“The Threat of Fascism is Real”

“The Threat of Fascism is Real”  August 29, 2021   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

NYT, Lisa Lerer, July 24, 2021

What happened on Jan. 6 is no mystery; we all saw it on our screens. And yet more than six months later, we don’t all see it the same way.

“It was the media that went out and pushed this whole narrative about ‘this was an insurrection’ and ‘this was just way too out of hand’ and ‘these are not patriots,’” said Maura, who spoke in a recent focus group of Trump supporters from Arizona. Calling it a largely “peaceful” day, she said: “Nothing could be further from the truth. It was just a bunch of people who were overexuberant.”

“One hundred percent orchestrated by antifa and the left; one hundred percent,” said Annette, another Trump supporter. “There were a lot of people who went down for the right reasons, but not the ones who caused the riots. Not the ones who caused violence.”

Jeff saw an even more nefarious plot: “It goes a lot deeper than antifa,” he said. “I think it goes to George Soros and all the people in government that are bought and part of the deep state. They were trying to set up a false-flag event.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/24/us/politics/capitol-riot-investigation.html

 

Almost 20 years ago, Kansas City pharmacist, Robert Courtney, made national news when he was arrested for selling cancer chemotherapy drugs that he had watered down in order to make more profit.

Once apprehended, he confessed to having sold the diluted and thereby virtually ineffective medication to more than 4000 patients, allowing him to fraudulently make several million dollars. 

 

I remember hearing about Courtney in the news and finding it difficult to believe. How could he? I had worked as a pharmacist’s assistant when I was in high school and college. I remember how careful we were to make absolutely certain that prescriptions were filled properly. And on many occasions, when poor parents with a very sick child, couldn’t afford to pay for the medications their child needed, our pharmacist would reach into his own wallet to pay for the anti-biotics. 

 

I couldn’t imagine a pharmacist intentionally watering down lifesaving drugs, literally killing thousands of cancer patients, so that he could pocket extra money. But, folks, he did. He did it for years, evidently, without remorse, without qualms. I want to believe that most people are basically good. I want to believe that most people are basically honest. In fact, I do believe it. I am convinced that if you are walking down the street and you drop a wallet full of cash on the sidewalk, that most people would pick it up and chase you down to give it back to you. 

 

However, it is important for us to realistically also acknowledge that everyone isn’t honest, everyone isn’t good, and that some people are so self-centered that they believe that whatever they do for themselves, if it is good for them, it doesn’t matter how many people that it is bad for.

 

This month, as public schools are opening for in-person classes, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and Texas governor, Greg Abbott, have forbidden schools from making mask wearing mandatory. At this point in the Covid-19 pandemic, there is no one who does not know that wearing a mask when you are inside a building around a lot of other people, dramatically cuts down the transmission rate of viral infection. 

Everyone knows that school children will infect one another and that those children, before they show any symptoms, will go home to infect parents and grandparents, siblings, and neighbors. There is no way around the fact that thousands of people in Texas and Florida will die from Covid infections because of these anti-mask mandate policies of DeSantis and Abbott. So why would they do it?

 

The governors of Texas and Florida are killing school children and the families of school children with this policy in a horrifying race to see which one of them can most apparently become the successor to the Trump legacy, allowing them to claim the political donations and votes of the lunatic fringe in the next presidential election. That governors Abbott and DeSantis would knowingly and intentionally kill thousands of people in their states in order to get political donations and votes seems almost too harsh, too cruel, too sociopathic to be believed. They couldn’t possibly be that evil. I know. It is hard to believe.

 

Which is why I began by reminding you of our Missouri pharmacist, Robert Courtney. Some people are malignant narcissists. Some people will place their personal fortune above even the lives of those they are supposed to serve. What is different about the pharmacist and the governors is that the pharmacist went to prison and one of these governors may have found a pathway to the White House. 

 

We don’t want to think about politicians being so hungry for power that they would do to this country what Robert Courtney did to his cancer patients, but, and here folks, I am begging you to seriously think about what I am saying, American democracy is not a permanent fixture in the world. 

It could go away, and it could be replaced by fascism very quickly if we are not all committed to defending American democracy and remaining vigilant in our defense. And, believe me, I get it when people say that they are just exhausted with politics, bad news, hysterical rhetoric from both the left and the right. We just want government to work, to do what it is supposed to do and leave us alone.

 

The Trump administration certainly didn’t make America Great Again but his insane and corrupt administration did two things well: they made Saturday Night Live worth watching again, and they drove up ratings numbers of virtually all forms of news, TV, radio, print media, podcasts, and on-line magazines. Heck, even our downloads steadily increased during every month of the Trump administration as more and more people joined me every week to get mad with me at all of the horrifying things the Clementine Caligula did every day. 

 

But I am tired of talking about Trump and treason and tyranny. I am tired of listening to and reading news all of the time. I have not read a fiction novel for the pleasure of reading for years. I’m tired of leaning forward in the saddle all of time. I want to go scuba diving; I want to go to flea markets and look for classic rock and roll albums. I want to go out to a comedy club and laugh with strangers who I do not know who they voted for in the last two presidential elections. 

 

Everyone is talking about wanting to return to a pre-pandemic normal. That sounds sweet but folks, I want to go back a little further, I want to go back to a pre-Trump normal when I believed that we had two major political parties with different views on lots of things, but both loved America, defended the constitution, and truly believed in Democracy. 

 

I am relieved that Joe Biden doesn’t have a twitter account, that he is not an ego-deficit attention hound who has to be in front of a camera all of the time and that he more or less goes about the business of being a conservative Democrat who pretends to have progressive sympathies. He is not the progressive president I have longed for, but he is at least someone that I can fairly comfortably ignore most of the time, and, evidently, I really needed a break and I know that most of you did too. 

 

But I will confess, I am still worried that we may be laying down our swords prematurely. I am worried that seven months after the January 6^th insurrection in Washington, that not very much has happened to make sure that our failed insurrection is not followed by a successful insurrection. 

