OCTOBER - EPISODE X: FALL 2019

WISDOM OF THE SAGES
EPISODE X: FALL 2019

Hello People of the World;

Wow, I mean it isn’t as if we don’t have a history of it getting cold in the fall. It has snowed no on Halloween and we are freaking the fuck out. Hey, it snows sometimes on Halloween. Yeah?

 All right, let’s get going:

1:[ We turning into a Touch Screen Society. Almost everywhere has a touch screen that renders us service in some form. The theater I work at has installed several touch screen stations where you can order tickets and food. The banks have them in the ATMs and I recently went to a Mc Donald’s where I was shown to use one rather than interact with a human being. Is that where we are heading as a society?

2:[ Speaking of McD’s: after I made my order and sat down to wait. I noticed that the servers tried their best to not interact with anyone who came in, instead turning them to the touch screens. I noted that one person sort of looked through the menu options before moving on to the server. Who steered them back to another touch screen to make his order. Meanwhile, the touch screen he was just at, the screen changed after about five minutes with the usual lapse-time response text screen: “Are you considering other tasty options?”.

It made me think that maybe they should have added more snarky responses if no one comes back to the screen a minute or so after the automated lapsed-time text screen. Something like: “Am I talking to myself?”, then “Hello?”. Then finally, “Yeah. I’m talking to myself.”

I think that would be funny.

3:[ I don’t know why people hate pumpkin spice suddenly. I have no issue with people who like pumpkins spice anything. Go ahead, you do you, folks….

4:[ Not really interested in seeing “The Joker”. Though I recently saw a couple of really good movies – “My Name is Dolomite” and “Fast Color”. Both I would add to the Best of 2019 list. I had ordered “Fast Color” online after seeing snippets of it at the ICON. It looked good but it only ran two weeks. SO, as soon as I found it online I ordered and I was not disappointed….

5:[ The Native American Movie Riffing Project may be dead as a Community Collaborative Project but my friend Dave and I are set to revive it as a smaller project with a select few writers. We already recruited a new writer/collaborator and we will be rolling toward a February 2020 recording after a series of writing sessions. So, stay tuned for that!

6:[ I read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’ “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” recently and it really changed how I view any US “historical” novel or text. If it does not cover the Indigenous of the Americas, it is incomplete or a fabrication. But, after reading it I felt that I would not get a deep read of “Founding Myth: Ho Christian Nationalism is Un-American” by Andrew Seidel. I was worried that I would view it with that same lens of the missing Indigenous.

Yet, while it rarely mentioned Indigenous peoples historically, it did remind me of what a secular document the US Constitution is and how it was meant to be. How our government is supposed to be irreligious to ensure religious rights for everyone not a select religion. I did end up gaining a lot of out the book. Most especially in connect to my own atheism and how I fit into the American society.

Then, I began reading the Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese adaptation “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States: For Young People” to see how they adapted the book for the school set. For the first five chapters, they follow it pretty well, making the more complex things easier to understand.

Then, I ran into a big issue for me. The two authors paint a tenuous connect between the US Constitution and the concept of the Covenant with God in connection with taking the land from the Natives. Now, Christianity has long been used for the purpose of land theft from Natives and dealing with us. But I could not get past the very slight connect the authors try to make to the Constitution, a secular document. It bothers me greatly that I could not read on further, practically nullifying my enjoyment of the book.

To me, an atheist, I feel that is a misrepresentation of the document. The Constitution itself, once ratified, came under fire from leading Christian leaders fo the time for being a very secular document and not mentioning or connecting to God once. If seems the authors of “Indigenous Peoples’ History…” use the Declaration of Independence’s use of the word “Providence” to make that connect and offer no reference or note on how it is connected to the Constitution. This, I feel, misrepresents the US Constitution and its secular being. It also could empower white nationalists and Christian nationalists, supporting that there is a divine connection to the Constitution and strengthen their position. A tenuous connection does not make a fact.

To me, the bigger actual scandal the book could make a case for is how, with this document in place that guarantees every citizen’s right to believe, or not believe in religion and that all citizens are equal under the law; that, the Constitution’s writers and later forms of government owned and supported slavery, helped Christianity gain a foothold in Native communities, and ignored their own treaties to take the land. To me, that is the biggest issue, that still continues to this day. Making the US Constitution into a Covenant with God for Land Stealing is a narrative as false as any history that does not include the Native Americans.

I think I will write the authors and see if they would alter this in future editions. But first I must research the notes Seidel provide to strengthen my case. Stay tuned….

7:[ On a sad note, our dog Molly died last week. I will write something for our beloved puppy soon and post it on the other blog. Again. Stay tuned.

That is it for this month.

Halloween is here. It is crazy how fast time seems to be passing. I am always interested in what happens next. We’ll see.

As always, I invite you to comment, correct, or contradict anything I write here. I am open to a critical debate. Thanks for taking the time to check out what I write here and I will see you in a month.

Until next time, remember “I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control everything really are.”

2019 Ernest M Whiteman III