The Great Impoverishment Continues... Manifest Destiny of Greed

 

Hope rekindled in the Ghost Dance

The Great Impoverishment which has seen wages stagnate and fall, which has seen jobs shipped away, continues with an attack against our rights. It began 30 years ago and has been the greatest wealth transfer in the history of mankind, and now that 1% of the people hold the wealth, there begins the assault on the human rights of the 99%.

We simple, everyday Americans will be the new Indians driven from our homes; we will be the new slaves to the military-industrial-corporate complex; we will haunt the new reserves and plantations.
The script of the new global economy was written years ago, and we see its fruition now: devastated cities and devastated peoples.

From our tears will come the earthquake and the hurricane.

We read:

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/ict_sbc/the-higher-law-background-of-the-u-s-constitution
The ‘Higher Law Background’ of the U.S. Constitution
By Steven Newcomb

On December 31, 2011, President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2012. By doing so, he thereby placed his imprimatur as President of the United States on a provision in that Act that codifies in U.S. law the military detention of anyone in the world, without charge or trial, and without a time limit. Even U.S. citizens can be held until the end of hostilities in a climate of war that has been called “generational.
As an American Indian, I find this development unbelievably fascinating, and unnerving. Think about the irony: The first African American President of the United States, a former civil rights attorney and professor of constitutional law, has now become a President of the United States who has helped to further undermine, and perhaps destroy, the U.S. Constitution. He has done so by signing into U.S. law a legislative provision—which he requested—that, in effect, guts the tradition of habeas corpus, and arguably institutes martial law in the United States...

... John Locke was another political thinker who provided ideas that... had “impressed themselves most definitely upon American constitutional law.” Locke said that “legislative power is not the ultimate power of the commonwealth, for ‘the community perpetually retains a supreme power of saving themselves from the attempts and designs of anybody, even their legislators, whenever they shall be so foolish or so wicked as to lay and carry on designs against the liberties and property of the subject.’” Or, as the Antigone of Sophocles put it in 442 B.C., “an unjust law is not a law.”

We have walked that trail of tears too long now. It is time.
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Will The Ghost Dance Shirt Protect Us From Ourselves?

There is this:

U.S. Bio-Security Officials Sound Warning After Scientists Create Deadly New Strain of Bird Flu

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/12/20/scientists-spark-fears-by-creating-highly-contagious-airborne-strain-bird-flu/

The U.S. government is sounding the alarm after reports that Dutch scientists have created a highly-contagious and deadly airborne strain of bird flu that is potentially capable of killing millions, The Independent reported Tuesday.
The U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity is currently analyzing how much of the scientists' information should be allowed to be published—given the inherent risks of having the information fall into the hands of terrorists or rogue states.
"The fear is that if you create something this deadly and it goes into a global pandemic, the mortality and cost to the world could be massive," a senior US government adviser told The Independent...

"There are people who say that the work should never have been done, or if it was done it should have been done in a setting where the information could be better controlled," a source close to the US biosecurity board told the newspaper...

The mutated form of the H5N1 strain of avian influenza was created by a Dutch team of scientists led by Ron Fouchier, of Rotterdam's Erasmus Medical Centre, and the researchers are now hoping to publish the details of how they developed the new strain...

"We have discovered that this is indeed possible, and more easily than previously thought. In the laboratory, it was possible to change H5N1 into an aerosol-transmissible virus that can easily be rapidly spread through the air," he said.

Words fail me.

I was serious when I said we have to abandon all the old ways, and work to establish new ones: religion, philosophy, economics, science, politics... all have failed to provide strength and guidance to mankind. The most serious crimes against the physical and spiritual welfare of our peoples are allowed to be perpetrated by an insane Culture.

Our science kills us; our economics impoverishes us; our religions compel us and enslave us; our entertainments degrade us!

We must re-create ourselves.
Do not abandon Hope, rather abandon the ways of Exploitation and Discord... but before we abandon anything, we need to be ready to substitute something better. Otherwise, we fall into anarchy and violence.
The time for creating that "better story" of mankind for me is now, this Christmas season. After the change of the year, all things will be changed.

As a postscript, does anyone else find it odd that we are almost at the point of proving the existence of Higg's Boson at the same time we have been industriously printing our boarding pass for the extinction express? Each step forward is followed by at least two steps back into chaos.

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Give me some cloth,
some lustrous cloth...
she will sew for me
a new polychrome shirt:
blue as sky,
green as forest,
purple as berry,
bright like yellow flowers...
wâpikwana...
kâ-osâwâki wâpikwana...
I shall wear that new Ghost Dance shirt!

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Ghost Dance 3

Deny all the myths. Burn the useless scripts. Throw out the icons that have lost their power to let the divine participate in human life. I have no use for the old shirts of capitalism and communism, of markets and price efficiency, of this society's idea of virtue and justice, for they are deader than Jacob Marley... deader and yet deadlier!
The cloths of heaven have lost their power; they can no longer warm us, they can no longer keep us dry. We have the newly loomed cloth and shall make the shirts of new life.

It is time for the new Ghost Dance, the new Resurrection and the new Life Eternal.
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Ghost Dance Again

I have decided to actually have a New Ghost Dance in 2012; Lord knows, I'll need it. I will need a new shirt, a new Ghost Dance shirt to keep me safe from those who would seek to rob me, to impoverish me, to take my rights away, to test their maniacal economic theories upon my life and the lives of my family... and of my friends and their families... and those of my neighbors.

