What If White Men had Tilled Their Own Crops
I have spent some time trying to imagine the world we would be living in if the white men had tilled their own crops for 2 centuries, if natives had co-governed North America especially in regard to resource extraction, if women had all along shared power and informed it with the direct biological experience of making and nurturing new life. Would we still have technological and economic development? Would we have more equitable distribution of wealth? What would life be like in a country that wasn’t based centuries of genocide, theft and enslavement?I can’t fathom the delusion, ignorance and justification that would allow, over the span of 100 years, a culture to murder 9.7 million indigenous men, women and children and steal their land; to kidnap, torture and steal the labor of 12 Million black men women and children; to keep all of the women of the land in secondary servitude without a vote, living as property; to rape and pillage the kingdoms of nature, to rob the the land of her animals, minerals and resources without regard for future generations… and to still keep a concept of themselves as “great”… to think it was owed to them. To think they were “self-made men” or “the land of the free.”Anyone studying restorative justice or transformative justice knows this. The healing begins when you own your crime, and actually feel the victim impact. The healing of America begins with looking it square in the eye and saying: we did this.If you do this then you might weep, America, you might fall to your knees in sorrow. Only from this place of not being numb do we have any possibility of actually becoming great, and not just repeating the story of pervasive disrespect for life itself, which continues right here now with South American migrants who come to labor in our land, or the ongoing export of war to the world.There can be restitution, reparations and a new reality. But not until we own it as a nation, not just on the fringes.#BendingtheBow #mendingamerica #BeingActuallyGreat #SocialJustice