Category Archives: reality

Life in The Great Plains

Posted on by
Reply

The Great Plains of the United States is a vast area with few people and beautiful vistas. You can drive on the open roads in Montana, North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Kansas for hours and see only a handful of cars. The houses are few and far between and without exception have an American flag flying in front. Each town’s population sign boasts between 29 and 1500 residents.

On our way from the Battlefield of Little Bighorn to Cody, Wyoming, where we’d be spending the night before heading into Yellowstone Park, we stopped in for some lunch at a small diner in the town of Lovell, Wyoming, population 2320.

During our travels, we’ve come to expect quirky, odd people and sights, but so far in this part of America what’s stood out the most is the utter normalcy of the people and towns. The diner was quite ordinary. Plain tables and chairs. Around one table were four middle-aged women having a girls’ lunch. Otherwise, we were alone. The menu was also nothing special. Hamburgers, french fries, pizza, tuna salad sandwiches.

And then there was this sight –

No one seemed to think it strange. I guess man and bird are regulars.

Our teenage server was a fresh-faced, blonde girl. No tattoos. No piercings. No make-up. Just a few freckles and a friendly smile. I found myself wondering about her life. Being a teenager in a town of 2000 people in the Great Plains. The nearest city, Cody, boasting 10,000 residents, is an hour away.

After we’d eaten our sandwich and were waiting for coffee, I approached the girl and asked if she’d be open to talking about her life. She nodded with a respectful ‘yes’ and a shy smile. I started with an easy question.

“What do kids your age do for fun around here?”

She didn’t hesitate. She told me the obvious – there’s nothing to do in Lovell – but went on to say that, as a result, kids make their own fun. They sometimes build a campfire and sit around talking and telling stories. They go fishing. Most teenagers work in the summer and often after school during the school year.

I mentioned that I’d noticed the lack of tattoos, piercings, and make-up and asked if that was the norm. She replied that most families in Lovell are Mormon (she’s not), and have been brought up not to find those kinds of things attractive. There’s a strict dress code at her school, which is fine with her, but she wishes they were allowed to wear leggings. (that was her only objection)

I asked if she saw herself settling down in Lovell after school or moving to a bigger city. With a mischievous smile, she said that her dream was to go to New York City and become a cosmetologist but added that she’d likely get married and settle down in Lovell, or maybe as far away as Cody.

Interestingly enough, her parents divorced when she was 10 and after a year living with her mother in Denver, Colorado, she chose to move to Lovell to live with her father. Of course, the explanation may lie simply in a troubled relationship with her mother, but I wondered later if it was the siren call of a simpler life surrounded by stark natural beauty.

There are undoubtedly inconveniences living in a tiny town with limited options. But in the towns of the Great Plains states, there’s also the inspiration and peacefulness of being surrounded by natural beauty. The rush and tension that people love to hate in the big population centers are absent. There’s virtually unlimited space. Zero crowding on the roads, in the restaurants; no long lines in the grocery store or the post office (which each town has!). From our limited experience, no one is in a hurry. They have time for conversations with the neighbor ringing up their purchases and the customers in the diner.

At our server’s age, I was also a server in a restaurant. I worked in an Indian restaurant, wearing an elegant sari, where the choices on the menu were exotic and expensive. The restaurant was on the river that ran through the tourist area of San Antonio and was constantly packed with people. Without a reservation, people were out of luck. I saved my tip money to get the hell out of Dodge. San Antonio, a city of over a million people, was too familiar. I wanted nothing more than to strike out, on my own, for more interesting pastures.

It took me 50 years to reach the point that our server reached by 16. The point where I appreciate the empty open road, the farms where the closest neighbor is at least a kilometer away. When I can often think of nothing better than sitting in a wooden chair looking out at a calm lake for an hour or two with an unopened book on my lap.

Lubec, Maine

I used to think that living in the city provided more opportunity for connection to other people. I imagined living in rural areas to be isolating. Living in a small community of 5000 people created doubt in my mind and observing people and talking to people in The Great Plains sealed my recognition of my faulty reasoning. I now think that, while it clearly depends on the individual, living among fewer people may very well encourage kinder, more intimate connection than living in a city.

As the miles rolled by, we were finding the sheer size of the open, empty plains comforting. Neither my partner nor I being particularly stressed out or hyper people, we were, nevertheless, experiencing an inner loosening in our very souls.

I often thought of travel from Wisconsin, where I was at university for more years than I care to think about, to San Antonio, as boring. Lots of wheat fields. Lots of cornfields. they go on and one and…on.

