December 30, 2001
Rev. Sanders
Third Street Church of God
1246 New Jersey Ave.
Washington DC
Dear Rev. Sanders,
Intelligence, responsibility for actions and decisions, honest assessments, and humility must be in an operative mode. In its stead a mad, idiotic buying and selling of American flags have replaced the natural response to someone having us by the balls. The nation is living in fear, seeing terrorist in every son and daughter of Ishmael, a bomb in every loud sound, a conspiracy in every brown mouth whispering. This is where we are right now, as a nation.
Unknown assailants have us, as a country and as individuals, by the balls in a vice grip and we are play-acting and posturing like our national heroes (our lone wolf heroes, Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Cool Hand Luke, etc.) and President Bush’s image of self, John Wayne? As fathers, mothers, leaders, a group, cities, states, and a country we should be alarmed, shamed, enraged that our President endangers his constituents by disallowing an honest assessment, any revelatory discourse about our foreign policies, actions and approaches in Africa and the Middle East, that fueled the dark intent of the architects of the 9-11 bombings. In its stead we swagger patriotically into combat with an ill-defined enemy leaving the country vulnerable and largely in the dark, ignorant about what is really going on, and seemingly blind to our truths as a nation and a force in global war and politics. A moronic idea to fight and eradicate evil with bombs, technology, and solders has become a rallying cry.
From the November elections to the present Bush isolated and distinguished himself by refusing to participate in the international conference on racism, disregarded the decades of research and findings on global warming, pollution and the obvious solutions. He displays disrespect for the earth and a callous intent towards the poverty of other nations, and he supports any atrocity committed by Israel.
In New York, assassins killed 6,867 (including the missing and the presumed dead), collapsed 450,000 tons of concrete, steel and glass to the earth, destroying in two horrific hours more office space than exists in all of San Francisco’s financial district. 61 countries lost citizens in the bombings. 8 Islamic countries lost citizens. 23% of Americans tried to find out if they had lost someone in the September 11th attack on American soil. 3 U.S. citizens were murdered in anti-Muslim hate attacks. Total monetary damages from the attacks exceeded $70 billion. And into the dark vanished the illusions of American life. The smoke left us with choices, options and history. History with neighbors is almost always exposed to light. A conflict ripe with dangers has within its very make up problem areas to be examined and viewed from various angles with intelligence and detachment.
The issues of race in America are working in the midst of our terror. “Our shit don’t stink, and a need to feel good about themselves, no matter what was done to anyone else” are two elements of the paradigm of white racism exposed and silently challenged by people of color worldwide. Our court-appointed president asks the nation to be patriotic, suspend introspection on the sequence of events that led up to the bombings. He asks Americans and other countries to choose sides and fight on the side of right, freedom and democracy from the point of illusion of who we think we are as a nation, a corporation, and a force in the global community.
Our government excuses any evil, any terror Israel initiates and inflicts on people and no one is supposed to be ‘pissed off’ about this? For fifty years we have bombed countries: Japan, China/Korea (1950’s), Guatemala (54), Indonesia ’58, Cuba (between ‘56-’60), Guatemala ’60, Congo ’64, Laos ‘64-’73, Vietnam ‘61-’73, Cambodia ’69, Guatemala ’67, Libya (’86 we killed his daughter trying to assassinate their leader), Granada ’83, El Salvador & Nicaragua the 1980’s, Panama, Iraq, Sudan ’98 (bombing a chemical plant, An error, We compensated no one.), and Afghanistan in 1999. A few days before the attack on New York guess what we were doing in Iraq? We killed eight people bombing the country!
If the United States of America did not profit from the drug trade, facilitate its manufacturer and distribution, train and create assassins, topple governments, install dictators, commit acts of terror against nations, kill innocents by the thousands, consume such an obscene percentage of the world’s resources, break treaties, lust for war and conflict, sell weapons, technology, and ideas to countries for a season and eventually betray or use them for our own benefit right would be on our side.
If history did not record the chemical warfare used against the First Nations People, or the massacre of innocents at Wounded Knee or Sand Creek, the undeclared war on the Seminoles and the Africans in Florida or record hundreds of broken treaties, the murders or terrorist acts done in the name of the Christ Jesus and Progress, I would wave the flag and take up arms against the schools of terror active in the world today. But I cannot. We created the conditions that led to the September 11th bombing. This country is covered in blood. Like its president the heart is full of war and the mouth is full of pleas for peace and reconciliation and the eyes tell the nature of this dichotomy. Patriotism? We respond to the terror we created with patriotism? Patriotism is not a defense or an offensive. It does not prevent death or shield against terrorism; it merely denies and obscures.
