Musings

Ah, July 4th. What a great time it is in the US. I can’t remember exactly what it is we are celebrating but I love how we use fireworks, which were created in America. It’s also great because we get to eat sweet corn perhaps for the first time all summer. Thank God our ancestors brought corn over from England and Ireland. Can you imagine a summer without corn?

I think, as a fan of history, that this is the perfect time to reflect on the great history of our country. We are certainly going through some interesting times these days and I think it’s important to trace the roots of where we are and see how we got here. Will you travel back in time with me to honor July 4th?

The first people

America can trace our history all the way back to um…when did the Mayflower land? Well, at least 500 years ago. People came over to America because it was the land of the free and the home of the brave and that is what they were. They wanted to be able to use their guns and practice their religion, so they came to this empty land and decided to build their empire here. Now, they did encounter some Indians when they got here, and they did their best to get along with those people at first. They even let the Indians teach them how to farm and stuff. But you know, this really needed to be a white man’s land and these Indians just didn’t seem to get that, so they had to go. If the Indians had just tried to assimilate maybe things would have been smoother. I think you can talk to the Cherokee about that, but I’m not sure.

Anyway, living in this new country was really hard. There were a lot of trees and rivers and stuff and there were not any Starbucks or Target stores, and there were several other changes as well. Our ancestors tried to get the Indians to help with farm work and stuff but the Indians just fell over and died. Now, luckily the fates were with us from the start. There was a whole continent where the weather was always gross and there was just no civilization – Africa. So our ancestors started bringing those folks over so they could be productive and help out with planting fields and other stuff. In return, these African people got homes, food, and lots of other stuff. Now it’s true that sometimes bad things had to be done to the African helpers if they weren’t really getting how lucky they were. Much like the Indians, if they had just understood how privileged they were things would have gone better.

Why we are celebrating

So the years went on and our ancestors were still having to deal with the Indians and the Africans who were all like, “This sucks” for some reason. But we had our own problems. England was making us talk British and drink tea, so we threw tea in the water somewhere (California?) and that started a war. The English really like their tea When the war did break out the English tried to steal our guns, so we wrote up the Declaration of Independence that said that everyone except the Africans, the Indians, women, and people from other countries who were trying to live here could pursue happiness via Christianity and gun possession. Thomas Jefferson really wanted to drive the point about the guns home, so he not only signed his name really big but he also created fireworks to mimic the sound of American guns.

At some point between that and now some of our ancestors wrote up the Constitution. The guys who wrote that up were very conscious of the fact that the whole world was watching them, including us in the future, so they decided to give freedom to everyone just like they had. That meant that people who had come from Africa could continue to help out our ancestors, Indians could try to assimilate into white culture, and women could continue to make food and babies just like they always want to do. Some cynical people have said it’s crappy that only white guys wrote up this document, but I mean, they had settled the country and like, the whole continent by then, so I think everyone at the time was ok with this and we’d be ok with it now.

From the start, America has been about and for people who were born here and who have white skin and also who are men, and that’s really the way it should be. Like I said, they did all the work. With guns. That is the ancestry we are celebrating tomorrow, going back to when our forefathers declared that no British person would take our guns or make us drink tea.

Happy July Fourth!

Today is a horrifying day in the history of the United States of America. Today, our Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of Hobby Lobby that a privately held company can avoid covering women’s contraception if doing so collides with the company’s religious beliefs.

Let’s think about this in an over-arching way first. We are saying that companies, corporations, have religious beliefs AND rights. We are saying that a company can distinguish between what it will cover and what it will not cover, but only where women are concerned.

This is disturbing enough.

What I wonder about are the implications for women like me who use “birth control” as a form of hormone replacement therapy. Companies can proclaim in grandiose statements that they will not cover contraception for a woman, but in doing so they are also preventing women from getting the hormonal support they need in the wake of problems like infertility. A woman who cannot access HRT is more prone to organ failure, and that is just the tip of the iceburg. Of course, it would be difficult for a woman to stand up and explain this today, in an era when candidates for the Presidency advise women to just hold an aspirin between their legs to avoid pregnancy. With an audience like that, how can you explain the endocrine system and why some women need to take pills to help their systems work properly?