The boredom of the 70s through the 90s is today’s meditation.

Deadly Clash of Cultures: the Sad History of the Native American

Posted on by
Reply

The Z Bar Motel in Buffalo, Wyoming, is a great place for a family vacation. Yes, it’s in the middle of nowhere, but very convenient for our travels, halfway between Mt. Rushmore and the Battlefield of Little Bighorn. It’s a motel made up of small (and larger) cabins. The two men in the cabin next to ours were from North Carolina. They come every year to escape the heat. Very friendly, they sat on their front porch schmoozing for large parts of the day, happy to chat with other guests of the motel as they pass by.

Our cabin had a fridge and everything else we needed. Unfortunately, it also had a flooded bathroom later in the evening. Luckily, the water didn’t escape into the room proper. We debated whether we should ask for a discount upon check-out the next morning but decided against it. It can’t be easy trying to make a living from tourists there. There’s really not much around there for many miles in every direction.

The decision was taken out of our hands the next day when the owner told my partner that he would be refunding our payment in full. (I checked later and he had, indeed, issued a full refund) Only three cabins were affected by the plumbing problem, ours being one of them. When traveling – and in life in general – we’ve learned that the best attitude is one of kindness and flexibility. We also benefit – not always financially – but always in our hearts.

An hour and a half up the road we pulled into the Battle of Little Bighorn memorial.

Many years ago, on a whim, I purchased a $10 senior pass for life to all US National Parks for myself which included other passengers in my car. At the time one of our sons still lived in the States and I figured we might even get some use out of a lifetime pass. It was the ranger’s idea in the John Muir forest in California. It came in handy on this trip. We saved ourselves over $100 and had a feeling of satisfaction. It included the Little Bighorn memorial, though not Crazy Horse since that’s a private endeavor. It would be just too cynical for a monument to a warrior betrayed fatally by the US government to be a national park.

We’d been listening to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, anticipating our visit to Little Bighorn. The book is written primarily from the point of view of and in sympathy with the Native American Nation. Having been brought up on the opposite perspective, it was interesting to learn the history of Native American/settler relations from this point of view. What became clear was that aside from the excitement, enthusiasm, and greed of the settlers, and the often apparent disregard for Native Americans as human beings by the US Army, it was a tragic clash of cultures that led to cruelty on both sides and horrendous misunderstandings with terrible consequences.

Before the explorers and settlers invaded Native American lands, the primary conflict was between Mexicans and Native Americans. Mexicans often kidnapped Native American children for use as slaves and Native Americans retaliated by stealing horses. Odd perhaps but with none of the butchery and cruelty that was eventually representative of the settlers, the army, and the Native Americans. The Mexican and Native American cultures, while different from each other, had more in common.

It took years for Native Americans to grasp the concept of hunger for ownership of land that precluded the use of that land by others. They’d always had free access to vast tracts of land – virtually any land they wanted or needed for hunting or growing food for their needs – and considered all of the land as their home, belonging only to the holy spirits. They saw no reason not to share it with the settlers, though they were certainly territorial between tribes and there were consequences when tribes didn’t respect the non-verbal, non-contractual rights of one tribe to the land on which they hunted. The White settlers and army utilized these tribal conflicts to their advantage by allying themselves with one or more tribes against others. It would be years before Native Americans realized that the rules of the game had changed. As a result, they were slow in reacting.

Once they caught up they were no less cruel than their White counterparts. Taking the worst from their experience with the Mexicans, they kidnapped women and children. Taking the worst from their experience with US troops, they butchered their enemy with vehemence and carried out indiscriminate atrocities.

Beginning in the 17th century, settlers and soldiers came well-equipped with the weapons of their time; sidearms, shotguns, rifles, muskets, and infectious disease. The Native Americans initially had bows and arrows, tomahawks, and little resistance to the diseases of the Europeans. It would be years before Native Americans obtained rifles to arm themselves. By that time their numbers had been decimated by disease and warfare. It is estimated that 80% of Native Americans were dead by the 1he middle of the 19th century as a result of White colonization. It is estimated that no more than 2000 colonists, settlers, and US soldiers were killed during the so-called Indian Wars.

(As an aside, the so-called Vietnam War is known as the American War in Vietnam. I have no idea what Native Americans call the Indian Wars. I couldn’t find such a reference. But surely they have a different name for that part of their history.)

