Response to the Bernie or Bust question--First Americans group
I want to thank First American group people for keeping this a peaceful little oasis here at DU. It's interesting that the Hillary v. Bernie bickering hasn't taken hold here at all, which is nice. Because, while I really wish indigenous issues would get more attention during these national elections, I'm also grateful that the Native vote has not become the sort of political football -- kicked, thrown, slammed-in-the-end-zone or fumbled -- that the African American Vote™ has become. Safety in insignificant numbers, I guess.
Anyway, although I have been lurking at DU for several years, it's only in the last few months that I started participating, mostly just the fun of lobbing an occasional water balloon into the pro-wrestling spectacle that is GD-P. I support Bernie (I think he'll be the best president Indian Country has ever seen, surpassing even President Obama, who has turned out to be pretty damn good so far). In the few cases where I've wanted to point out Bernie's receptiveness to Native voters, I've tried to keep it in GD-P or the Bernie group rather than here.
Yesterday, I posted my response to the "Bernie or Bust" bashing over there:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12511440480
I really wanted to post it here. So, forgive me for bringing this row into here, but you're the people I was aiming for.
Here's the relevant part of that post.
I won't settle for second-best. I won't settle for pragmatic, incremental progress.
According to yet another divisive opinion, this one in the Guardian, and subject of a DU post, my self-righteous insistence is a result of white privilege, because only affluent white progressives can afford the privilege of being so picky.
. . .
Half of my family has been in what is now the U.S. for thousands of years, ever since migrating down the glaciers from interior Canada. For most of those millennia things were quite good, privileged with plenty of food and enough wealth to share around.
Then the Russians came with their diseases, and things got worse.
Then the Boston Men came in their gunboats, and things suddenly got much worse. The U.S. Navy destroyed my family's town: bombarded it and then burned what was left, leaving the survivors with no winter stores. Eventually the town was rebuilt.
Then the Yankee missionaries came, and things got still worse again. The church men convinced the people that they were hell-bound sinners. They burned their totem poles, burned their regalia and any other sign of their culture; they suppressed their language and marriage customs; they moved out of their clan houses and into respectable American single-family dwellings (each needing a separate source of heat, the fuel oil conveniently sold by...guess who!). They sent their kids away to boarding schools. The cultural destruction and public burning was continuing in 1992.
Then the businessmen came, and grabbed up all the resources. They continue grabbing today.
Still, over the last hundred years or so, things have gotten gradually, incrementally better, less dramatic than bombing and burning, anyway. Not so much better for the young ones who decide suicide is a good choice. Or drugs. Or alcohol. (Hooch is the one word from their language that has been absorbed into English.) But better, generally -- mostly for those who more fully adopted the American life-style -- so there is an awareness of incremental improvement.
All this history, it is a kind of privilege: fear isn't going to work. Eight years of Big Hands or Booger Eater in the White House is not that scary to the kind of people who preserved an un-exploded Navy bomb in their homes for 140 years, because it was part of their town's history, and sacred in the sense of at.oow, a thing that defines them, paid for by lives. Fear isn't going to work. Another generation of conservative bigotry on the Supreme Court is not that scary to people who have hardly seen anything but bigotry there.
Is perfection the enemy of the good? Yeah, maybe, but the best is by definition better than second-best, isn't it? Self-righteous? Yeah, maybe. Sacrifice? A single vote in one election -- yeah, maybe. Life is full of loyalties, some more dear than others.
There's a long memory active here: our ancestors are never gone, they're always here, now. Our descendants are not away in the future: they're here, now. They're watching.
I can't afford to support second-best. I can't afford to choose the lesser of two evils. I can't afford to settle for "not as bad as the other guy," that idle threat. To be a good ancestor, for the sake of my descendants -- and yours too, by the way -- I can't afford it. I can't afford not to be idle no more.
It's not simply a matter of privilege: it's a matter of perspective.
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