I wonder about where we go from here. If it is ok for companies to refuse to cover this part of a woman’s health, what could they refuse to cover next? Maybe they will proclaim that they shouldn’t have to pay for a woman’s annual PAP test or breast exam because, I dunno, that’s just all yucky womanly stuff, and hey, if a woman gets cancer it’s probably because she did something to anger God, right? Maybe maternity leave will be the next to go. I mean, it’s not the company’s fault that a woman decided to get pregnant. Besides, isn’t the next logical step to remind women that we should be staying home minding the kids anyway? If you want to have kids stay home all the time, not just the first few months.

I wonder what will be deemed permissible by our ruling body next. Maybe women shouldn’t be allowed to run for office anymore. That 5-4 decision would have probably been less close if those pesky women hadn’t been around, right? And women politicians? We all know everything went downhill politically when women like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren started popping up. Maybe women shouldn’t vote anymore, because they tend to vote for those women politicians.

I’d love to say this is all just hyperbole, but you know, I am really starting to wonder. Who would have thought that less than 100 years after women finally got the right to vote we would have to be clawing our way to have rights in the face of companies that now claim religious beliefs. It sounds like something out of The Onion. Maybe we have all entered into an Onion Universe. That would at least explain a day like today. Nothing else seems to be doing the trick.

This past weekend I spent some time in Nashville, Tennessee, for a trade show. On the first day, before the show began, my parents and I decided to venture out to The Hermitage, home of President Andrew Jackson. The museum and the tour paid careful attention to the legacy of slavery on the planation, which I thought was encouraging. As you are walking up the path to the mansion, for example, the audio tour notes that back in 1837 the whole area would have been a cotton field and you would definitely have seen slaves working in those fields. These are no-brainer facts, but it’s important that Americans incorporate these ugly truths into the romanticized stories of past heroes.

That being said, another key aspect of Jackson’s life and career went unmentioned and unnoticed. No where did I see any mention of the fact that part of Jackson’s legacy is that he helped to completely crippled the “5 civilized tribes” of Native Americans who up until his Presidency had mostly lived peacefully in the Southeast. Those five tribes were the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, the Creek, the Choctaw, and the Seminoles. Jackson was a notorious proponent of Indian removal, and while the Cherokee marched on the Trail of Tears under Martin van Buren’s Presidency, the foundation of that trail was set during Jackson’s term as President. This entire aspect of Jackson’s Presidency lies untouched at his home. Why?

Lately there has been a lot of talk about sports teams who use names like “Indians” or “Redskins.” That’s great, but are you aware of some of these statistics?

“American Indians and Native Alaskans number 4.5 million. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, these Americans earn a median annual income of $33,627. One in every four (25.3 percent) lives in poverty and nearly a third (29.9 percent) are without health insurance coverage.”  via http://www.spotlightonpoverty.org/

“A recent class action suit alleged that the government mismanaged billions of dollars in Indian assets. The case settled in 2009 for $3.4 billion—far less than what was lost by the feds.” via Forbes

“One-quarter of Indian children live in poverty, versus 13 percent in the United States. They graduate high school at a rate 17 percent lower than the national average. Their substance-abuse rates are higher. They’re twice as likely as any other race to die before the age of 24. They have a 2.3 percent higher rate of exposure to trauma. They have two times the rate of abuse and neglect. Their experience with post-traumatic stress disorder rivals the rates of returning veterans from Afghanistan.” via Washington Post

What it seems like to me is that we are not just brushing American history under the rug where whites and Native Americans are concerned – we are simply brushing all Native Americans under the rug. If we don’t see them and we don’t witness their difficulties, then fighting to get a logo changed can certainly seem like ample effort. Right?

There are Native Americans alive today whose great-grandparents fought Custer. The massacre at Wounded Knee, the massacre of Black Kettle and his tribe, the abuse of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce, all happened towards the end of the 19th century. That’s not that long ago, but the sands of time are threatening to bury it all, and we are letting it happen.

When will we be able to face the fact that Andrew Jackson was not just a slave-owner but also an Indian killer? When will we recognize that many Civil War heroes, including Sheridan and Sherman, went out West and declared that the only good Indian was a dead Indian? There are people alive today who were sent to schools in the East to get rid of their Native American culture. They were prohibited from speaking their native language. They were not allowed to keep their sacred possessions. Are we going to continue to sweep them under the rug too?

I am deeply concerned that we are going to simply turn a blind eye to our history and to our present where Native Americans are concerned. When will the battle end? When will we come to terms with what has happened on this “land of the free?” Huge portions of our population are still waiting.