For the next few weeks I will be in Mexico visiting the west coast and living in the hot weather. This is a stark contrast, weather wise, from my home in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
The temperature is about 89 throughout the day contrasted with 58 in the Northwest.
I will have more to say about my stay in Mexico tomorrow.
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Politics in any country is a rough and tumble business. In the ideal politics is a process of persuasion where individuals called political leaders have the duty to inform the population, to educate the population with the facts in an effort to persuade people to form a common opinion on a topic. The emergence of tough and complex issues like energy and environmental policies aimed at dealing with the adverse affects of climate change, and health reform challenge politicians and the population to engage politics in the ideal sense or to engage in bully mob rule. The Republican Party in the United States has chosen to engage the tough issues of the day with bully mob rule.
In the presidential election year of 2000 the Republican Party chose to use bully mob rule to intimidate people to oppose efforts carefully recount votes to determine who won the state of Florida. Organized “hooligans” threatened, shouted, and otherwise forced their views to disrupt the recount process. Fear seems to drive the Republican party and its leaders to act hysterically and to threaten and intimidate voters. Reminiscent of fascist and Bolshevik tactics in the 1920s and 1930s, the Republican party seems to have lost its way … giving up on the political process of persuasion.
With the developing debate about health reform in the US, Insurance company and pharmaceutical company supported Republican party activists began in August during the Congressional recess to use town hall meetings with congressmen as venues to engage in “hooliganism,” bully mob intimidation of public officials and ordinary citizens. This is a corruption of the political system. This is not politics. This is not a policy debate. This is a form of political violence that corrupts democracy.
Republican organized bully mobs in town hall meetings is not politics. This is a betrayal of the political process that denies American citizens the benefits of their own governing process. Republican destructive political behavior must be rejected by the public. If it isn’t then hooliganism will become increasingly used to force political change favorable to a few corporate interests or other narrow interests upending democracy in the United States.
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When the salutation, “All my relations” is spoken or written these days, many people think this quaint and perhaps a little presumptuous. But, the expression has always expressed a deep and timeless connection between people that celebrates relationships between people, places and other beings. “All my relations” also speaks to a collective memory among people that extends back deep into the beginning.
In the western hemisphere including Greenland and the far eastern part of the Eurasian continent that touches Alaska and Japan we recognize a human family spread out, living in different climates and ecosystems. The differences are responses to the place, plants, animals and view of the sky. The sameness of members of a vast family bespeaks a distant root branched out over the continents. There is one family of native peoples making up the whole, but many cultures with different languages, social practices, economic activities, and ways of praising grandmother and grandfather.
Long told in stories and remembered in numerous ways, the connection between native peoples in the western hemisphere have remained a constant. Origin stories, legends, songs and dances reach into the distant past and give in metaphor the details of the passage into this world. Now, according to Science News the biological tracers have been identified by deductive science to affirm what has long been known among the original peoples in the western hemisphere: We are all related.
There are many important differences between native peoples throughout the hemisphere and virtually all have to do with culture; though it is often the case the customs, cultural practices are often similar if not always exactly the same. The use of song, dance, stories, hunting methods, transportation and even sometimes eating habits are the same or very similar.
It is and always has been true that we have connection between peoples in this hemisphere even as it is true for peoples on other continents. With respect and dignity we salute our friends and family with “All my relations.”
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