 

I couldn’t believe that on the evening of January 6, there was this rush to return to normal. Debris was cleared from the Capital building and the senate returned to session to approve the results of the November presidential election. Again, I  couldn’t believe my eyes when Texas senator, Ted Cruz, and Missouri senator, Josh Hawley, returned to the floor of the senate to cast votes against approving the election results, continuing to promote conspiracy theories about the election, promoting Trump’s “big lie,” which provoked the insurrection in the first place. Why were they not behind bars that night? And why, even more, have they been allowed to remain free, and even still members of the senate? Is treasonous insurrection no longer a crime in America?

 

What we all saw with our own eyes on January 6^th was the former president whipping up a crowd of thousands, sending them to the Capital with orders to disrupt the constitutional process of certifying the presidential election. 

 

His speech was laced with not-so-veiled threats aimed at his own vice-president, as well as for other leaders of the Congress and the Senate. We watched Capital police being brutally beaten. We saw rioters breaking out windows and knocking down security barricades and doors. We saw treasonous villains occupying congressional offices, carrying off stolen souvenirs, and spreading their own feces over priceless pieces of historical art. A few people died in the clash, but it could have easily been much more lethal had not security guards acted quickly to get the vice president and the speakers of the house and senate to safety. 

 

This is what we saw on the news. What we do not yet know is how many members of Congress and the Senate helped to give guided tours of the Capital building the day before the rally, helping the riot organizers to plan their assault, showing them where to find Nancy Pelosi and people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Ilhan Omar, all of whom would very likely be dead now if the rioters had found them. 

 

This insurrection, though planned and provoked by none other than the 45^thpresident of the United States, the leader of the Republican Party, the night of  January 6^th, Senators Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, remembered their oath of office and they loudly condemned the insurrection and laid the blame where it belonged, at the feet of Donald Trump. But that fit of conscience and patriotism didn’t last long. Within days, they were back in the Trump orbit. 

The kind of Republican leaders who went to Richard Nixon and told him it was time for him to resign do not exist in the Republican Party of today. Did you ever think you would hear a classic liberal like me bemoaning the fact that there just are no more Barry Goldwaters around?

But here is the question I am imploring you to consider today: Would the Republican Party support a fascist takeover of American democracy if it would allow them to remain in power? Every fiber of our hearts and minds wants to scream in response, “no,” “of course not!” “Never!” 

 

However, all of the evidence, from voter suppression laws in many states, to supporters of the big lie who still insist that Trump won the 2020 election “by a land slide,” to elected officials who are trying to stop any formal investigation of the events of January 6^th, we see a preference for fascism over democracy in the flesh. I know that we don’t want it to be true. We want to think that it is over-heated rhetoric that will go out of fashion, and everything will just remain the same, but, dear friends, I am afraid that is a luxurious self-deception that we cannot afford. 

 

Just as I pointed out a Missouri pharmacist who killed thousands of cancer patients for profit, let me point out to you that this is not the first time that the threat of fascism has come to America. Almost a century ago, as the USA struggled to come out of the Great Depression, everyone was not a fan of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal.” In fact, many feared that he was holding the door open for communism.

 

In reaction, many wealthy Americans turned to fascism as a more attractive alternative. In the 1930’s, so many wealthy Americans feared that the poor would strike out against them in civil war that they had machine gun nests built on the roofs of their homes. In those days, both Hitler and Mussolini were guest writers in many popular American newspapers. In fact, in 1932, Republican senator, David A. Reed, of Pennsylvania, announced on the floor of the senate: “If this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now.” 

 

In 1933, a group of wealthy business and media leaders hatched a plot to use disenfranchised WW I veterans to form an army and overthrow the government of Franklin Roosevelt and install a fascist dictator who would protect the rich and keep the poor in servitude, even to the extent of forming work camps in which the poor would be forced to do labor in support of domestic corporations.

 

You probably didn’t hear about this in history class, but I encourage you to look it up. It was known as the “Business Plot,” and it included people as well known as media tycoon, William Randolph Hurst, and DuPont, and even Prescott Bush, seen  here pictured with Adolph Hitler with whom he worked and who he admired prior to becoming the father of president George H. W. Bush, and grandfather to George W. Bush.

 

Most historians believe that the Business Plot might have succeeded had they not made the critical error of trying to recruit retired Major General Smedley  Butler to lead their army of veterans. Butler saw through their plans but played along until he had gathered enough evidence to go to Congress and testify against the insurrectionists. 

 

Although the William Randolph Hurst family of newspapers tried their best to belittle General Butler and to deny the plot against the Roosevelt government, Congress was simultaneously aware that he had the goods on those who had planned and funded this insurrection, while they dragged their feet in the investigation to avoid having to indict leaders like Hurst, Bush, DuPont, and the Sterling family that controlled the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, and the directors of J. P. Morgan. 

 

As usual, none of the big names were indicted but many of the small players were put on trial. And that, men and women, is what I fear may become of our January 6 insurrection. There has been a lot of opposition from Republicans to even investigating the insurrection, understandable since, if there is a full and comprehensive investigation, very many of them will certainly spend the rest of their lives in prison but the usual pattern is that the big fish go free and the little fish get fried.

 

Last month, four of the brutalized Capitol Hill police officers did sit for questioning in a congressional hearing. The most memorable of them, at least for me, was the testimony of Officer Harry Dunn. He asked the members of Congress not to give up until they get to the bottom of it. To get who caused it.

 

Dunn did not pull any punches when he pointed directly at the former president, comparing Trump to a man who hires an assassin. Dunn said, “If a hitman is hired and he kills somebody, the hitman goes to jail. But not only does the hitman go to jail, but the person who hired them does. There was an attack carried out on January 6th, and a hitman sent them. I want you to get to the bottom of that.”

 

And that, men and women, is my point. Like you, I am tired of thinking about Trump and his whole corrupt regime, and I am very sad to say that the Republican party, at least in my mind, is no long the loyal opposition on the other side of a democratic debate. I believe that they have become an anti-American party bent on the destruction of democracy in favor of fascism. And if we want people of color to be able to vote, for gays, lesbians, bi and trans folk to live in peace. If we want universal healthcare and a living wage for everyone, then, I believe, we have to make democracy strong again. 

