Note to Self: The Indians Fought Back

Are you going to hand over your land and neighborhood without a fight? 

A big, bad world waiting to eat you up

My family lives upstate New York on a farm two hours north of Manhattan.  Columbia County, New York has about the same population density as the state Wyoming — very rural.  From Boston to Northern Virginia, just around the corner from us, there is a densely populated region, like the Rhineland in Germany, or parts of Asia. 

The mid-Atlantic corridor is different than the comparable parts of Asia and Europe, though: you can’t drive two hours from some spot on the Rhine and find a place with open space like Wyoming. 

When we’re home, it’s easy to forget how extensive the suburban malls are, how close all these cities are jammed together, metro areas bleeding into each other with no clear rural areas in between, at least within about 100 miles of the coast. 

Here’s a model: As settlers moved west and met new Indian tribes, the first Europeans were traders, looking for an advantage by taking the risk of going further than the competition.  These traders often married local women and learned the local language.  They didn’t come with an army and seemed pretty innocuous. 

Then came missionaries.  The first missionaries might have offended local sensibilities, but they were also not interested in annihilating the population.  They also often offered education and, later, some protection from legal theft of the Indians land.  Only when it was too late did the land speculators and soldiers move in and only then did the Indians realize how massive and powerful civilization they encountered was…

I think this model is probably wrong in a lot of cases.  The Iroquois, for example, dealt with Europeans for 200 years.  Other tribes certainly had to know something about the world of trains, industrial production, large cities, even as they only met a few settlers.  It’s not that they didn’t know how big and powerful the newcomers were, it’s that it was impossible to imagine that they would be swept away and their land taken.  I mean, just look: these woods, these rivers, how could anyone take this from us?  I’m not that different, as I look out at my sheep here in Columbia County. 

I think about what the Indians were thinking when I imagine Columbia County ruined in a few years.  Sprawl, ugly, standardized, all magic obliterated, local knowledge rendered useless, farms wrecked, traffic, more ugly, for nothing.  It’s coming. 

No it’s here: creeping in, like the missionary’s brother, just setting up a little farm, then his buddy with a trading post, next thing you know, boom, your land is destroyed. 

Off to the city

But we went off to the city through endless suburbs this week.  We spent a piece of our spring break in New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC this week.  Here are some more take away points from this trip:

Socialism works.  Washington DC is very nice.  The fact that the place is clean, safe, beautiful, with good education options and plenty of public land for recreation, lots of museums and cultural institutions, efficient public transportation, proves that socialism works.  The federal government wants Washington to be nice, so it is.  If the government wanted the small city of Rensselaer, New York to be nice, it would be.  But no.  The government doesn’t want McDowell County West Virginia to be prosperous, well-run, and nice.  It would be straightforward to make Detroit nice.  Just look at DC.  Rugged individualism, the entrepreneurial spirit, the creative energy of capitalism: none of these had squat to do with the economy and infrastructure of Washington DC.  The capital is a planned city with an entirely socialist-based economy.  Affordable housing would be easy to achieve.  Not without some socialism, though.  We live in the racist past we say we left behind.  The United States has a brutal caste system, similar to South Africa under apartheid.  Sure, there are some Black and Latino people in well-paying, prestigious office jobs in DC.  There are many native-born White people doing poorly-paid manual labor in the city.  Asians are probably distributed evenly in all sectors.  And there are still well-paid jobs in the middle (like “homeland security” and “law enforcement”).  But, leaving aside the >5% exceptions that only serve to mask and spruce up the rigours of the system as a whole, lower-paid Black and Hispanic people serve White office workers who are far richer.  That’s the economy.  I saw streams of young White people heading downtown to work in offices and similar streams of Black and Hispanic workers heading the opposite way to stock shelves, take care of children, clean houses, plant trees, and deliver packages.  You can just look up and see it.  Clear away the propaganda and don’t read a report in the New York Times, just look at the street.  The divide is probably less stark and the racism less complete in DC than in most other cities, as the government at least should have some inherent incentive to diversify, unlike, say, Google.  But even when its the government driving the agenda, even after eight years of a Black president until just the other day, it’s a caste system, and a pretty firm and hard one.  White college grads ride off to their government, connection-based jobs on their share-a-bike ride and never think anything is amiss.  Just the way it is.  Just the way it is.  The complete web of propaganda, from the education system to the corporate media, include architecture and urban planning.  The web is so complete that almost everyone takes our social arrangement for granted — it has to be as it is — it’s natural.  It’s all a law, like gravity.  Sure, it’d be great to be able to jump over buildings in a single bound, but gravity: what are you going to do?  It would be nice if everyone had the same shot at a cushy job, but, hey, what can you do?  It would be nice if the winners and losers of the system had comparable life-expectancies and qualities of life, so that the competition for advantage did not extend to educational opportunities for the next generation, to healthcare, or anything as basic as how we live, but, hey, it’s all gravity.  Nothing you can do about it.  George Washington sucked.  George Washingon was a piece of shit human being and the fact that we are still glorifying these sinister murders says we think being a evil, greedy pig is a good thing.  What kind of society worships assholes?  A nice place?  Okay, so you say, slavery was accepted in 1790?  Yet, Washington and Jefferson themselves wrote that slavery was wrong over many years.  They kept on making money from it, so it was hard to stop.  Impossible.  But why did Washington have to yank out a slave’s teeth to make his own false teeth?  Couldn’t he have found a less brutal solution?  What kind of monster yanks out a man’s teeth to make himself look better in public?  And we have a city named after this monster? 

When in DC, as they say, follow the money

The reason racism is America’s original sin is that being racist was profitable.  The nation accepted an idea (racism) in order to justify making money (through slavery).  With the union of profit and idea, a softer concept became a harder ideology. 

Many people do not profit directly from being racist, and yet they still are racist.  Vast numbers of White people hurt their own bottom lines, throw away their own money, due to their own racism.  This dynamic has always been true.  But such White people could drift away from racism or at least not proactively act on these ideas if not re-directed by those that have skin in the game, so to speak, by making money with racist ideas. 

Who has the most skin in the skin game in 2018?  Urban, White Democrats and such like elites.  The Democratic-linked elite sits in the same position as slave owners did in 1800: being racist will make them rich.  How?  Gentrification. 

Remember the Indians at the beginning of this essay?  New York, San Francisco, Washington DC: didn’t these cities used to have large Black and Hispanic populations?  What happened?  Democrat-like elites conspired to drive non-Whites out of town.  Not past tense: right now. 

Well, not just gentrification.  Also, private prisons, the whole drug war, mass incarceration industry, etc.  And a lot of more Republican-ish White people got their hands in that pot. 

Still, prisons, housing, education: nothing you can do… it’s like gravity.  White people want something, like a neighborhood, and the Indians, or whoever, have to get out of the way.  That’s just capitalism.  It’s like the weather.  You can’t change it… In fact, you are supposed to keep voting for them for some reason (gun control or because Obama is a cutie or something). 

… or could we?  You know, turn off the TV and think?  Throw away your history books?