Sharing power with The Other. Our country if we'd had President MLK or President Wilma Mankiller

The stupidity of entitled youth disrespecting a Native American Omaha People Elder, Nathan Phillips, unnerved me as I recall the sense of respect and affinity I felt for Native American identity when I was their age.

Was it sweet stories I heard as a very young child about native children who loved nature as I did? Was it moments of relatively sensitive treatment I saw on “Little House on the Prairie” segments as a child, where some kind of moral lesson about honoring other people of all cultures was a constant theme? Was it my own love of campfires and tents and trees and frogs and birds and other wild things as a Girl Scout, or my mother’s quiet comments that we “thought we had some Indian blood” on her (French Canadian) side of the family? Native sensibilities and spirituality seemed full of poetry and wisdom.

I don’t know why, but I guarantee that at age 14 or 16 I would have approached a Native American person chanting and drumming as a moment of magic, awe, and something sacred. (Nothing I was taught in my Florida catholic school would have changed that.) I guarantee my attitude would have been quiet reverence, of thinking, “my God, what a wonderful thing is happening, to have this experience. What can I learn from it?”

The absence of normal reflection or humility you see in that youth is so disturbing. Instead, he seems to be testing the wings of his white privileged power. “What will happen if I stare him down and stand in his face?” Rather than a humble approach, “what can I learn from you?”, that boy saw it is as a game to overpower the Other.

And I wonder, how great with our country be, had we more heavily adopted and integrated the ideas of native Americans in the institutions and laws of our country? Respect for the environment could’ve been a value from the beginning. Seventh-generation thinking would have deepened us. Private ownership of land could have been modulated in different ways, while zoning laws and fair access to beaches and property taxes and drilling rights and pollution of waterways would be seen differently if informed by the idea that one doesn’t fundamentally own the land. Character values of self-discipline, less-materialistic lifestyles... for so many of society’s ills, Native cultures have the antidotes.

In Jungian thinking, what is suppressed gets expressed eventually (whether you want it to or not), often through some type of neurosis. The shadow lives in the unconscious, and becomes powerful (and harmful) the more it is suppressed. Art is one good way to bring elements of the unconscious into consciousness.

The lessons we were too scared to learn..too cowardly to learn..too proud to learn. European settlers thought they knew everything, and looked on the Natives as primitives. Climate change has arrived, and as many of us may become nomads and refugees, we will learn — learn the importance of a minimalist, spiritual lifestyle; learn the great value of welcoming and caring for strangers; learn that our power and security isn’t solid after all.

Our culture never had a chance to see MLK run for President. His elevating language and ability to inspire would have been an amazing opportunity for a more open America. Our corporate boards don’t generally look like America either. When the group in power rejects whole groups as being ineligible for power, they rob the culture as a whole from evolving in necessary, critical-to-survival directions.

On the other hand, there is always a backlash. How do you take steps forward as a society, while diffusing and de-energizing the backlash?

Conversely, there is nothing suppressed about the hate and bigotry evidenced on FOX News for the past decade. What IS being suppressed by FOX (aside from the truth)? Perhaps we should consider that question, as we try to deprogram our countrymen who have fallen prey to the cult leaders. One thing that I consider to be suppressed in FOX viewers is a normal human desire for a world that is happier and just for all. “Liberty and Justice for All” has a certain ring to it. Compassion is another thing that is being suppressed by FOX. How does one resurrect normal human compassion from the deep dark holes that FOX has buried it in?