 

I believe that the Republican party as it now exists needs to fade out of existence and be replaced by a patriotic party that can be pro-business, fiscally conservative, pro-defense, and even kinda crazy about free-market values . . . but they can’t be fascists. 

 

But most importantly, the world needs to see the strongest democracy on the globe actually prove that we believe in equal justice for all. 

I believe, to save America, Donald Trump must be charged with insurrection, tried, and if found guilty, imprisoned along with several family members and minions. I am not happy to say this, I just believe that I am right.

 

 

 

“Gilgamesh: The problem with Enkidu”

August 22, 2021   “Gilgamesh: The problem with Enkidu”  Dr. Roger Ray, pastor 

From the Epic of Gilgamesh “My friend Enkidu, whom I loved so dear, who with me went through every danger, the doom of mortals overtook him.

Six days I wept for him and seven nights: I did not surrender his body for burial until a maggot dropped from his nostril. Then I was afraid that I, too, would die. I grew fearful of death, so I wandered the wild.

…How can I keep silent? How can I stay quiet? My friend, whom I loved, has turned to clay. My friend Enkidu, whom I loved, has turned to clay. Shall I not be like him and also lie down, never to rise again, through all eternity?”

 

Because some ancient cave paintings seem to use familiar images to tell a story, anthropologists have some relative agreement that humans developed spoken languages about 35,000 years ago. 

However, written language only appeared about 5,500 years ago, in Sumer, what is now known as Iran. So there was about 30,000 years of songs, poems, and, possibly, some of our best mother-in-law jokes that are now lost to us because no one could write them down. 

The oldest real piece of literature is about 4000 years old; it is the epic poem based on the fantastic accounts attributed to an ancient king of the city of Uruk, Gilgamesh. We believe he is depicted in this relief as the master of animals, holding a male lion under his left arm and a serpent in his right hand. Gilgamesh might have been an actual person but the telling and retelling of his great strength and prowess inflated history to the point that, as you can see here, judging from the size of the grown lion under his arm, Gilgamesh dominated the ancient Akkadian basketball courts at a height of about 18 to 20 feet. 

The modern era rediscovered the Gilgamesh epic in the 1850’s and what interested modern readers the most was a fragment of the novela that was shockingly similar to the story in Genesis about Noah. This story, written thousands of years before the book of Genesis, talks about a fellow named Utnapishtim who was conscripted by the gods to build a huge boat, prior to a divinely inspired flood, and to collect two of every kind of animal in order to save them from the flood.

 

There are differences in the Genesis account of Noah and the Babylonian account of Utnapishtim but the similarities were such that it kept adult Sunday School classes in the throes of irrational panic attacks as they were forced to wonder if God really wrote the Bible or if it might just be a collection of ancient stories and sermons. Of course, both the story of Utnapishtim and the story of Noah are likely to have been oral tradition myths that just got copied into the longer narratives where they were preserved for us to read and compare. Neither are historical, neither were written by God, and it is evident for a number of reasons that I won’t bore you with now, that the Babylonian version is much older than the Genesis version and some Hebrew priest in antiquity is still awaiting trial for obvious plagiarism. 

 

But all levity aside, the reason that I bring this up today is to take note of the fact that at the very dawn of civilization, when our ancient ancestors were first trying to grapple with the meaning of life, the first issue that was treated in any length was the horrifying reality that we are all mortal and that we will all, one day, die. 

 

In the Gilgamesh epic, the hero of the story had become so very strong and so sexually exploitative that the people of Uruk appealed to the gods for someone who could challenge Gilgamesh.

And the gods sent them the wild man, Enkidu, who was, at least initially, more of a problem than Gilgamesh because he was like a wild animal who did not speak, would not wear clothes, and could not be restrained. Again, without going into any details, Gilgamesh comes up with the bright idea of sending the town prostitute out to deal with Enkidu and the people came out the next day to find him peacefully seated, fully clothed, and communicating normally. The epic does not say what she did to tame him and I will not speculate about it here. 

 

The larger point is that Enkidu and Gilgamesh become close friends and set out on many heroic quests and feats of superhuman strength. The gods eventually take offense at their arrogance, and they cause Enkidu to die a slow and painful death.

Mortality comes as a shock to Gilgamesh. He holds onto the body of Enkidu, grieving his death until, the narrative says, “the worm dropped from the nostril of Enkidu,” a symptom universally understood to mean that he was not merely dead but that he was really quite sincerely dead.

 

It is, at this moment, that Gilgamesh becomes obsessed with an awareness that he too would die one day and so he sets out to find the secret to eternal life.

 

Religion is full of promises of life after death, assurances of the reality of heaven and or hell, but in this most ancient piece of what we might think of as religious philosophy, the conclusion is that while there are hints and hopes for life after death, it ultimately either does not exist or if it does, it is unattainable. 

That may not be what you want to hear, but, I have to tell you, I recently listened to a sermon from the famous preacher at the mega-church in California, the Saddleback Baptist Church, Rick Warren. Rick Warren was talking about mortality, but he was assuring the more than 4 million people who have listened to this message, that your death is just a transition to a new and better life. That God loves you and created you to be a member of God’s family, that you just have to go through some tough learning lessons in this brief life, to get ready for glory. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5xyYI9tNV8&t=1043s)

 

Of course, many of you have tried to reign in my criticisms of fundamentalist preachers in the past, reminding me, “he has his opinion, and you have yours,” and “everyone has a right to their own beliefs, their own religion, and no one is better than another.” I get it. You would like for me to be more diplomatic. Sometimes I would like for me to be more diplomatic.

 

But if everyone’s opinion is of equal value, why do people choose to have a board-certified neurosurgeon do their brain surgery rather than the guy who mows their lawn? The guy who mows their lawn might be a better neurosurgeon than the person with fancy degrees and certifications at the hospital…. He could be, he might be, but we all know that he probably isn’t. In fact, it is nearly impossible to even imagine that he could come close to being qualified to perform brain surgery.

 

What I would say about Rick Warren’s 1 hour and 14-minute-long sermon about the afterlife is that he did not say one thing that could be supported by any evidence at all, not a bit. There is no more reason to believe anything that he said about heaven than there is to believe in fire-breathing dragons, unicorns, or that Donald Trump would be restored to the presidency this month. 

