whites to call them Indians. "Indians" is a bad name given them by ignorant Europeans whose primary purpose in coming to North America was to steal and to conquer. They called it discovering, exploring, trading, but let's use plain language here. They planned to take as much as possible and give as little as they could get away with. It was the European way of the time.
"Our" is wrong as well. What are called Native Americans in the USA and First Nations in Canada were never conquered, never defeated as a people. Of the hundreds of distinct tribal groups--at least the ones that were not slaughtered to extinction (Beothuk, the original "redskins" that lived in Newfoundland) or decimated as they tried to defend themselves in "Indian wars"--none were truly defeated. They didn't have any concept of "owning" land, so they were prepared to share it with the newcomers. Since the newcomers themselves were not decimated by such delightful diseases as smallpox that the Europeans delivered, the white skins soon outnumbered the natives. As always, size (of population) matters.
So far as aboriginal peoples of North America are concerned, even today, they are Americans or Canadians only according to citizenship documents they may have needed for travel purposes. They consider themselves citizens of their own nations, as promised them in treaties written for them by English speaking lawyers, in English legalese, explained to them in simple but deceptive language they could understand. The English speakers had no leave to negotiate, so it was a "take it or leave it" situation. This matters because in most of these cultures no one forces another to say "No" to anything and it is considered very rude to be forced into saying "No" yourself by another person. The aboriginals agreed to treaties partly because their culture taught them to be agreeable, to not say "No" to someone who is offering something.
They were tricked into giving up "ownership" of their land (a concept they never had in their culture) by Europeans who promised them homes on land they would control ("reserved" land, thus called reserves or reservations) and rights to fishing and hunting on their traditions lands, free education and a stipend for each person from the Crown each year.
The aboriginals had no concept of "king." They knew of a Creator that was active in their lives but never seen, so they assumed that the unseen King would also look after them as the Creator did. And, of course, keep promises made in writing.
What were the living conditions? A little perspective is in order here. After the Second World War, representatives of the (white) government of South Africa came to Canada to see how the Canadian government dealt with its "Indian problem." Then they went home and, following the Canadian pattern, enacted Apartheid. Apartheid was banned in South African years ago when the black skinned people vastly outnumbered the white skins and the world turned against a prejudiced government in South Africa. However, in Canada, the Indian Act still exists, though the government has made promises for many years to remove it. The United Nations has condemned Canada publicly for its apartheid regulations, to no avail. Apartheid still exists, not in South Africa, but in Canada. On "the rez."
Are "Indians" forced to stay on reservations these days? No, in Canada about half live off their home reservations. But any government benefits come only to those who live on the reserves. If you live off the reserve, even briefly--especially if you are a woman--then move back to the reserve, good luck trying to get your rights to benefits back from the government.
Now about the "What's The Matter" part of the title. What's the matter is that North American aboriginal people did not die out, as expected, which is why they were given such a "sweet deal" in the apartheid style treaties. What's the matter is that the culture of the North American aboriginal people is very, very, very different from the culture that was brought to North America from Europe. If this article were expanded to book length, it would still not be long enough to explain the many differences between the cultures of the Europeans (now white North Americans) and the aboriginals.
What's the matter is that the white governments of North America never kept the promises they made to the aboriginal peoples in legally drafted and signed treaties they drew up themselves. No aboriginal group was ever offered the chance to draft a possible treaty because they were considered by the Europeans to be inferior people, not quite human in the European sense. Not only were the conditions of the treaties in the style now known as apartheid, the governments didn't even keep the few promises they made in those treaties. Promises they made up themselves.
We are used to politicians making promises before elections, then forgetting them once the elections are over. But if we have a legal agreement with the government, we expect the government to keep its end of the bargain. The government certainly expects us to keep our end, and is prepared to enforce it with imprisonment if we don't. The government of Canada has never kept its part of the treaties it agreed to with the aboriginal people it wanted to avoid going to war with. There were no Indian wars in Canada to speak of. The aboriginal peoples had no choice but to let the white skins take over their land, exploit it with farming, with mines, with oil wells, while receiving zero in return for their agreeing to "share" that same land. Their "reserved" land, by coincidence, rarely proved to have any real value, including for hunting the animals they traditionally hunted for food, temporary shelter and clothing.