Those who seek to steal from us desire to re-establish the past.
But the past is gone. It can only be re-established by force, for time has moved on.
There was a quote from a manual that dealt with the Nickel Mines shootings:

Resist the impulse to always have an answer. We often feel that we need to have an answer or to take away the pain… to give hope when there is fear. Sometimes this is our own discomfort in seeing children suffer. Often the best answer is to reassure children that you don't know how it will all turn out OK, but that you know that the way we get through difficult times is to do it together. Kids and parents, kids and teachers, kids and their friends, that this is a time for us to all be there for each other.

That is good advice. However, be impulsive to have faith in things getting better, be steadfast in believing that suffering may be overcome. We may not know what to do, but we know how it should be done: with love and care and hard work and not the easy way of compulsion and violence.
We should always know how to stand fast and be loyal to the idea that Creation is intrinsically good: each year has its seasons, and when winter comes, we are sad to see summer depart, but we know what to do.

There is a time when the flowers fail and snow covers the land. In this we see the promise of the Spring.

My Dance will try to speak of this.

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2012 And Ghost Dance [Written 10/13/2009]

The Ghost Dance prophet, Wovoka, may have said that the renewal comes quick, quicker than your can see it: you blink, it's here.

I do not have a clue what I meant by this.
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New Ghost Dance 2

I have read a lot about the Ghost, or Spirit, Dance which was the teaching spread by Wovoka, or Jack Wilson.
My interest started a long, long, long time ago when I had first discovered that religion was not only what was on display in the "conservatories" of religion, nor had the horticulture of the age rendered all religious growth coppiced and pollarded, or pruned into static topiaries!

I had discovered Religions of the Oppressed by Lanternari, and had realized that religion, far from being well-defined and systematized, was on the loose in the world and was growing like some mad kudzu everywhere!

So when I came across Mooney's account of The Ghost Dance, I was enthralled. I never forgot the recounting of the story of the Prophet showing two men an old black hat: one saw an old black hat, the other saw the universe within the ambit of the sweaty brim! How different - I thought - may the Truth be to two different men!

Later, when Clarence Thomas was confronting Anita Hill, I saw the same thing. One day it came to me that both individuals were telling the Truth! I was amazed, truly amazed.
I was amazed at the set-up: we have two people who contradict each other. In our present scheme of things, one has to be telling the truth, and the other mistaken or lying. Typically, the one we feel political sympathy with is telling the truth.
The realization that both were telling the truth was stunning, not so much for the nature of truth that it revealed, but for the duplicitous nature of the set-up that we all mindlessly accept. We will never grasp truth as long as we start our inquiry beforehand by stating that the assumptions involved in the set-up are themselves already true.

(Mrs. Thomas recently placed a call asking Ms. Hill to confess to her misleading  testimony, and this was debated by our media representatives, which indicates that we mostly still believe in the set-up. The judicial system has a certain manner of conducting its business based on this type of winner-take-all logic which works for the judicial system, but this does not imply we extend the paradigm beyond the court room.)

I found that realizing both told the truth forced me to not take sides and to be silent, for what really could I add to the situation? Not a bloody thing! There was nothing to analyze if both sides are indeed telling the truth.
The fact that the two truths seem so disparate is our problem, not a problem of Truth itself.

I do not attack Truth. I do attack the way we deal with it. Truth does not lead to discord, it leads to amity. Truth does not lead to division, it leads to community. And Truth makes for a congress - a coming together - that is a concert of trust.

Truth will make us all Peace-makers. We are yet a long way from that.

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New Ghost Dance

From Wikipedia article on Ghost Dance:
(By the way, I contributed to the fund raiser at Wikipedia. Please support independent entities.)

Jack Wilson, the prophet formerly known as Wovoka, was believed to have a vision during a solar eclipse  on January 1, 1889...

Anthropologist James Mooney conducted an interview with Wilson in 1892... Wilson said he stood before God in heaven and had seen many of his ancestors engaged in their favorite pastimes. God showed Wilson a beautiful land filled with wild game and instructed him to return home to tell his people that they must love each other, not fight, and live in peace with the whites...  God said that if his people abided by these rules, they would be united with their friends and family in the other world.
In God's presence, there would be no sickness, disease, or old age. Wilson was given the Ghost Dance and commanded to take it back to his people. He preached that if the five-day dance was performed in the proper intervals, the performers would secure their happiness and hasten the reunion of the living and deceased...


While most followers of the Ghost Dance understood Wovoka's role as being that of a teacher of pacifism and peace, others did not.
... Scholars believe that in 1890 chief Kicking Bear introduced the concept to his people, the Lakota Sioux.
The Lakota interpretation drew from their traditional idea of a "renewed Earth" in which "all evil is washed away". This Lakota interpretation included the removal of all Anglo-Americans from their lands. In contrast, Wilson's version encouraged harmonious co-existence with European Americans.

 As we approach 2011, we will need a new version of The Ghost Dance. We are going to be cut down, just like the Sioux. When the fanatics in Congress attempt to balance budgets, they will attack the poorest and sickest and most defenseless first. Then they will come after those who are not Corporate entities and Large enough to withstand their onslaught.
The white men wish to destroy us, because we use up their precious resources.
They will preach austerity while denying themselves nothing.
There is no science of Economics. It is guess work. Their guesses will be proofed upon our bones!

ps. This does not even take into consideration the white terrorists - usually labeled "deranged loners" by the conservative right wing - who will shoot us!

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