I don’t want to tell you that absolutely everything that this bloviating corpulent cleric says is nothing but balloon juice but the only reason that I would not assure you that there is no credible content to anything he says is just because he is saying more or less the same thing that millions of other preachers are either directly saying or at least implying…. 

 

And in mainstream churches with ministers who are actually educated, they just let you believe this non-sense and never say anything to correct you or teach you or even lead to the kind of critical thinking that ancient people had to consider after reading the Gilgamesh epic. The educated clergy know better, but they don’t want to upset you, they don’t want to disappoint you, they don’t want to take your security blanket away from you . . . or maybe they don’t want to lose their job and their pension fund. 

 

By the way, Rick Warren is not the richest evangelical pastor in the country, but his net worth is over $25 million which is more than 100x my net worth and you can depend on me to tell you the truth and back it up with scientific research. 

 

Now, sure, he could be right about eternal life, but if he is, this chow hound better hope that only humans go to heaven because if cows, pigs, chickens, and fish also have souls, he better find a place to hide as soon as he gets through the pearly gates!

 

Why, when there is absolutely no evidence for the life after death for fish, chickens, cows, pigs, or people are millions of people willing to make an obvious fraud a multi-millionaire peddling balloon juice? 

But if you look up the sermon that I will have linked in the text of this message and scroll down and look at the comments, you will see thousands of ebullient comments from people enthusiastically saying that it is the best sermon they have ever heard. Why, why when it is such obvious bologna, would so many people applaud being fleeced by a con man? And it is simply this: they want to believe it. 

 

When I was five years old, I caused a stir in my kindergarten Sunday School class when I blurted out that Santa Claus was not real. I told my classmates, over the shock of our teachers, that deer don’t fly and that there was no way that one person could visit every house in the world in a single day, even if they could wiggle down chimneys. My brother, who was a couple of years older, cornered me later and demanded that I act like I believed in Santa because if I didn’t, we wouldn’t get as many presents. 

 

My parents conspired to lie to us about St Nick and we conspired to pretend to believe the myths so that we might get an extra present on Christmas morning. In religion, people pretend to believe in things that are obviously not true because they get something out of the exchange… the ultimate of whistling past the graveyard. 

 

Belief in an afterlife can comfort us in our grief, giving us some thin hope that maybe death isn’t final and that someone we loved very much will be restored to us in some other existence when we have joined them in death. Belief in an afterlife can assuage our own fears of mortality, narcissistically assuring ourselves that we are just too important for the universe to dare to try to go on existing without us. 

 

And, belief in an afterlife can give you some sense that there is a cosmic balancing of the scales of justice. The late Texas Governor, Ann Richards, tells a story about one of her political friends who had a problem with a neighbor in a land right-of- way dispute that stretched over several decades. In a chance meeting years later, Ann asked the woman about how things had turned out with her pesky neighbor, and she said, “Oh her, that woman done died and gone to hell.” 

 

The ancient Persian slaves invented the concept of hell for about the same reason that I don’t own a gun. When my father died, my older brother asked me if I wanted any of his guns and when he made that offer, I thought of all the people that I have known who really deserved to be shot, and so I told him that I didn’t want to own a gun. The Persian slaves who had been sorely mistreated by their masters, felt that there needed to be a hell because so many people deserved to go there. I understand their sentiment, really I do, but just because there ought to be a hell doesn’t mean that there is one. Just because we would feel better about mortality if we could believe in heaven, doesn’t mean that there is one. 

 

My daughter and I found ourselves at an impasse this week talking about people we know who have not had the Covid vaccine. She insisted that there are good and intelligent people who just don’t think that it is a good idea. I, on the other hand, have become comfortable with a binary choice, given the amount of information we have all been exposed to over the past year about the virus and the vaccines, there are only two plausible reasons why someone in the United States would not be vaccinated, other than those who are too young or those who have some rare medical condition that would make it dangerous to be vaccinated . . . what remains is: you are either too stupid to understand the issues or you are too evil to care about the fact that your bad choices places the lives of others at risk, not to mention keeping the economy, the arts, churches, and concerts closed. 

 

Valerie insists that she simply does not agree with my analysis but can’t really offer much of an apologetic for her friends who have refused the vaccine to this point. I can applaud the fact that Valerie loves these people so much that she does not want me to label them as being either stupid or evil . . . maybe Valerie is a better person than I am, but honesty and a fearless orientation to reality compels me be less generous. 

 

I don’t have any unvaccinated friends in the USA because I simply refuse to associate with people who are willing to give the virus a space in which to mutate and become more lethal, killing millions more people entirely unnecessarily because this pandemic would be over now if it were not for all of these sociopaths exercising their freedom of choice to be a public menace. That’s just my opinion, it just so happens that my opinion is supported by facts. 

 

We lost a good friend last year, one of our founding members and one of my most enthusiastic supporters through all of the challenges we faced in starting our church. Chris died in her third battle with cancer. When the end became evident and she found the courage to talk about how we might have a memorial service for her in the midst of the pandemic, her one demand was that I not say that there was no life after death because she did not want her mother or her daughter to lose hope. 

I agreed not to say that explicitly but I also assured her that I would not say the opposite, that is, at my age, I refuse to pretend to believe in Santa Claus. 

I can either be honest or I can be silent, but I won’t do what most pastors do, which is offer false hope that everyone in the room knows is a lie. But if you can stand it, I do have some philosophical comfort to offer.

Life is precious specifically because we are mortal. If life were eternal, then no one day has either meaning or value because life just goes on and on and on. What gives value to our existence is the very fact that it is inevitably in short supply. Because we do not live forever, we must embrace every day as an opportunity in which to discover joy, love, learning, new experiences, and new friends. 

It seems almost too modern to find among the musings of the 2^ndcentury Roman Emperor and devoted Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, the rather disarmingly honest advice that we should not be afraid to die but that we should be afraid that we might never begin to live. He was known to be a persecutor of the early Christian Church but his personal meditations do not read like the monster that the early church described. I think that he simply saw Christianity as being a religion that was falling into the trap of making promises of eternal life that kept people from ever starting to live fully, accepting the fact of their mortality and then making the most of the days that we actually have. 