The "problem" with "our Indians" is that the white people lied, cheated, duped their treaty partners, then refused to keep even the few concessions they made in the treaties they signed to keep the peace. And the white people can't understand why their "Indians" are upset. Wouldn't you be upset?
Not only do the aboriginals not have a concept of land ownership (no one would accept ownership of the air, so why should people want to own the land when we can all share?), they don't have a word for "religion". Aboriginal people don't have a problem with belief and faith, with wars and arguments between people who believe in the same God, as whites do. They never ask "Do you believe in God?" Every one I know and have read about believes in a Creator. That's not the God of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). The Creator is a part of everything, to them. Including rocks, trees, grass, wheat, bears, snakes and people. In fact, the concept of Creator largely agrees with what physics has proven about atoms being components of everything, about energy and matter being different versions of the same thing, about everything of importance being accessible. Science doesn't agree with the concept of a supernatural, but the aboriginal people do not blame scientists for their shortsightedness. They accept what others think and choose to believe.
It's the rest of us non-natives who can't accept differences, who can't accept others who don't believe what we have been taught, who can't accept that aboriginal people believe what they can feel and experience while whites want to have mysteries based on "faith."
The problem is not with the people we white North Americans call Indians, but with us white North Americans not caring enough about others to learn about them, to see if what they believe, what they know, how they live, may be better than what we have been taught. We treasure our ignorance and want to preserve it for our children. Those who believe anything radically different from what we have been taught must surely be "inferior," so may safely be disregarded.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers who want to grow children who do not treasure ignorance, but who embrace learning about all people so that world peace can become possible.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Thursday, September 08, 2011
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Stop It, Lazy Selfish Greedy Bastards!
Stop It, Lazy Selfish Greedy Bastards!
"I love humanity. It's people I hate."
- Edna St. Vincent Millay, American poet and playwright (1892-1950) [also quoted in the Peanuts comic strip]
Farmers learn stuff that's down to earth. As I immerse myself in the deeply troublesome and awkward project of converting a lifelong city boy to struggling survival farmer (small variety, 8 acres), that has become my favourite saying--the "down to earth" one.
Before I continue with this article I must convey an important life lesson. There are two types of people: those who always put their own best interests first and those who frequently and comfortably put the best interests of others, individuals or groups or whole communities or societies, ahead of their own.
That may be the most important life lesson I have ever learned. It explains a huge amount about human behaviour. Personally, as a member of the latter group, it means that I can disregard any ideas of friendship or overtures of relationship of any kind with members of the former group.
Is that classification too harsh? Perhaps I can make it easier to understand by suggesting the behaviour of house cats as representative of what I will call the selfish group. If you have carefully observed the behaviour of cats, bells should begin to ring in your head now. Cats are the ultimate self-interested pets. Nature has programmed them to be survivors by putting themselves first.
That's not to say that cat owners are selfish or self-interested. On the contrary, they tend to be more altruistic kind of people. Dogs, on the other hand, better represent the altruistic group--again, that's not necessarily true of their owners. Dogs in the wild survive as individuals in an interdependent relationship with the pack. As the saying goes, dogs have owners while cats have staff.
People tend to behave much like one or the other of these two groups. No, I don't mean that they eat with their faces in bowls, let's leave that now.
Where I live, in eastern Canada, people with European heritage have lived for hundreds of years (First Nations people for over 3000 years in the oldest continuously occupied community in the New World). Only in recent decades has garbage been collected. Before that people took their trash to a dump, burned it or left it in a remote area of a field. Today I removed the last remnants of a burn barrel where previous (and oh so primitive) humanoids had tossed stuff that could never possibly burn.