Envy and the larceny of economics has tailored our relationship with many nations alongside a deeply felt urgency to make freedom a part of the world’s people. Racism, commerce, progress, and war are energy foods of a restless nation consumed with the fire of war, dominance and the acquisition of things. We are a complex society. Study is required to fathom the myth of America, the reality of America and the stories of America, the contradictions of America.
Our reaction to September 11 has insured that we will be attacked again and succeeded in sustaining the energy that fuels contempt for our ways and approaches to interacting with the rest of the world. We are allowing an opportunity to heal many wounds and thus usher in a profound healing into the world. This moment will escape detection by most Americans because nationally we reside within a Medicine Wheel of Darkness and we are wealthy, mighty in war and unapologetic.
The Medicine Wheels teach that the circle or the wheel is the religion of the living. All things seek the Circle. The deer, the fox, the dog sleep in a circle. The Womb is an opening, a circle. The world is a circle. The Zero Teachers passed down the greatest of all discoveries: The Zero to the People many centuries ago. The Christian’s creation story says God spoke the world into existence giving their God a mouth from which came the Word. The mouth, the Womb, the entrance to homes of the Ant People, the Mole People, the Snake and the Spider Peoples, an embrace, the nest of birds, the circular path of our lives from birth to resurrection is the Way of, the understanding of the Circle. The paths of the Four Winds move in circles from the North, the South, the East and the West. The Sacred Wheels are teachers, mirrors. Lies circulate around the worlds. Truth circulates within the breast of a knowing soul with courage to speak into the face of opposition. Truth speaks from the eyes and the lives of our children who mirror and mimic the veracity of our beliefs, the stances we hold in the world and the concepts we live by as adults negotiating in the worlds of politics, commerce, development, war, parenting, religion and power. The powers, the mentality, the people who govern America, the governing forces in American spirit and daily living obviously revolve around the Medicine Wheel of Darkness.
South on the wheel of darkness is greed—for physical things, for the manifestation of ideas into the physical through unworthy manipulation and accumulation through theft and, often, abuse.
West envies other’s dreams wanting to take what other people have accomplished.
North is the fixation of ideals, the inability to grow, rigidity of perception so that you no longer see the oneness of life but only your own limited position within it.
East of the wheel is the need for manipulation and control and jealousy
“
Their [the white men’s] Wise Ones said we might have their religion, but when we tried to understand it we found that there were too many kinds of religion among white men for us to understand, and that scarcely two white men agreed which was the right one to learn. This bothered us a good deal until we saw that the white man did not take his religion any more seriously than he did his laws, and that he kept both of them just behind him, like Helpers, to use when they might do him good in his dealings with strangers. These were not our ways. We kept the laws we made and lived our religion. We have never been able to understand the white man, who fools nobody but himself.”—Plenty Coups, Absaroka
Over a hundred years have passed since Plenty Coups voiced the common observation of Native peoples worldwide who were forced into encounters with white people. This is a pivotal moment in history, ripe for healing Wheels to be activated. If ever there was a time to repent of the evils we have wrought, as a nation, it is now. The time to allow nations and their millions to emote, to tell their stories and show how our policies and assumptions have affected, destroyed and altered their lives, is now. Today is the moment to listen. Today is the time to ask for forgiveness and allow healing in others and with our soul. We need to be responsible for what our hands have wrought. Waving the American flag doesn’t mean a damn thing. It is a moronic and weak gesture; shallow before the truths we chose to ignore; pale before our self-righteousness. We cannot expect to live, as we are accustomed to for very long. We have dug our grave and created the means to make our demise a reality at the hands of the Frankenstein’s we created over the decades. Who are we alive in the fields of death and acquisition we own and deny? What are we not learning from the ancient Egyptians and the other nations that reigned for centuries? We are a pitifully young nation; teenagers in fact, making gross acts of power, projecting ourselves into dark places those great entities sought to avoid.
There is a powerful and effective Wheel I have used in the dynamics of my own living development: A Medicine Wheel of Apperception & Balance. I ache and I mourn for my country and her predisposition for war: war on poverty, AIDS, alcoholism, drugs, black people, heart disease, terrorism, etc. I ache to share this Wheel but the nature of the beast cannot recognize itself. If Recognition does not take place the Wheel of Apperception & Balance is ineffective. What our Heart needs our thinking [our Mind] cannot see to accept. Let me grieve now for what will come to pass.
Gregory E Woods
African-Absaroka Indian