 

I know that some people think that I am a real spoiler when I tell people that heaven and hell are just imaginary, but I believe that it is the church that has been the real spoiler…. Scaring children with threats of hell, infusing decent people with Puritan values that rob life of all joy, and tricking the elderly into trying to be religious enough to gain a ticket on the train to glory when, in fact, their last ride will be to memorial gardens in the back of a hearse. 

 

In the gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples that the truth will set you free. I believe that it will, the honest truth is liberating, but it has been my experience that before it sets you free, it can make you very angry.

 

The church and many of the religions of the world have lied to you. They have sold you ancient pipe dreams about eternal life. Go ahead and take a minute and be mad about having been lied to, but don’t wallow in it too long, because the truth is that life is short, and you have a lot of living yet to do. 

 

I think that the more valid spiritual teachings from Buddhism to Epicurean philosophy, guide us towards a middle path in which avoid the extremes, but we do not deny ourselves the joys of good food and drink, stimulating conversation, laughter, and close friendships, all balanced with meaningful work and purposeful living. No matter how well you live, mortality is a one-way ticket. 

 

But, as Alan Watts said, we do not sing a song to get to its end. We do not live our lives to come to a successful end at the gates of eternity, we must live fully in every day. The joy is not in reaching a final destination, the joy is in the journey or there is no joy at all. So pick a good traveling companion, wear comfortable shoes, and make sure that you are not always the one who pays for dinner.

“Wonders and Horrors”

“Wonders and Horrors”        August 15, 2021      Dr. Roger Ray

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO

“Beware the evil or insincere friend; he is more to be feared than a wild beast.”  Confucius

 

   “preaching means more than handing over a tradition; it is rather the careful and sensitive articulation of what is happening in the community” 
― Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer

 

When I started in seminary, during one of our plenary orientations, we were told that pastors are the doorkeepers of life’s transitions. That is, we preside over the rituals that mark the most dramatic changes in the lives of our parishioners: We dedicate a newborn child, we baptize young people on the threshold of adulthood. We conduct the weddings and the funerals in the lives of families. It is a largely symbolic role, but it formalizes a deeper reality through a common ritual.

 

But this role is not always merely symbolic. Sometimes the rituals take on profound importance, like the day I helped a young father take his infant son’s casket out of the backseat of the limo. A child for whom I had held a dedication service just a few weeks before, now ready to be placed in the family cemetery.

 

And yes, we perform weddings, one of my least favorite tasks because of all of the ego and expense so often involved, but we’re usually around for the divorces as well. And sometimes that is not just sad, it is dangerous. In my 41 years in ministry, I have rescued women from abusive homes, wrestled a gun out of the hands of a drug addict who was bent on killing his family, chased a runaway teen into the heroin den where she lived and carried her out in my arms, stepping over the strewn bodies of the addicts lying on the floor.

 

And, of course, we do funerals but, on a few occasions, before the funeral, I was called upon to escort the grieving mother into the apartment where her son had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head in living room. Or standing outside the intensive care unit with a husband who has to decide whether to ask for the extreme measure of invasive surgery or to allow his beloved spouse to die in peace. 

 

Rituals can be symbolic, but it would be a mistake to say that they are merely symbolic. Sometimes they are necessary, sometimes healing, sometimes comforting, and sometimes even inspiring. 

 

Beyond these priestly functions, there is the role of pastor as teacher. I’ve done more than my share of Bible Study classes, but teaching is not always done from the classroom or the pulpit. Sometimes it is when you take a bus load of teenagers to Appalachia to teach them compassion by making home healthcare visits to a run- down mobile home deep in the woods, or to clean up alleyways in a Chicago housing project full of drug paraphernalia and the equipment of the sex trade. 

 

And I have taken teams of adults to help families restore their homes after a hurricane in New Orleans, or to Central America, to build houses and dig wells for some of the most impoverished people in this hemisphere. 

 

A great deal of what pastors do is to teach orthodoxy, the right and true beliefs at the core of any faith community. But, I have found the classroom to be more of an impediment to education than a real center for learning. Learning how to mix mortar in a depression in the ground with a shovel and a few buckets of water and then carrying that mortar in 10 gallon buckets to the people who were laying the blocks, moving a family from a shack made of mud and bamboo, into a real house, a house with a floor and door. Those are lessons not soon forgotten.

 

Sometimes a pastor is called upon, simply to be present in the midst of chaos and crisis. You go and sit in a prison cell with someone who, might be innocent, and might be very guilty of serious crimes. And to courtrooms where I have sat beside a young woman who was looking for support for the moment when she would have to give testimony against her step-father for his sexual abuse, or to sit with a family as they had to watch their grown child be sentenced unjustly to years in prison for an offense that should never have resulted in a day in incarceration. 

 

It is a life full of wonder and celebration, mixed with terrible failure and sadness. Every addict doesn’t become sober, in fact, most do not. Marriage doesn’t always end in healthy reconciliation, in fact, it usually doesn’t. 

 

But what our seminary lecturer did not say back in that long ago fall of 1980 at Vanderbilt, is that the best pastors, the ones who strive to be prophets, also stand as doormen in the passageways of an entire society. We don’t hear their names very often, but the poor have Washington Gladden, a New York Congregational pastor, to thank for the fact that electricity was provided in poor neighborhoods just as it is in gated communities. Dorothy Day, forced early 20^th century city dwellers to see and to care for the hungry and the homeless during the Great Depression. 

 

The church has been guilty of many horrible sins and humiliating hypocrisy, but who would want to live in a culture that had not been transformed by the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., or the anti-colonial efforts of Mahatma Gandhi? 

I found my own prophetic voice in the early 1990’s as the AIDs epidemic made both politicians and preachers use the fear of AIDS to vilify the gay community. Taking up the cause of gay rights was not a natural move for me. I had not grown up in a “woke” family and my education had hardly prepared me for the hatred and fear I would face in trying to bring liberation to the marginalized who were not heterosexual. 