Why would they put non-burnables in a burn barrel? Because they expected to move before they would have to deal with the consequences of their laziness. Much the same reasoning some people use when they toss beer bottles or cans out the windows of their cars as they drive down a road late at night rather than returning them to a recycling depot (the get their deposit back) at some later time.
My wife and I want to create a small farm that grows vegetables. You could call it a hobby farm except we don't plan to sell our veggies. We want to donate them to local foodbanks and shelters. Farming requires machines, ours needed a tractor with a plow. Lacking funding from a generous government or chemical manufacturer, we bought a used tractor, a classic model made in 1948. It worked beautifully, except the clutch would not disengage, which is decidedly awkward if you want to change gears.
For weeks I asked around but nobody knew how to adjust that clutch--"Take it to Bremner's (a local tractor dealer with an excellent reputation), they can fix any tractor problem." One day recently a man who usually functions with an oxygen hose at his nose (he didn't even get out of his car) stopped by our house as his wife left a fish her husband caught in one of his healthier moments. Even at our first meeting when it came out about my not being able to adjust the tractor clutch he offered to do it for me.
A few days later, without the oxygen, he hauled his 350 pound frame under the tractor, thrashed around for about an hour and came out with the clutch adjusted, something others had been unable to do. Despite needing his oxygen again, he stayed for tea then made his way home for pure O2. He wouldn't hear of taking a penny for his trouble. He was happy to help.
Everywhere you look you will find what some call the givers and the takers. Both may be easy enough to like until you need something, at which time the takers will vanish. Their lives are driven by self-interest, which is to say, greed.
The selfish ones are so easy to see around us that without evaluating life carefully you might get the impression that almost everyone is greedy and selfish. They aren't. The generous and altruistic people don't advertise themselves. They just are. The selfish ones make the news.
Believe it or not, despite the huge media efforts by industries to make us all into selfish, accumulative, consumer workaholics, more people today than ever before in history are giving to others, thinking of others, putting the best interests of others and the world ahead of their own. That's how civilization grows. That's how humanity progresses. That's how our planet will survive. We can't expect industries or the selfish to think of the welfare of everyone else.
Humanity could do with more selfless ones among us. People can change. What might help is if you are an altruistic person who is happy make this known to a selfish person who is unhappy. Selfish people are all basically unhappy, they seek thrills and gratification as substitutes for real happiness. It never makes them happy because they can never get enough. Greed is addictive.
Spread the word. Happiness is addictive as well. The more you give to the happiness and welfare of others, the happier you are. No one knows why. It seems, somehow, to be built into our genetic code to have the ability to be selfless while we retain the basic instinct to be greedy.
If we really want to beat nature, we can do it by helping each other. No other animal on the planet has the potential to do that the way we do. Birds and mammals are known to be nurturing and some are altruistic, but none can rise above what nature provided the way people can.
That's the only kind of defeating of nature that is win-win. That's the real potential of humanity.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want their children to grow healthy and strong in all developmental streams, not just a limited few.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
"I love humanity. It's people I hate."
- Edna St. Vincent Millay, American poet and playwright (1892-1950) [also quoted in the Peanuts comic strip]
Farmers learn stuff that's down to earth. As I immerse myself in the deeply troublesome and awkward project of converting a lifelong city boy to struggling survival farmer (small variety, 8 acres), that has become my favourite saying--the "down to earth" one.
Before I continue with this article I must convey an important life lesson. There are two types of people: those who always put their own best interests first and those who frequently and comfortably put the best interests of others, individuals or groups or whole communities or societies, ahead of their own.
That may be the most important life lesson I have ever learned. It explains a huge amount about human behaviour. Personally, as a member of the latter group, it means that I can disregard any ideas of friendship or overtures of relationship of any kind with members of the former group.
Is that classification too harsh? Perhaps I can make it easier to understand by suggesting the behaviour of house cats as representative of what I will call the selfish group. If you have carefully observed the behaviour of cats, bells should begin to ring in your head now. Cats are the ultimate self-interested pets. Nature has programmed them to be survivors by putting themselves first.
