In the days of both the Spanish Inquisition and the Mexican Inquisition, imported from Spain by the thugs from the Mediterranean who made contact with the vulnerable farmers, fisher Native people of the Americas– it is documented that various native groups, indigenous familial ideals and people who held to those ideals, were targeted to be destroyed by the gang of thugs who wanted gold. And women. And land. And power over others– to have others grovel before them.
That is, to demean the cultures, faith, families, to have their gathering places, healing places, medicines, rituals, storytellers, poets, artists, healers, village leaders, town criers, craftspersons, holy people, charged falsely and brought to not due process, but tortured emotionally, tortured in spirit, harmed hideously in body… to break them; to put them in shock and a constant state of terror.
If a tortured person survived the withholding of care to heal them from the lash, from having been blinded, burnt, from having their voices stilled by cutting out their tongues, or severing their genitals…and if surviving, that is, ‘repenting’, they were then punished further by being shut off from food supply, adequate health tending, clean water, right of assembly, held without freedom of movement, isolated, left without resource, held away from all basic freedoms to build one’s own culture and to live in one’s own culture, in peace.
A people colonized by a thin crust of men willing to unleash military and weaponry on the populace for contravening them, are not free. Not free from disparagement. Not from false charges. Not free from reductionistic re-defining of the gut issues into foamy intellectualizations and rhetoric. Not from theft of their lands and resources for food. Their women and children are not free. Their elders and kin and clan are no longer free.
Targeting the people who are the heart of the community is an old way to destroy cultures, by smearing their characters, silencing them, killing them. Targeting the ways and means of health and education and ritual is also a malicious way since time out of mind, to destroy a people, so that the people are only left with a self-assigned often maniacal dictator who most often wants to be called Papa, or father, or Daddy.
The targets for destruction in our times: I so hope I am wrong:
National Public Radio
Public Television
Public Air Waves
Free Health Care for Children under Age 2/ now subsidized
Head Start
Health Care for All, regardless of afflictions
Food Coupons
Mortgage deduction
National Endowment for Arts and Humanities
Partly gov’t subsidized health care clinics for women and children and men
Protest against pollution, endangerment of natural and needed water and air
Annual funding sent to several hundred gov recog. Native American tribes
Indian Health Services
Taxing or not of Native Casinos
School Breakfast and Lunch Programs Subsidies
Farmer subsidies
Endangered Species Acts
Pristine Land in National Parks
Protection of water, air, food supply
Medicaid replaced by substandard care
Medicare, same
Private use of Federal Lands
Treasury Dept, valuation/devaluation of dollar
Cross-Border Funds Send Home Policy, already massively expensive
to sender, will this admin raise costs/blockade
money flowing from workers in the USA to their families in Mexico and elsewhere.
Oil, coal, uranium regulation
Energy regulation in consideration of EPA studies
Tobacco, firearms
FDA including consideration of medical cannabis
FCC
Veteran health care, substandard care
Medicines by brand exchanged for weaker ‘generics’
Free choice about physicians
Gov supported orgs of all faiths
Social Security, the only safety net from losing everything, by many
Government Grants that support life, decency, reasoned information gathering
National Mental Health Institute
CDC
Public Schools as good to best education investment
Right to work/ unions
Minimum wage
Small Business Admin
Dept of Defense: The Draft Board
INS
IRS
Trade Balances
Govt Advisor Positions re many many topics critical to various citizens
Gov’t Ethics
Benefits for elected officials
NATO
NAFTA
Debt Carrying re Other Nations since WWII
GLBTQ Equality
HUD, foreclosure policies
SEC regulations
All and any protective regulations
Separation of Church and State
Supreme Court Nomination
Supreme Court Decisions
Federal Judge appoinments…
There are more… Many more.
And typically– back to the Inquisitions– the thugs favored brutalities meant to reduce the resources of beauty, freedoms, creative life, speaking, writing, performance, gathering, theater, caring for one another in ways that are defined by the group at hand instead of ‘king george-esque’ distant ruler who does not have the same needs as others.
Too, during the Inquisitions, there was strong emphases on the use of weasel words, as in our times… we will ‘give you access’… if you willbehave. We will put ‘the choice before you’ if you accept this inferior x or y or z.
….meaning if you have a king’s ransom to relinquish to gain adequate housing, medicines, can travel far to gain services that were once at one’s door, are in goverment with paid-for perks far beyond reach of average person, then you will have ‘access’, you will have ‘choice’… you will be ‘friend’ to the ‘king/queen’ instead of down and out gobsmacked…
and if you somehow have ‘access/choice’ you will be only one of a handful of persons out of 300 Million citizens who can afford to have ‘access’ and ‘choice’, to buy great medicines, surgery when needed, clean food, nourishing food, to have free education, and more.
A dual caste society, continued. The haves. The have-nothingwhatsoevers.
To be brief, though the analogies are profound in the hierarchy of thugs put in high postions in ‘the new world’ [which was to us, our ‘old world’], whether Spanish prelates or thug sailors or greedy gold thieves –there are also the centuries of ‘the conquerers and dictators’ promising and promising and PROMISING that by treaty, the people’s lives would be improved.
But. Every agreement, every contract, every treaty was broken by the thugs. The people became more and more impoverished, and only those who sucked at the leather of the sandals of the thugs, ever barely improved their lot in life.
We’re marching on Saturday under the banner of La Nuestro Señora de Guadalupe, who is not only the Mother of the Conquered, she also is the one who said we should NEVER go down on our knees to any wanna-be conquerer, ever again. Thus we will be marching for Mercy, Love and Decency for All.
We will be in full native ceremonial regalia. Our ancestors… so many died. It’s a miracle to many of us that some lived, and that we come from those souls who somehow managed to survive a holocaust in the 16th century and beyond. We hope the knowing of such will stand us in good progress –to preserve and help and heal and care… and to relentlessly push back if and when consideration of and decency toward souls is needed and is within our reach.