 

Working with alcoholics, you learn to accept failure in 4 out of 5 cases. When you are trying to help society through a gateway into a new way of living, you are likely to fail a thousand times before you ever see success. I was a part of countless demonstrations before it became legal for same sex couples to be married. We led hundreds of demonstrations against America’s illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with no discernable influence on public policy. We have demonstrated against the PayDay Loan industry, and in support of Planned Parenthood, and in favor of giving a living wage to food industry workers. 

 

Sometimes, being a prophetic pastor, demands that you keep planting seeds that you will never see grow up into a meaningful harvest, but to borrow my favorite line from Bruce Cockburn’s sone, Lovers in a Dangerous Time, “we have to keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.”

 

We are now at a time in history when the old models of what it meant to be a church are passing away. Many churches that were already in steep decline, will simply never re-emerge from this global pandemic, and, in many cases, that may be a good thing. The church has a long and sordid history of defending slavery, supporting the ruling class at the expense of the poor, of teaching homophobia, perpetuating racism, and covering up the crimes of pedophile priests and pastors. 

When I see small churches being transformed into large family homes, or cathedrals into office parks or shopping malls; I have to tell you, I have mixed feelings. I have lived within the four walls of institutional religion for my entire adult life, and I know how toxic church politics and denominational power can be.

 

As the Florida pastor, James Harnish, once said, “The church is like Noah’s ark - the only way to stand the stench on the inside is to remember the storm on the outside.” In my youth, I had some church leadership who were people I looked up to and I aspired to be more like them. In the waning days of my time as a denominational pastor, I barely survived an Area Minister and a Regional Minister who were guilty of embezzling church funds and hiding serious sex crimes on the part of denominational leaders.  I know a lot of people who are in prison who should not be, but those two men should certainly be in prison right now but they were allowed to coast into retirement, suffering no consequences for their crimes and showing no signs of having ever had a conscience. 

 

Churches are a self-selected community and so, many friendships and some romances are discovered in the process of being a community. The very nature of a voluntary association that deals with the most important and the most controversial issues of life will draw people who want to claim its voice and its vigor, and some, for reasons of ego or sociopathy, then choose to try to destroy it.  It took me a long time to realize that most of the people who want to push you up onto a pedestal will eventually enjoy, even more, watching you fall. It is easy to think of these people as having malignant intent but, looking back on more than 40 years of these relationships, I am willing to conclude that most people simply don’t know how to be a friend. 

 

For the most part, when we say “I love you,” we say it with a very large “I” and a very small “you.” I think that one of the most powerful aspects of the gospel accounts of the passion narrative is if you read it, paying close attention to the friendships. As they are written, there were a dozen men in that inner circle of Jesus’ associates. Most of them slept through the real moments of crisis, never aware and never getting involved. Peter, whose protestations of love and loyalty were the strongest, showed that hypocrisy was his most pronounced characteristic. The literary creation of Judas, whose very name is intended to represent the faith community, got involved in a lethal way, betraying Jesus with a kiss. 

 

The gospel writers would have us to believe that Judas was motivated by greed, but it is evident that sociopaths destroy the lives of others out of envy. Over the years of publishing my newspaper columns and now posting my sermons on-line, I have had hundreds of pieces of hate mail and dozens of death threats, but such stuff is like what Soren Kierkegaard called “being stomped to death by geese.” It takes someone you love very much to be able to really hurt you, to get close enough to drive the dagger in deeply. 

 

A lot of energy over the past 41 years have been consumed by betrayal and defeats, senseless ego battles and board room politics over budgets and personnel. I have witnessed the toxic seamy underbelly of organized religion and I am entirely sympathetic with those who want to have nothing to do with it but it isn’t really fair to judge a home by looking in its septic tank. The perspective on life from the vantage point of the sewer is never that rosy. 

 

The only proverb that is original to me is one that I came up with about 30 years ago: If you light a candle in a dark place, you will draw bugs. 

That is, if you try to accomplish anything that is really important, something noteworthy, and heroic; critics will literally come crawling out of the woodwork. Still, I refuse to define my life in ministry based on chirping of the frogs from the sewer. You know, lions don’t spend much time wondering about what sheep think! 

 

Forty-five years ago, I thought that I wanted to go to law school, but I became persuaded that there were a lot of good lawyers in the world but not many good preachers. Once in grad school, I realized that the majority of demands for my time was in pastoral counseling, and I considered becoming a licensed psychologist, but again, I realized that there were many excellent psychologists in the field but finding a really good preacher was nearly impossible, so I devoted myself to the task of becoming one. 

 

I will have to leave it to you to decide whether I ever accomplished that goal or not. For myself, in spite of the hardships and conflicts, I judge my commitment to the church and specifically to the pulpit to have been worth it. Whether I ever became a really good preacher or not, I am deeply grateful for having been given the opportunity for four decades to try. 

 

I find myself now standing in the doorway of yet another transition. This is not my retirement speech, I hope that it will be a few years before I deliver that one, but this is certainly marking a transition as David Ketchum and I will try to share this one job between the two of us. Fate brought David to us a few years ago and I could not have found a co-pastor with whom to share a pulpit that I respect and trust more than I do David. 

 

This transition also affirms the fact that we will primarily be an on-line church, providing messages and content to thousands of people around the globe while still remaining rooted in a small, seated congregation here in Springfield, MO, the most unlikely place to base a progressive spiritual voice. 

 

My crystal ball is all foggy. I don’t know what the future of church life will look like in the next decade. I don’t have any better idea about what my life will look like over the next decade, but I am confident that people of faith have a vital role in shaping the world that is now emerging. There is no retirement from kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. I hope that preaching less often will give me an opportunity to just get better at it.

 

A Shattered Vision: Residential Schools, Forced Assimilation, and Shifting our Collective Consciousness

by David “Katya” Ketchum

Watch on Youtube

It’s not a secret that I love studying history; I believe it is a vital discipline for understanding and transforming the world. And as shocking and terrifying as human cruelty has been throughout recorded history, it’s also heartening to observe, time and time again, the movements opposing oppression that have always existed. This is also important to remember if you are tempted to excuse the complicity of people in the past by insisting that they were just products of their time. By studying history, we also become more aware of our own responsibilities and possibilities in the present. 