That's not to say that cat owners are selfish or self-interested. On the contrary, they tend to be more altruistic kind of people. Dogs, on the other hand, better represent the altruistic group--again, that's not necessarily true of their owners. Dogs in the wild survive as individuals in an interdependent relationship with the pack. As the saying goes, dogs have owners while cats have staff.
People tend to behave much like one or the other of these two groups. No, I don't mean that they eat with their faces in bowls, let's leave that now.
Where I live, in eastern Canada, people with European heritage have lived for hundreds of years (First Nations people for over 3000 years in the oldest continuously occupied community in the New World). Only in recent decades has garbage been collected. Before that people took their trash to a dump, burned it or left it in a remote area of a field. Today I removed the last remnants of a burn barrel where previous (and oh so primitive) humanoids had tossed stuff that could never possibly burn.
Why would they put non-burnables in a burn barrel? Because they expected to move before they would have to deal with the consequences of their laziness. Much the same reasoning some people use when they toss beer bottles or cans out the windows of their cars as they drive down a road late at night rather than returning them to a recycling depot (the get their deposit back) at some later time.
My wife and I want to create a small farm that grows vegetables. You could call it a hobby farm except we don't plan to sell our veggies. We want to donate them to local foodbanks and shelters. Farming requires machines, ours needed a tractor with a plow. Lacking funding from a generous government or chemical manufacturer, we bought a used tractor, a classic model made in 1948. It worked beautifully, except the clutch would not disengage, which is decidedly awkward if you want to change gears.
For weeks I asked around but nobody knew how to adjust that clutch--"Take it to Bremner's (a local tractor dealer with an excellent reputation), they can fix any tractor problem." One day recently a man who usually functions with an oxygen hose at his nose (he didn't even get out of his car) stopped by our house as his wife left a fish her husband caught in one of his healthier moments. Even at our first meeting when it came out about my not being able to adjust the tractor clutch he offered to do it for me.
A few days later, without the oxygen, he hauled his 350 pound frame under the tractor, thrashed around for about an hour and came out with the clutch adjusted, something others had been unable to do. Despite needing his oxygen again, he stayed for tea then made his way home for pure O2. He wouldn't hear of taking a penny for his trouble. He was happy to help.
Everywhere you look you will find what some call the givers and the takers. Both may be easy enough to like until you need something, at which time the takers will vanish. Their lives are driven by self-interest, which is to say, greed.
The selfish ones are so easy to see around us that without evaluating life carefully you might get the impression that almost everyone is greedy and selfish. They aren't. The generous and altruistic people don't advertise themselves. They just are. The selfish ones make the news.
Believe it or not, despite the huge media efforts by industries to make us all into selfish, accumulative, consumer workaholics, more people today than ever before in history are giving to others, thinking of others, putting the best interests of others and the world ahead of their own. That's how civilization grows. That's how humanity progresses. That's how our planet will survive. We can't expect industries or the selfish to think of the welfare of everyone else.
Humanity could do with more selfless ones among us. People can change. What might help is if you are an altruistic person who is happy make this known to a selfish person who is unhappy. Selfish people are all basically unhappy, they seek thrills and gratification as substitutes for real happiness. It never makes them happy because they can never get enough. Greed is addictive.
Spread the word. Happiness is addictive as well. The more you give to the happiness and welfare of others, the happier you are. No one knows why. It seems, somehow, to be built into our genetic code to have the ability to be selfless while we retain the basic instinct to be greedy.
If we really want to beat nature, we can do it by helping each other. No other animal on the planet has the potential to do that the way we do. Birds and mammals are known to be nurturing and some are altruistic, but none can rise above what nature provided the way people can.
That's the only kind of defeating of nature that is win-win. That's the real potential of humanity.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want their children to grow healthy and strong in all developmental streams, not just a limited few.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Friday, December 21, 2007
Charity Means Giving To Losers
A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton, English novelist, poet, politician (1803-1873)
'Tis the season of giving as I write this, Christmas, or "the holidays," the time when we supposedly think more of giving to others than of taking for ourselves. For the Christian part of the world and those countries and cultures that celebrate the gift-giving season along with their Christian (or nominally Christian) neighbours, Christmas is the season of the heart.
