Burying My Wounded Heart on My Knees

What our government did to the natives is a long forewarning of how she will treat her own prime citizenry.
The US government was more faithful in betraying their treaties with Native Americans than in honoring them. So the famous book title — Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee — recalls a line from a poem which seemed to embody the last refuge of those who have been rendered powerless in every possible way. There is much common ground in the otherworldly outlook of Native American culture and that of the ancient Hebrew. What can you do when all you can touch, see and name has been turned upside down and inside out? If you have no hiding place for your soul outside this world, you are the most miserable of all creatures.
I almost laugh when I hear people throwing fit about some perceived injustice. Over the most pitiful slights they will create a scene worthy of any cheap movie. No one suggests they did not suffer some wrong, only that their response is simply worse. In the name of some small wound they shred everyone around them. When they turn to me for some sign of moral support, more than once I’ve told them to go screw themselves for being so childish. Yes, my granddaughters I would be expected to embrace and carry them through their moment of sorrow, but they have already submitted themselves to my guiding hand, and I will surely teach them better, given time. But I will not be party to a human grade of dirty vengeance arising from a very petty complaint.
“Feelings! Whoa-o-o-o feelings! I wish….” I wish they would stop operating from a child’s sense of justice. Children are natural solipsists; the world revolves around their whims because they are incapable of thinking in any other terms. Part of the definition of the word “adult” presumes you outgrow that limited reasoning capacity.
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s understand something. Your access to that electronic store of value at the bank will be blocked when the banks close at some point down the road. All your retirement accounts and investments are likely to be confiscated in the near future. All your guaranteed government support payments, regardless of the official reason they were granted, will be cut off. That includes my veteran’s pension. Everything tangible will be subject to confiscation without warning or compensation. It won’t matter if you capitalize names or not, there is no invocation the state is bound to honor. There is no law higher than the bureaucratic purpose of keeping the system alive and ascendant as long as possible. When you can stop pretending you expect “the law” to protect you, you may be ready to face reality.
At this point in time, “the law” is little more than a popular cultural notion not shared by those who run things. They belong to another culture. Join yourself to the folks working in any bureaucracy and you will be drowned in the new culture, taught to compartmentalize yourself so your real human conscience is disabled while on duty. That’s the fundamental nature of Western Civilization, to depersonalize the operations of the state and dehumanize everyone involved. When you hold up that fancy gilded crucifix, it won’t stop the vampire army attacking you. Your mythology is of no interest to those with power, except when it serves their lifeless purpose.
We have no idea why God allowed the European settlers to dispossess the natives living here in America, but we can easily understand the barbarism which drove that horrific slaughter and enslavement. Worse than the dead bodies was the lifeless corpse of a morally superior culture left rotting in the sun. Our God says His ways are inscrutable, but He did reveal a value system which condemns what we did. He hasn’t forgotten it, and will hold us accountable for our bottomless greed and violence. The biggest sorrow is not how many innocents will be harmed in the process, but the vast number who were silly enough to buy into that illusion of divine destiny and to believe the lies about their entitlements. God says you have a right to bow before Him voluntarily instead of being thrown prostrate.
Uttering darkly and vehemently, “That ain’t right!” won’t make anything better when the same crushing hand falls on you. All the more so when you somehow expect your words to magically stop the hand of power from squeezing so hard. Get over yourself.
For quite some time the Lord has given me the opportunity to see all this coming, to know it for what it is. I let that silly boy slip back into the nursery and closed the door behind him. I’ve been on my knees, begging for a chance to surrender all the stuff I can’t keep in the first place, and a chance to see with fresh eyes what it means to invest in another world where such evil cannot touch me. You should try it.