This violent and tragic history of Native American-European relations is littered with misunderstanding of cultural differences, broken promises and treaties, and the racism of those centuries when many Whites simply did not regard people of color as human beings. Whoever does not recognize that fact cannot possibly understand the murder of unarmed Native American women and children such as the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, ostensibly in retaliation for the murder of a family of White settlers. Verbal and written descriptions of Native Americans as being like savage dogs (Andrew Jackson), savage as the wolf (George Washington), and calls for the total extermination of all Native Americans abound (too many to list).

History has shown that the inability to see an entire population group, in this case Native Americans, as human beings, is always the precursor to insensitivity at the least and unspeakable cruelty at worst.

Which brings us to The Battlefield of Little Bighorn, also known as Custer’s Last Stand.

In 1875, after gold was discovered in South Dakota’s Black Hills, the U.S. Army ignored treaty agreements and invaded the region. This betrayal, one of many, led many Sioux and Cheyenne tribesmen to leave their reservations and join Chief Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in Montana. By the late spring of 1876, more than 10,000 Native Americans had gathered in a camp along the Little Bighorn River.

In mid-June, three columns of U.S. soldiers lined up against the army. A force of 1200 Native Americans turned back the first column. Five days later, General Alfred Terry ordered George Custer’s 7th Calvary to scout ahead for enemy troops. On June 25, in arrogant and reckless disregard for opposing opinions, including his Indigenous guide, Mitch Bouyer, Custer decided to press ahead rather than wait for reinforcements. Many historians believe he was more interested in increasing his reputation for a run for President of the United States than in the cautious advancement of his troops.

In any case, by mid-day on June 25, Custer’s 600 men entered the Little Bighorn Valley. Word had quickly spread of the impending attack. The older Sitting Bull rallied the warriors while Crazy Horse set off with a large force to meet the attackers head-on. Custer and some 200 men in his battalion were attacked by as many as 3000 Native Americans. Within an hour, Custer and all of his soldiers were dead. According to Cheyenne oral history, Custer himself was killed by Buffalo Calf Road Woman.

Standing at the many marked locations above the Little Bighorn Valley, reading descriptions of the battle that happened 50-100 meters away was an intense experience for me. I could smell the blood, feel the sweat, hear the war cries, sense the exuberance of the Native American warriors and the terror of the soldiers. I don’t know why it affected me so strongly, just that it was one of the fiercest reactions I’ve ever had in a historical location. Standing on the steep bluffs, I could feel the thrill of the Native American warriors – finally, finally, reigning victorious. After just one hour, 268 US soldiers lay dead, and no more than 100 Native Americans.

The feeling of accomplishment, justified revenge, and taking back control, was short-lived.

The battle at Little Bighorn reinforced popular opinion as to the savagery of the Native American Nation and served as a rallying point for the United States to increase the efforts to force native peoples onto the reservation lands. Within one year of the battle, most Native Americans surrendered and the Black Hills were taken by the US government without compensation to the Lakota.

Sitting Bull was later killed by Indian agency police on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation during an attempt to arrest him at a time when authorities feared that he would join the Ghost Dance movement. He was 58 or 59 at his death.

Crazy Horse was killed by a bayonet-wielding military guard after surrendering to U.S. troops at Camp Robinson in northwestern Nebraska. He was 37 when killed.

A trail of broken treaties and US government promises, Christianity meeting Spiritualism, tribal life and nomadic life versus settlement life, differing social structure, and visions of authority all led to the tragedy of Native American/settler clashes. It might have served as a cautionary tale for other disastrous clashes of culture in far-flung locations but as George Santayana wrote, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Humankind has shown repeatedly that we do not learn from history.

Today there are approximately 326 Native American land areas in the U.S. administered as federal Indian reservations (i.e. reservations, pueblos, rancherias, missions, villages, communities, and others). The largest is the 16 million-acre Navajo Nation Reservation located in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. While there are an estimated 9.7 million Native Americans, only about a quarter live on reservations or other trust lands. The others are scattered to the winds.

On to new adventures in Cody, Wyoming.

An Alternate Reality – And Not a Good One

Posted on by
1

Beginning in the 2010s the mid-20th century term “woke” has gained popularity as connected to matters beyond race such as gender and identities perceived as marginalized. It became popular with millennials and members of Generation Z, and by 2020 became a sarcastic pejorative among many on the political right and many centrists in Western countries. Writer and activist Chloe Valdary, essayist Maya Binyam, and others have written that the new usage of the woke concept is a double-edged sword, being used for “Woker-than-Thou-Itis” which leads to canceling people for a potpourri of opinions – societal, economic, political, educational – and worse.