Who benefits from this monetary extravagance? Two general groups. One is comprised of people we know who for the most part don't need what we will give to them. The other would be people we don't know, usually, the unfortunate, the homeless, those who have lost (or perhaps who never had) the comforts most of us enjoy.
The latter group is society's losers. We give to people who don't have the stuff to be financially secure and successful in our world.
Some mammals and birds tend to their sick and injured, but humans are the only species on earth that supports its losers, those who don't have what it takes to survive on their own in this tough world. Like the rest of us do. In other species, the weak die, but in ours we keep them alive, though in poverty.
Is "a good heart" in Bulwer-Lytton's quote our lip service to charities that support those that would not survive in any other species? Yes, if the extreme capitalist doctrine that we are fed constantly can be taken at its full value, that's exactly what charity is. Success, by that standard, is wealth.
Virtually every parent of a young child wants that child to grow up to be happy. They'll tell that to anyone. But more important is that they be rich, or at least have a substantial enough income that they can support themselves in a style equivalent to the one they were raised in.
Rich people, including some of our movie and sports stars, are the epitome of success in western culture. Let's get this straight, no rich people are happy. Not really happy. Fake happy, yes. Do you know a happy rich person? They revel in their money, their ability to spend and to impress others. But underneath, most are more miserable than they would like anyone to know. They have money, which they learned and have come to believe is the most important thing in life. But they aren't truly happy.
They don't fare any better in their marital relationships than the rest of us. They have few or no real friends, people who care about them and not their money. They may not divorce at quite the same rate as the average, but that's because their mini-society says that they can afford to have affairs they can pay to cover up. Their friends can be bought and sold. It's a continuation of the value system of old European nobility.
What about those poor people, the ones the rich consider to be losers? Many of them have more real friends than rich people. The homeless ones live in temporary communities that are far more mutually helpful and supportive than any other in the larger community.
Somehow society missed its opportunity to teach them the knowledge and skills they needed to have to support themselves when they were children. How could that happen? Schools are not designed to teach life skills, they're structured to teach the knowledge and skills that the biggest employers in the country need. Industries control the school curriculum because they provide the employment that generates the income that supports the nation.
Parents used to teach life skills, as did neighbours and other members of the community. In smaller communities, this is still the case. Kids learn life lessons from their hockey coach, their scout leader or the nice lady who bakes cookies for the kids. Some learn them in the religious institutions their family belongs to. But none of these are dependable in larger cities. In cities, winning--the capitalist mantra--is everything.
As of the beginning of 2008, more people will live in urban areas of the world than in rural settings for the first time in history. Most countries are becoming urbanized, citified. As if this is a good thing. It's a good thing for industry because it provides a pool of labour for their work force, but it's not so good for so many communities that have become cultural and social ghettoes. Their primary values are to work and to spend. Just like industry wants.
While industries hold wealth and acquisitiveness as ideals of society, which give us happiness, what most of us miss is that the happiness that industry wants for us is fake. It's all advertising mind-twisting.
The "losers" of many societies of the world know more about real human values, traditional values, values that work to benefit the community as well as individuals, than those with money.
So let's continue to support these less fortunate members of our society. They may not have the knowledge or skills that most of us have, but they are perhaps the sole repository of basic human values that industry is trying to brainwash out of us through its persistent advertising.
Or, for the more adventurous among us, get to know some of these people. If you do, you will find that they know stuff you don't, stuff that could make your life richer. Not your pocketbook, your life. You know, the reason why you're here. (It's not really just to work and to spend, you know.)
Consider this. How much will industry care after you die? How will it remember you? Of course it won't. No one expects that. But so many of us adhere to its preaching about working and spending that we must think industry will offer us its own form of heaven.