A Legacy of Failure, Cruelty, and War

    One of these important historical moments in US history, when there were multiple and large movements to either oppose or work for social justice, followed the American Civil War. Optimism that Reconstruction would bring about true and lasting healing and change in a nation ravaged and traumatized by the horrors of slavery and war, combined with optimism that there could be a change in the government’s policies regarding Native peoples. President Ulysses S. Grant and the events that took place in his administration are a good example of these trends. The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, for example, were aimed at providing federal support to protect the rights of Black Americans and oppose the Ku Klux Klan (https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-enforcement-acts/ ). Under the direction of Attorney General Amos Ackerman, hundreds of Klansmen were tried, often by Black juries, and imprisoned. Thousands more received fines or warnings, or even fled to escape prosecution. As a result, the KKK as a formal organization was in wreckage by 1872. (https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_enforce.html )

    At the same time, Grant wanted to find a different approach to US relations with Native peoples. He worked closely with his longtime friend and colleague, Ely S. Parker, and made Parker his Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Parker, whose Native name was Donehogawa, was a member of the Seneca nation and the first Indigenous person to hold the post of Commissioner. Together, they developed policies that included providing federal troops to protect reservation borders from settlers and that ultimately would have provided a pathway to citizenship for Indigenous people. These plans were vehemently opposed and undermined, and opponents eventually falsely accused Parker of embezzling money. He was exonerated, but Congress stripped power from the office of Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and Parker resigned in 1871. Plans and relationships fell apart, and Grant ended up waging war against the very people he had thought he would protect, including “the Modoc War in 1873, the Red River War in 1874, and the Great Sioux War in 1876.” (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ulysses-grants-failed-attempt-to-grant-native-americans-citizenship-180971198/ )  

    By 1885, the year Grant died, Donehogawa, once Grant’s enthusiastic colleague, described the fate of Indigenous peoples in North America. Resisting the racist idea that blamed Indigenous people for their troubles, he wrote:

“The disabilities, disadvantages and wrongs do not result, however, either primarily, consequently or ultimately from their tribal condition and native inheritances, but solely, wholly and absolutely from the unchristian treatment they have always received from Christian white people … . The tenacity with which the remnants of this people have adhered to their tribal organizations and religious traditions is all that has saved them thus far from inevitable extinguishment.”  (https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/letter-to-harriet-converse/ )

    Grant’s campaign slogan had been “Let us have peace,” and he seemed sincere in his vision to reform federal Indian policies. So how did it happen that, as Alysa Landry pointed out, “some of the worst massacres and grossest injustices in history [occurred] while Ulysses S. Grant was in office”? This is an important question to ask, if we want to avoid the kind of pitfalls that kept others’ from true healing and change. 

    In Grant’s case, central to his failures was “the development of millions of acres of federal public lands” and “the private acquisition of land by pioneers, spectators and railroad and mining companies,” made possible by Grant’s approval of the Timber Culture, General Mining, and Desert Lands Acts, which all expanded the land available to homesteaders and settlers – at the expense of Native peoples.  In the end, Grant’s hopeful slogan, “Let us have peace,” was no match for the reality of expansionism. In Landry’s words, 

“Grant realized that his expansionist goals required the removal of Indians from desirable land. His Indian Peace Policy, designed to reform the Indian Bureau and remove corrupt agents, also called for rigorous agricultural training on reservations and established schools and churches that would transform Indians into Christian citizens.” (https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/ulysses-s-grant-mass-genocide-through-permanent-peace-policy )

Cultural Genocide by Another Name

This tension is the US setting for residential schools. Even though some people, like Grant and Donehogawa, wanted to promote and protect the rights of the Original Nations, that hope was always in second place to the relentless westward push of land-grabbing and violent displacement. A cluster of ideas have especially supported and justified this kind of colonization. First, the dominating power believes in its own superiority. Members of this society, then, are entitled to rule and profit from that superiority, even if it comes at the expense of others. This is especially the case when the people harmed are categorized as inferior. Moreover, because the dominating power believes in its superiority, it can reframe the harm it causes to others as ultimately in their best interest. Those that survive will reap the benefits of being assimilated into the superior culture. It’s a tidy system that excused hundreds of years of oppression and continues to do so today. The residential school emphasis on agricultural training, education, and conversion fits this pattern. But forced assimilation could only be viewed as moral and good from the vantage point of superiority. 

    Unfortunately, the settlers of North America never lacked that character trait. Captain Richard H. Pratt, who was a founder and superintendent of the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, gave a speech in 1892 that showed how a person could justify even the most cruel actions under the guise of racist and paternalistic generosity and care. He began by stating that: 

“A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” (http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929/ )

Amazingly and horrifyingly, Pratt would then use the enslavement of Africans as a positive example of how assimilation could work. Rather than recognize the courage, persistence, creativity, and love that marked Black resistance to slavery and its descendants, such as Jim Crow and mass incarceration, Pratt gave all the credit to the White people who enslaved them. In Pratt’s view, “the care and authority of individuals of the higher race” was a blessing in disguise.

“Horrible as were the experiences … of slavery itself, there was concealed in them the greatest blessing that ever came to the Negro race—seven millions of blacks from cannibalism in darkest Africa to citizenship in free and enlightened America … .” (ibid)

In contrast, Pratt saw the wars fought against Native peoples and concluded that forced assimilation was more effective. “We have never made any attempt to civilize them with the idea of taking them into the nation,” Pratt wrote, “and all of our policies have been against citizenizing and absorbing them.” Boarding schools were Pratt’s answer: 

“It is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage. He is born a blank, like all the rest of us. ... Transfer the infant white to the savage surroundings, he will grow to possess a savage language, superstition, and habit. Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit.” (ibid) 

This is what White supremacy looks like, dressed up in schoolmaster’s robes. The unmistakable goal was to eliminate Indigenous nations, communities, customs, languages, and life.

