What Does Columbus Have to Do with Me?

Today in my Facebook newsfeed I’ve seen lots of “Rethink Columbus Day” posts. Rethinking Columbus Day is an excellent idea. Yes, let’s do. Celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day sounds great to me. But let’s give indigenous peoples—and our children—more than just a day off in the fall.

The “Ocean Blue” story so many of us were told about Columbus was not just a story about someone who lived in the fifteenth century. It was a story about ourselves. Here’s how the story goes: We, Americans of western European descent, are explorers, adventurers, and, yes, conquerors. We are bold and sophisticated, excelling in written language, technology, and learning. We are the good guys in the white hats. We are rugged individualists who rely on our own ingenuity and resourcefulness to cross the ocean, the continent, the world.

But just under the surface of the myth lies the bloody truth: western Europeans raped and pillaged the people Columbus “discovered”; they terrorized them with their brutality and forced them into slavery. The truth should make us squirm. This is a discomfort we need to sit with for a while.

We are not who we were told we are. We are not who we thought. No white horses, no white hats. We are descendants of arrogant, avaricious imperialists who thought the only possible value of indigenous peoples of any continent was their monetary value as slaves. I am not saying that we are culpable for our ancestors sins, but I am saying that we are still living with their effects. And until we realize that, and soberly weigh our ancestors’ beliefs and culture—and our own, which stem at least in part from theirs—we will not be able to adequately address the violence, greed, and arrogance from which we sprang.

No, not everything we inherited from our predecessors’ culture is bad. But neither is it nearly so squeaky clean nor so heroic as we once believed. If we believe the lies we tell about our ancestors, we will believe the lies we tell about ourselves. But if we honestly and soberly assess our forebears, we’re much more likely to be able to honestly and soberly assess ourselves. Imperialism is not just a sin of the past. It has not vanished; it has changed its form and focus. Neither are racism, arrogance, and greed confined to the past. There is no virtue in wallowing in guilt or angst, but a sober and truthful assessment of who we were and who we are is necessary if we are to make real progress in the things that really matter. And I believe that when all is said and done, what really matters is how we treat each other, and by “each other” I mean our fellow human beings.

If how you see your ancestors affects how you see yourself (and it does), then so too does how you treat others—all others. If you treat all those you encounter in your life—whether in person, online, in the media, or even just in your imagination—with respect and openness, if you assume that everyone is worthy of your time and attention, then you will also know that you too are worthy. We are not defined by the sins of our ancestors. But the sins of our ancestors will live on until we look at them squarely and see them for what they really are. Then, perhaps, we will be free to cultivate respect and humility and compassion—not only for others, but for ourselves and for our children.

We Need a New Bottom Line

Andrew Weil is right: Even if health care reform with a public option sails right through Congress without a hiccup, it won't begin to approach an accurate or useful diagnosis when it comes to the United States and health care. According to Weil,

What's missing, tragically, is a diagnosis of the real, far more fundamental problem, which is that what's even worse than its stratospheric cost is the fact that American health care doesn't fulfill its prime directive -- it does not help people become or stay healthy. It's not a health care system at all; it's a disease management system, and making the current system cheaper and more accessible will just spread the dysfunction more broadly.

I would go further. The problem with the current system is that it is driven not by the need to provide care and promote health but by the need to make a profit. That's not to say that the people who participate in the system hold this value, but the system itself is designed to promote profit for its stakeholders. That some people may be helped in the process is incidental to the drive for an attractive bottom line.

Fundamentally, at the very heart of what troubles us as a nation is that we have placed the drive for profits way ahead of the well-being of ordinary people. The people decrying health care reform are defending not the needs of people but the needs of corporations. Our agriculture and food systems value profits to the exclusion of the well-being of people and the planet.

The corporations that continue devouring each other and the people and communities who get in their way are absurdly wealthy. They are like a gaping black hole that must be fed regardless of the consequences to the nation and the planet.

Look at the term "bottom line": its original meaning was "the essential or salient point," but now it has come to mean "financial considerations." When are we going to learn to make the well-being of people, families, and communities our national bottom line?

Weil ends his blog as follows:

Washington needs to take a step back and re-examine the entire task with an eye toward achieving the most effective solution, not the cheapest and most expeditious.

Actually, way before Washington steps back, we the people must step back and take a long, hard look at ourselves and what we value. Are we willing, at long last, to put people before profits?