But, no. Industry can't do that. Industry is not just heartless and sociopathic, it's atheistic. Industry has to be atheistic because it holds money to be its deity. Even industry knows that money is a false god. It just doesn't bother to tell us because it wants us to believe in that god.
Merry Christmas, dear readers! May the spirit of the man whose birth is celebrated this season fill you with love and charity. May you give of yourself to those who will most appreciate it, not necessarily to those who expect it of you. If you do, your life will be richer for it, especially if you get to know some of the beneficiaries of your giving from the heart.
The head always thinks of itself first. The heart thinks of others. Jesus said.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how, what and when to teach children the lessons they need to live full lives, as real people not as puppets of industry.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton, English novelist, poet, politician (1803-1873)
'Tis the season of giving as I write this, Christmas, or "the holidays," the time when we supposedly think more of giving to others than of taking for ourselves. For the Christian part of the world and those countries and cultures that celebrate the gift-giving season along with their Christian (or nominally Christian) neighbours, Christmas is the season of the heart.
Who benefits from this monetary extravagance? Two general groups. One is comprised of people we know who for the most part don't need what we will give to them. The other would be people we don't know, usually, the unfortunate, the homeless, those who have lost (or perhaps who never had) the comforts most of us enjoy.
The latter group is society's losers. We give to people who don't have the stuff to be financially secure and successful in our world.
Some mammals and birds tend to their sick and injured, but humans are the only species on earth that supports its losers, those who don't have what it takes to survive on their own in this tough world. Like the rest of us do. In other species, the weak die, but in ours we keep them alive, though in poverty.
Is "a good heart" in Bulwer-Lytton's quote our lip service to charities that support those that would not survive in any other species? Yes, if the extreme capitalist doctrine that we are fed constantly can be taken at its full value, that's exactly what charity is. Success, by that standard, is wealth.
Virtually every parent of a young child wants that child to grow up to be happy. They'll tell that to anyone. But more important is that they be rich, or at least have a substantial enough income that they can support themselves in a style equivalent to the one they were raised in.
Rich people, including some of our movie and sports stars, are the epitome of success in western culture. Let's get this straight, no rich people are happy. Not really happy. Fake happy, yes. Do you know a happy rich person? They revel in their money, their ability to spend and to impress others. But underneath, most are more miserable than they would like anyone to know. They have money, which they learned and have come to believe is the most important thing in life. But they aren't truly happy.
They don't fare any better in their marital relationships than the rest of us. They have few or no real friends, people who care about them and not their money. They may not divorce at quite the same rate as the average, but that's because their mini-society says that they can afford to have affairs they can pay to cover up. Their friends can be bought and sold. It's a continuation of the value system of old European nobility.
What about those poor people, the ones the rich consider to be losers? Many of them have more real friends than rich people. The homeless ones live in temporary communities that are far more mutually helpful and supportive than any other in the larger community.
Somehow society missed its opportunity to teach them the knowledge and skills they needed to have to support themselves when they were children. How could that happen? Schools are not designed to teach life skills, they're structured to teach the knowledge and skills that the biggest employers in the country need. Industries control the school curriculum because they provide the employment that generates the income that supports the nation.
Parents used to teach life skills, as did neighbours and other members of the community. In smaller communities, this is still the case. Kids learn life lessons from their hockey coach, their scout leader or the nice lady who bakes cookies for the kids. Some learn them in the religious institutions their family belongs to. But none of these are dependable in larger cities. In cities, winning--the capitalist mantra--is everything.
As of the beginning of 2008, more people will live in urban areas of the world than in rural settings for the first time in history. Most countries are becoming urbanized, citified. As if this is a good thing. It's a good thing for industry because it provides a pool of labour for their work force, but it's not so good for so many communities that have become cultural and social ghettoes. Their primary values are to work and to spend. Just like industry wants.
While industries hold wealth and acquisitiveness as ideals of society, which give us happiness, what most of us miss is that the happiness that industry wants for us is fake. It's all advertising mind-twisting.