The Civilization Fund Act

    The official roots of the residential schools in the US go back to 1819, when Congress passed the Civilization Fund Act. It’s stated goal was stopping the “decline and final extinction of the Indian tribes” by “introducing among them the habits and arts of civilization.” (https://web.archive.org/web/20090213110330/http://digitalhistory.uh.edu/native_voices/voices_display.cfm?id=45 ) The name of the act already demonstrated their commitment to forced assimilation, with the settlers’ ways assumed to be civilized and superior to any others. However, those early schools were mainly operated within Native communities, and some communities believed, or hoped, they could take advantage of the schools to slow colonization or mute its brutality. Instead, the powers that be just became frustrated that forced assimilation wasn’t progressing as quickly as they had planned. 

    The demand for removing children increased, and Grant’s 1869 Peace Policy was part of the growing shift toward residential or boarding schools. A parallel movement was happening in Canada. The emphasis on saving Native peoples by converting them is clearly seen in both nations, as is the elevation of the missionary as a heroic figure, the embodiment of the White Savior. This shift is demonstrated in no less than Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. MacDonald, who said: 

“When the school is on the reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write his habits, and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. … Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.” (https://ehprnh2mwo3.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Executive_Summary_English_Web.pdf  )

    Assimilation required, then, the removal of the children’s cultural identities, such as forcing them to wear uniforms, forbidding native languages, and cutting braids. And to be effective, the schools tried to traumatize as many children as possible, so that cultural transmission would be broken generationally. Hundreds of thousands of children were forced to attend schools in the USA, rising to over 80% of Native children by 1926. In Canada, more than 150,000 children were “required to attend state-funded Christian schools”. (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/22/us-to-review-history-of-indigenous-boarding-schools-deb-haaland )

New Tactics, Similar Results

    These schools are a powerful and tragic reminder of how oppression often comes in layers. The schools themselves constituted violence, a direct and intentional attack on Native peoples and cultures. They should have never existed. Once there, children were regularly exposed to physical, verbal, and sexual abuse, as well as structural violence (such as malnutrition and lack of health care) and cultural violence (such as cutting their braids and forbidding them from speaking their native languages). All the while, these children mattered so little to the authorities that proper records were often not kept. 

    In Canada, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission spent almost eight years, from 2008 to 2015, investigating their residential schools. Their findings offer insight into the schools, including how so many children died. Leslie Young of Global News, summarized the findings. First, the number of deaths were likely much higher; for example, students who became sick and were sent home to die were not included. Of the 3,200 deaths they investigated, the commission reported that officials did not even record a name for 1/3 of the deaths, or a cause of death for ½ of those who passed away. Even so, Young reported that: 

“Indigenous children in residential schools died at far higher rates than other Canadian children, even for the time, … . / According to the report, many children died from infectious diseases – in particular tuberculosis – fires in school buildings, suicide, drowning, and other accidental causes.” (https://globalnews.ca/news/7911690/residential-schools-deaths-location/ ) 

Additionally, we know that nutritional experiments, in which Native children were purposely malnourished and, in some cases, fed an "experimental flour mixture that was illegal in the rest of Canada,” were performed in Canadian residential schools in the 1940s. (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/residential-school-nutrition-experiments-explained-to-kenora-survivors-1.3171557 ) We also know that at least one doctor, assisted by a nurse, performed medical experiments on Native children in the 1950s. The experiments resulted in deafness and left the victims and their families with terror they still remember to this day. (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/ear-experiments-done-on-kids-at-kenora-residential-school-1.1343992 ) 

    Moreover, compulsory attendance at boarding schools did not end in the US until 1978, when the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed, or in Canada until 1996 (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/30/the-guardian-view-on-canadas-residential-schools-an-atrocity-still-felt-today ). Even then, the system shifted to other ways of forced assimilation, especially placing Native children into foster and adoptive care in non-Native households. David Simmons of the National Indian Child Welfare Association, described the process: 

"There was very little work done … to help the families rehabilitate, very little work done to really understand if there were any other family members who might be able to step in, … . / And usually the reasons that were given for removing children were pretty flimsy, compared to what we normally consider good practice in child safety." (https://www.npr.org/2021/07/11/1013772743/indian-boarding-school-gravesites-federal-investigation )

Shifting Cultures and Consciousness 

    All of this connects to the urgent needs of the present. There is a temptation to view the problems associated with forced assimilation and residential schools as in the past. But that is a lie, convenient for those in power, harmful to everyone, and animated by “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/bell-hooks/ ).  Alongside changing systems and structures, a cultural shift is needed to move away from those attitudes and ideas that have fueled colonization, led to the practices of forced assimilation, and continue to be embedded in our collective consciousness. 

When you listen to the news, for instance, listen through the lens of this history. 

    When you hear about the ongoing resistance to pipelines through Indigenous lands (https://www.stopline3.org/#intro ), don’t separate it from the history of state-sponsored violence against Native peoples. When you hear a story about how a Native American student is treated for wearing braids (https://www.npr.org/2018/12/06/673837893/school-district-apologizes-for-teacher-who-allegedly-cut-native-american-childs- ), remember the history of cultural genocide. When you learn that “In South Dakota, a Native child is 11 times more likely to be placed in foster care than a white child” (https://www.teenvogue.com/story/foster-care-has-failed-native-american-youth ), remember the ongoing legacy of forced removal and residential schools. And when you grieve the children still living in concentration camps on the US’ southern border, don’t forget that this represents another instance of forcibly separating Native children from their families, and that, according to lawyers, “the process is even more complicated for those who only fluently speak any one of more than 100 indigenous languages spoken by millions of people from Mexico to Honduras.” (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/asylum-central-americans_n_57c85ebde4b0e60d31ddb9d9?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004 )

Colonization, White supremacy, and other forms of domination rely on the exploitation of human beings and the earth itself in order to accumulate power and wealth in the hands of the few. These interlocking systems were never wise, compassionate, moral, or sustainable, and they now drive us to the edge of extinction. Gratefully, these oppressive systems are not the only traditions, even in the West, and Indigenous peoples especially have courageously preserved and developed many other cultures that do not rely on domination. Especially for White folx, our work of the present moment is to heal and transform our collective consciousness, honoring the great web of life and finding our place within it. And to do that, we must part ways with the sins of superiority, forced assimilation, and greed, learning that our own well-being cannot be separated from the well-being of the diversity of humans and human cultures, or from the earth itself. May it be so.