Being woke has become, for a very vocal and powerful minority, a raison d’etre; the social group to which they belong, indiscriminately adopting every element shouted most loudly by the woke in-crowd. Because this includes most of the Western media, it sometimes seems that it is representative of the entire Western world. And since cancelation can mean not only a loss of acceptability but a loss of status, job, and income, the majority of people, those who see that the emperor is, indeed, naked, are reluctant to speak out against the increasing lunacy.

There are comedians like Ricky Gervais who unabashedly refer to “The old-fashioned women, the ones with wombs.” or “Oh, they want to use our toilets. Why shouldn’t they? They are ladies – look at their pronouns! What about this person isn’t a lady? ‘Well, his penis.’ “Her penis, you fxxking bigot!” But the bad boy of comedy can certainly court cancelation. He’s already a multi-millionaire. And, even so, he was condemned by LGBTQ groups, and his Netflix special SuperNature was criticized as ‘dangerous’.

What’s dangerous is this entire alternate reality we’ve witnessed come into being. A reality that exists only in the minds of the woke, but has been attracting Generation Z. You know the ones – zoomers – university students who do not yet have real knowledge about anything much and are wont to invest time or energy in learning about an issue before they join earnest activists and their paid counterparts on the front lines of protest.

When it was mostly about pronouns, we could smile at the annoying reminders. Perhaps many of us balked at the plural ‘them’ being used for a single person, but generally, we made the crossover gracefully. When we got over the surprise at the audacity and absurdity of portraying the Queen of England as Black in Bridgerton, many of us could even accept the importance of opening a wider range of roles for people of color (although note that the sanctimonious woke are not so accepting of actors with no physical disability portraying characters with physical disabilities or for a Jewish Israeli actor portraying Cleopatra).

Critical Thinking Theory, originally introduced by Watson Glaser in his Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA) used to be a process of using and assessing reasons to evaluate statements, assumptions, and arguments. This approach, based on thinkers such as Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot, is not to be confused with the new, woke-lauded Critical Theory which is an attempt to disprove and discredit widely held or influential ideas or ways of thinking in society, also perhaps commendable if used without the current agenda of rewriting, or as gentler souls than I refer to it, reframing history. This includes taking people respected in the context of their time and condemning them with the eyes of 21st-century North America.

And if it weren’t enough to turn already-confusing adolescence into a morass of further gender identity crisis on steroids and with suicidal tendencies, demand that everyone change biology and grammar to accommodate the 10% (I’m being generous – some put it as low as 3.8%) who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, and to force commendable, often heroic personalities of a past long dead (as are they, of course) to retroactively conform to the woke standards of 2024, the alternate reality today is most conspicuous in the war against the terrorist organization, Hamas.

Why have I waited until now to come out against the “Alternate Reality of Woke”? Because in this most recent mutilation of reality, brave young people are sacrificing their lives and my own country’s existence is at stake. We must not cast a benevolent forgiving eye on the misinformation accepted blindly by those protesting as “Pro-Palestine” or claiming that the atrocities of October 7th never happened.

The world’s blatant ignorance of the history of the Jewish People in their homeland of Israel fosters the claim that “Israel popped up in 1948 as the creation of the British colonizers”, a statement presented as fact in a question-and-answer forum in one of United States’ most respected universities. It allows people who have never experienced modern-day Israel to state with confidence that Israel is an apartheid state. It encourages people to call the casualties of war in Gaza genocide.

Support for the Hamas cause should not be surprising.

For decades, perhaps as many as five, the United Nations has been controlled by anti-Israel interests. Since the creation of the UNHRC in 2006 over half of the country-specific resolutions passed were those condemning Israel. The sitting UN Commissioner for Human Rights, an Austrian, has been vocal in condemning Israeli airstrikes on Hamas in Gaza but to my knowledge has made no comment about the 1300 Israeli civilians murdered in their homes, dismembered, or about the over 200 Israeli civilians taken hostage of which only an estimated 100 remain alive. UNWRA workers were filmed participating in that horror.

In the alternate reality over 35,000 Arab civilians have been killed during the war in Gaza, all as a result of genocide. In reality, Israel has gone to lengths never before seen in the history of warfare to evacuate civilians from the areas of conflict. And clearly, a large number of those killed were Hamas fighters, inserted into residential areas to use civilians as human shields.

