Love, love is a verb

Happy 44 months, my darling wife.

I love and adore you.

I hope we stay together forever.

History Lesson

Last night, as I drove to my weekly French class, I listened to a rebroadcast of author and director Sherman Alexie's speech at the Seattle contingent of the Feb. 15 anti-war protests, it occurred to me that there's a strong sub-reason for why we don't want, as a nation, to get anywhere near the whole idea of reparations for African Americans as part of America's vile slave-holding legacy. Sure, you'll hear reasons given such as "How do we begin to write a check for the pain inflicted?" and "Why do we want to dredge up the past?" and even "Didn't we solve this with the Civil War?"

Yet, there's something I didn't think about until Alexie, a Native American, stated that it was ironic that the United States was so upset about Iraq about "breaking so many treaties" with us. The crowd laughed, getting the tragic in-joke and suddenly a little bit more of history stirred together in my mind. The reason why we don't want to hand out any kind of reparation with regard to African Americans is that the moment the United States sets any sort of precedent with reparation for past, the next group at the door will be Native Americans looking to address the literally centuries of slaughter, abuse, lies and broken treaties performed by the U.S. government.

America would be shattered as a nation if it had to honestly redress all the tribes across the nation. Read any simple map about the collection of tribes in American before white settlers and you'll see there were prominent cultures here...whole peoples, legends, histories and even civilizations. How could the United States begin to repay what happened? How could we heal from this schism?

The trouble is, as time and technology march forward, more children are going to learn about it. History has a funny way of making the truth be known and eventually the United States is going to have to deal with it. Of course, the sinister option is to continue giving Native Americans crappy health care and education, keep them on the reservation, and let a life of sub-standard living kill off anyone who can state an argument that the U.S. does owe the Native American something...a bit like, I'm guessing, how you see Holocaust deniers springing up as the last of the death camp survivors pass on to their final reward. If you have no challenger, you can rewrite history to keep the ghosts further away.

P.S.

Here's a fun bit of trivia: Type in Sherman Alexie's name wrong at Google and you'll get a bunch of transgender sex sites as a result. Oops.

Today’s Word: Stairs

From One Word

My grandmother had a friend named Ruby. They grew old together, lived in different houses on the same street. Ruby was a firebrand who barely cleared four feet. She was full of spirit and love.

A couple years ago, she slipped down her front stairs, went into a coma-like state and later died. She was too wonderful to die that way. We should have been with her.