All the loony right-wing scare tactics about "death panels" don't compare with the nightmare that is the current system. Do you really want a corporate bottom-line driving whether your child is able to get a life-saving surgery? Why would a profit-driven entity be more trustworthy than the United States government, which at the very least has the potential for accountability and reform.

Are we ready to turn the corner, to turn off the spigot that dumps all of our hopes and dreams into the endlessly greedy profit-driven black hole? Are we ready to make the well-being of our families, our neighbors, our communities, our nation, the world, and the planet our new bottom line, regardless of how our efforts affect corporate profit margins?

U.S. Military Personnel Victims of Torture

The revelations about the use of torture as an interrogation “technique” have churned many stomachs in the last two weeks. We knew it was bad. We knew it was reprehensible. Now we know more.

Astonishingly, there is still “debate” about the “effectiveness” of torture. Torture’s presumed benefits are altogether beside the point, which is that torture is illegal and morally reprehensible in the extreme.

There are those who claim that the call for investigations and prosecutions is “liberals pushing for retribution.” A vindictive desire for retribution (among other things) was what led to torture. This is not a question of policy differences, as—incredibly—some claim. Rather, it is a question of justice and the restoration of the Rule of Law.

As Ali Soufan said in the New York Times on Wednesday, “This should not be a partisan matter, because it is in our national security interest to regain our position as the world’s foremost defenders of human rights.” And as others have said, it is not a question of right vs. left but of right vs. wrong. In his column today, Paul Krugman wrote, “Never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. 'This government does not torture people,' declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it."

The United States is a very, very powerful nation. We have the responsibility to use that power wisely, not only for the good of our own people but also for the good of the world and the planet. The use of torture is a horrendous abuse of that power. At our best we have been a defender of human rights, and here we are blatantly violating human rights in one of the most atrocious ways imaginable. We have lost our moral footing and any moral authority we may once have had. We as a nation cannot ever defend human rights with any credibility until we fix this. If we do not pursue justice—however politically inconvenient that pursuit may be—we have no hope of regaining whatever moral standing we once had.

We have all been debased by the sanctioning of torture, but none more so than those who had to work in the environments where it was practiced. Kayla Williams, a sergeant in a military intelligence company of the 101st Airborne Division, poignantly asks, What does the act of torture do to those who commit it?

Williams cites the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, in which participants were randomly assigned roles as prisoners and guards. What we learned from that unhappy experiment is that human beings are profoundly susceptible to an environment in which the powerful abuse the powerless. In a 2004 editorial, after the initial release of photos of tortured detainees in Abu Ghraib, Philip G. Zimbardo, author of the Stanford Prison Experiment, queried, “Should these few Army reservists be blamed as the ‘bad apples’ in a good barrel of American soldiers, as our leaders have characterized them? Or are they the once-good apples soured and corrupted by an evil barrel?”

The “once-good apples” may have been the perpetrators of torture, assured by their superior officers that what they were doing was okay, but they are also the victims of those who exposed them to this extraordinary evil. We sent our daughters and sons, sisters and brothers into this morass. They went on our behalf. As scarring as war itself is, the experience of participating in the torture of fellow human beings is much worse.

In 2003, Alyssa Peterson, one of the first female soldiers to die in Iraq, ended her own life a few days after she refused to participate in interrogations involving torture. Kayla Williams, who served with Peterson, reflected: "It [being required to participate in interrogations involving torture] made me think, what are we as humans, that we do this to each other? It made me question my humanity and the humanity of all Americans. It was difficult, and to this day I can no longer think I am a really good person and will do the right thing in the right situation."

Those who serve our country in the military should never be exposed to such anguish and moral torment. Nor should they be further endangered because our enemies, knowing that we torture prisoners, are then that much more likely to torture captured members of the U.S. military.

Those who corrupted the barrel are the ones who should be prosecuted. Those who were forced into that evil barrel deserve our compassion, prayers, and support. Beyond the questions of legality and prosecutions are the questions of how these individuals can recover from the grave evil that befell them in their service to our country, an evil wrought not by our enemies but by our leaders. The first steps in that recovery may well involve investigations and prosecutions of those who corrupted the barrel.

We Are Becoming the Ones

Neocons like to talk about "personal responsibility." This is shorthand for "don't expect the government to fix it for you" (unless you're a bank). This idea is also paraded as "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" (whether you have any or not) and the myth of the "self-made man" (if you're a woman, you can just forget it).