The "losers" of many societies of the world know more about real human values, traditional values, values that work to benefit the community as well as individuals, than those with money.
So let's continue to support these less fortunate members of our society. They may not have the knowledge or skills that most of us have, but they are perhaps the sole repository of basic human values that industry is trying to brainwash out of us through its persistent advertising.
Or, for the more adventurous among us, get to know some of these people. If you do, you will find that they know stuff you don't, stuff that could make your life richer. Not your pocketbook, your life. You know, the reason why you're here. (It's not really just to work and to spend, you know.)
Consider this. How much will industry care after you die? How will it remember you? Of course it won't. No one expects that. But so many of us adhere to its preaching about working and spending that we must think industry will offer us its own form of heaven.
But, no. Industry can't do that. Industry is not just heartless and sociopathic, it's atheistic. Industry has to be atheistic because it holds money to be its deity. Even industry knows that money is a false god. It just doesn't bother to tell us because it wants us to believe in that god.
Merry Christmas, dear readers! May the spirit of the man whose birth is celebrated this season fill you with love and charity. May you give of yourself to those who will most appreciate it, not necessarily to those who expect it of you. If you do, your life will be richer for it, especially if you get to know some of the beneficiaries of your giving from the heart.
The head always thinks of itself first. The heart thinks of others. Jesus said.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how, what and when to teach children the lessons they need to live full lives, as real people not as puppets of industry.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Monday, February 12, 2007
What Did Thoreau Know About Happiness?
"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run."
- Henry David Thoreau, American philosopher (1817–1862)
Thoreau was never a rich man. Rich people and those who aspire to be rich believe that any amount of sacrifice of life is worth the investment to gain wealth. That includes their time, their work, their families, their values, their relaxation.
As western society ages, more and more people believe that wealth is the measure of a person, worth any exchange of what Thoreau called life. Not wealth itself, exactly, but what wealth can buy so that the wealthy person can show it off to others and what influence wealth can exercise over others who admire it greatly.
Not everyone in the world subscribes to that way of thinking. As much as Americans want to believe that the people the US calls terrorists only envy the wealth that US citizens have, very few (if any) of them do. They and many of their people consider western obsession with wealth to be a perversion of the purpose of why we are on this planet.
We in the west live our lives to earn enough money to buy the products that advertisers brainwash us into believing that we need so that we can be satisfied and happy.
Look how happy we are. The manufacturers, our politicians and our social leaders tell us that we must be happy, that everyone who does not live in a rich country must be unhappy.
If those important people tell us that we are happy, then we must be happy. After all, we reward them well for telling us the purpose of life. If we pay them so much to tell us what life is all about, then we might as well believe them.
Thoreau was poor, what would he know about happiness?
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to put it all into perspective.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Henry David Thoreau, American philosopher (1817–1862)
Thoreau was never a rich man. Rich people and those who aspire to be rich believe that any amount of sacrifice of life is worth the investment to gain wealth. That includes their time, their work, their families, their values, their relaxation.
As western society ages, more and more people believe that wealth is the measure of a person, worth any exchange of what Thoreau called life. Not wealth itself, exactly, but what wealth can buy so that the wealthy person can show it off to others and what influence wealth can exercise over others who admire it greatly.
Not everyone in the world subscribes to that way of thinking. As much as Americans want to believe that the people the US calls terrorists only envy the wealth that US citizens have, very few (if any) of them do. They and many of their people consider western obsession with wealth to be a perversion of the purpose of why we are on this planet.
We in the west live our lives to earn enough money to buy the products that advertisers brainwash us into believing that we need so that we can be satisfied and happy.
Look how happy we are. The manufacturers, our politicians and our social leaders tell us that we must be happy, that everyone who does not live in a rich country must be unhappy.
If those important people tell us that we are happy, then we must be happy. After all, we reward them well for telling us the purpose of life. If we pay them so much to tell us what life is all about, then we might as well believe them.
Thoreau was poor, what would he know about happiness?
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to put it all into perspective.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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