In the alternate reality, the people of Gaza are starving. In reality, the markets are open and functioning in addition to the huge amounts of humanitarian aid received. Gaza has been given foreign aid to the tune of literally billions of dollars since Israel left the area in August 2005. Sufficient funds to develop Gaza into a Garden of Eden for residents and the development of a thriving tourism industry. Sadly, over 75% of the population is considered to be living in poverty as the aid has been used primarily for Hamas weapons and the building of hundreds of kilometers of underground tunnels large enough for truck traffic in which to store weapons and house the military arm of Hamas

In the alternate reality, hospitals and schools have been bombed by Israel. In reality, yes, they have, but only after careful investigation showed that they were serving as storage for Hamas weapons, and Hamas camps. They received ample notice to evacuate and IDF soldiers helped evacuate patients from hospitals, sometimes at great risk to their own lives.

In the alternate reality, Israel is villanized and constantly pressured to stop fighting in Gaza by countries and organizations posing as humanitarians. In reality, Hamas has remained uncensured for refusing to give a list of hostages still in captivity, alive or dead, or for refusing to allow The Red Cross to visit the hostages or provide medical care for those in need. Those organizations also ignore the fact that Hamas has changed the terms of agreement to a ceasefire significantly at the last minute every time – and then blamed Israel publicly for not signing.

In the alternate reality, the LGBTQ community has come out full force as Pro-Palestine, in some cases Pro-Hamas (which is beyond comprehension on every level). In reality, Hamas indiscriminately and without compunction murders anyone known to be LGBTQ, while Tel Aviv has been listed as the No. 1 LBGTQ-friendly city in the world.

Israel has had a Jewish presence for 3000 years. From time to time during those 3 millennia, Israel has been controlled by Jews. The Jewish People, as a recognized People, has existed for between 3000-4300 years, depending on the source of information.

There has never been an entity called Palestine, other than in Yasir Arafat’s mind, Arab propaganda, and the alternate reality. As a People, those considered ‘Palestinian’ today are a collection of tribes bound together for political purposes.

There are so many lies, so much misinformation, and lack of information, that it’s virtually impossible to debunk them one by one here. And, of course, if unwilling to invest the time and energy to research them adequately, one can never know who to believe. Why believe me? Easier to just decide blindly, choosing the worldview that best serves you in your preferred social group.

I could present hundreds of photos of Arabs, Asians, Blacks, Whites, Jewish, and non-Jewish meandering freely in Israel’s malls, on Israel’s streets, working as pharmacists, doctors, nurses, store owners, teachers, or sitting in Israeli coffee shops and restaurants. Anyone who visits Israel knows how ludicrous the claims of apartheid are. But you could prefer to believe that the photos are as photo-shopped as the horrendous photos and clips of the October 7th atrocities.

The Muslim world began planning for this day in the early 70s when they began filling American universities with their young people. They have increased funding and investment in American universities, institutions, and commercial interests to the point of dependency. They have an extensive and extremely talented public relations arm that has created an alternate reality that builds on the naivete and laziness of the Western psyche as well as an Israel lulled into complacency.

Make no mistake – October 7th was the culmination of decades of planning, strategizing, coordinating, and enlisting. It was an excellent plan. If it had gone as planned they would have seen their dream of a new Middle East realized.

Israel didn’t get one plane or helicopter into the air for 8 full hours. Israeli civilians were left to the mercy of barbaric murderers, with only sparse, ridiculously small groups of IDF soldiers trying to stem the tide of thousands of Hamas terrorists and Gaza civilians who stormed the flimsy fence. Only their own bloodthirsty culture, which focuses on death and the extinction of Jews, ruined their plan. If they had not been stalled by the joy of seeing several thousand Israeli young people running for their lives from the Nova Music Festival of Peace and Love, or the thrill of decapitating people, burning babies alive in front of their mothers or gang-raping young women while forcing their boyfriends to watch before murdering them, they could’ve been all the way to Tel Aviv and northward before Israel recovered from the shock and lack of preparedness.

Hezbollah was caught off guard. Apparently, the original plan had been for a two-pronged attack; Hamas from the South and Hezbollah from the North. But the Nova Music Festival was too tempting for Hamas and Hezbollah was not yet ready to join in.

One of my pet peeves is people who use the language of the Holocaust in political argument about our 21st world. However, we are in a war for the very continuation of the State of Israel – nothing less – in a world that is showing itself to be unfriendly to Jews at best and anti-Semitic altogether at worst. Israel is our homeland and only safe refuge in this topsy-turvy world. The Holocaust proved unequivocally that we can never again allow ourselves to be dependent on other police, army, government, or people. In the mere 79 years since 6 million Jews were murdered while others stood by or collaborated, it seems that much of the world – many of them Jewish – have forgotten or convinced themselves that it could never happen again.

October 7th should have destroyed that alternate reality.

Hamas must be wiped out totally and irrevocably. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is living in an alternate reality; one that doesn’t bode well for the world.