Think for a minute about these images: is it literally possible for a person to pull herself up by her bootstraps? Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines bootstrap as follows: "a looped strap sewed at the side or the rear top of a boot to help in pulling it on." OK. Now imagine yourself sitting on the floor. You're wearing boots, with bootstraps. Now pull yourself up by those bootstraps. Right. Not happening.

And has there ever been a "self-made man," or woman for that matter? No one makes her own self or has only himself to thank for a lifetime of achievements. We are all way more connected to each other than most of us ever realize or acknowledge. We are all reliant on our families, our communities, our teachers, our friends, the kindness of strangers.

Still, there is certainly a place for "personal responsibility." Yes, indeed, you are responsible for your own actions. But responsibility doesn't end there. You are also responsible for how your actions affect those around you. George Lakoff asserts that "social responsibility" involves empathy. "Empathy is not mere sympathy. Putting oneself in the shoes of others brings with it the responsibility to act on that empathy—to be 'our brother's keeper and our sister's keeper'—and to act to improve ourselves, our country, and the world."

So whereas "personal responsibility" may be taken to mean "caring for oneself," "social responsibility" is taking care of others as well: family, community, country, and even members of groups to which one does not belong: other communities, other faiths and belief systems, other countries, other continents.

The raising of personal responsibility to a position of paramount importance, boiling it down to unbridled self-interest and rampant greed, separating it from empathy and social responsibility—these ideological land mines underlie our current crisis, which is way more than an economic crisis. What we are experiencing is a crisis of identity and morality and values.

When we adopt social responsibility and use it to temper and contextualize our personal responsibility, we begin to realize that in the long term all of our destinies are interdependent. My well-being, the well-being of my family, and that of my community are intertwined with the well-being of people living thousands of miles away, people whose language, culture, economic means, and values are very different from my own.

Our baser instincts are to think in terms of "us versus them." This thinking also involves the assumption that there's just not enough for all of us, so we are necessarily in competition with "them" for the stuff we need (or think we need). Our better angels, though, aspire to more than greed and rampant consumerism. They aspire to looking out for the welfare of all in the secure knowledge that everything we need is available to us in abundance.

According to Robert Creamer,

Responsibility for others is not some "soft" or "utopian" value; it is critical to our success and survival on our increasingly crowded planet. More than that, it's the key that will both prevent us from destroying ourselves—and can unlock exponentially expanding human possibility in the 21st century.

So the old "us versus them" needs to grow up and evolve into "we." Notice that, grammatically speaking, us and them are both objects, whereas we is a subject. The objects are acted upon, whereas the subject does the acting. We are the actors; we are taking responsibility, not only for ourselves but for our fellow humans and our fellow creatures and our lovely green planet. We. We are becoming the ones we have been waiting for.

Animal Morality

Andrew Sullivan notes that an article in yesterday's Telegraph reports on research indicating that "monkeys and apes can make judgements about fairness, offer sympathy and help and remember obligations," in other words, that "the findings may demonstrate morality developed through evolution, a view that is likely to antagonise the devoutly religious, who see it as God-given."

Professor Frans de Waal, who led the study at Emory University in Georgia, US, said: "I am not arguing that non-human primates are moral beings but there is enough evidence for the following of social rules to agree that some of the stepping stones towards human morality can be found in other animals."

The Telegraph article opens by asserting that "morality has always been viewed as a human trait that sets us apart from the animals." Humans keep doing this, and science keeps dashing their hopes for being "set apart." It used to be tool use. And war. And culture. Turns out that chimpanzees have many traits we used to consider uniquely human.

News flash: Humans are animals. Humans are on an animal continuum. We are them; they are us.

In a narrowly religious way, some might consider this blasphemous. We are made in God's image. Just us. Not them. We are moral beings. They are not. Right? So when a gorilla rescues and protects a little human, what is that? Amoral? Anyone who has relationships with animals knows better.

Does this mean we are less unique than we thought? Perhaps. Less special? Not at all. Rather than it being a demotion, couldn't we view it as a promotion of the rest of the animal world? The human tendency toward species-centrism and hubris has created all kinds of havoc in this world. It's time for us to develop a new worldview.

Enough of the idea of human beings "set apart" from the rest of creation. It's time for us to embrace our identity as fellow creatures and learn to respect and care for the creation and our fellow creatures. It's time to dispense with the cursed hierarchy and enjoy a flatter and more compassionate worldview.

The animals with whom we share this planet are, in effect, our sisters and brothers. They are worthy of respect, and they have much to teach us, if only we will learn to listen.