Such Native Roots

There’s an interesting store in the local mall that had intrigued me for a long time. I’ve never been inside until today; I just passed by the window display and tried to ignore it every time. Occasionally I took pictures of the same two t-shirts, a red and a green one. One day the store was empty and another merchant was occupying the space. I made a mental note of relief that it was gone.

Today I found “Native Roots” in a different part of the mall, occupying a slightly larger space. I decided to go inside and strike up a conversation with the shop assistant. I passed by beautiful hand-made native knick-knacks, adorned leather, some beads, jewelry, some colorful dresses, wooden boxes, belts, and other unique items you can’t find anywhere else.

An entire wall had nicely folded t-shirts on wooden shelves, the very same two t-shirts I had passed by for years in the window of the previous location. I assumed such native items are very popular in the upscale mall in Fairfax County, one of the richest counties in the nation. How else could they afford the expensive rent?

The shop assistant was a native Ecuadorian who was proud of their help for the native tribe whose wares they were selling. She did not mention the name of the tribe or whether the tribe was Native American or an indigenous tribe from Ecuador. I only hope their stuff was not made in China.

I brought up the two t-shirts that had bothered me for a long time – still prominently displayed and sold in numerous colors. One was adorned with pictures of Indian chiefs with the phrase, “Homeland Security – Fighting Terrorism since 1492.” The second t-shirt was a composite of four Indian chiefs superimposed over the American Presidents on Mount Rushmore, with the words, “The Original Founding Fathers.”

I am a naturalized American citizen and I certainly resent the fact that I and my fellow Americans are called terrorists by these people. I asked the woman how she felt about those t-shirts. She responded that this is the Native Americans’ country and we are all terrorists because we took it away from them in 1492 when Columbus discovered America. What does that make you, I asked her? She gave me a blank stare.

I also asked her what the name of the country was when Columbus discovered it. Which tribe was killing their neighboring tribe for supremacy at the time? Do nomadic tribes living here and there make up a country and how do you claim a country? Do borders, language, and culture make up a country? If not, how do you define a country? She did not answer any of my questions, she just shrugged her shoulders.

I am not sure what these Indian chiefs, “original founding fathers,” have founded. She wasn’t able to clarify that matter either.

I tried to explain to her that commerce is based on appeasing all customers; she and the owner of the store must be appeasing the hate-fringe in America who believes that we have no right to our own country because we took it unjustly from natives. There is not one country on the planet that was not established either by occupation, conquest through war, or through a massive land purchase.

How did she expect the rest of America to buy her hand-made merchandise when she is calling her customers terrorists? What kind of business model is this? It seems to me like a business model built on hate, on disrespecting the country that has taken her in as a resident, legal or illegal.

She told me in her broken English that I should address those questions to her Ecuadorian boss.

Propaganda, Totalitarians, and Somnambulism

Propaganda indoctrination springing from totalitarian regimes can have two human reactions: apathy and indifference to everything happening around you, admitting to yourself that there is nothing you can do about it, or the intense desire to study and understand it as if that process alone begins to redress what is wrong with such a system.

Take for example, the much maligned and hated Christopher Columbus. It is not possible that one single human being had caused all the havoc the leftist academia and their worshippers are heaping upon his memory.

Columbus managed to sail his way to the new world, and on October 12, 1492 sighted land, probably Watling Island in the Bahamas, even though he was looking for a western passage to China and India. There is such rabid leftist and misplaced hatred for this man as if he was the biggest genocidal maniac in the history of the world. The cause of such virulent reactions is likely the decades of propaganda indoctrination in schools masquerading as history.

“Totalitarians are very ingenious in arousing latent guilt in us by repeating over and over again how criminally the Western world has acted toward innocent and peaceful people.” (Dr. Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind, p. 71)

Can we coexist with a totalitarian system?  It is highly unlikely because the definition of coexistence of the totalitarian is quite different from the definition of the free citizen, living in peace with one another. To a totalitarian, coexistence means total subordination to their whims, plans, and ideology. “The psychological roots of totalitarianism are usually irrational, destructive, and primitive, though disguised behind some ideology.” (p. 74)

The citizens of totalitarianism become robots, speak in whispers, and look over their shoulders, officially bombarded by speeches and slogans that are empty and devoid of meaning and logic. Human beings must conform to survive and thus become robots. Man becomes mentally coerced and intimidated. Humans then become herds of sheeple—indoctrinated by enthusiasm and happy expectations for promised change and then followed and replaced by feelings of terror and panic. Dr. Meerloo calls it “personal and political somnambulism” or sleepwalking. (p. 82)

In the March 7, 1968 episode of Dragnet, titled “The Big Departure,” teenagers are determined to start their own country on an island off the coast of California. To finance this new country, they are caught shoplifting, and the infamous Jack Webb gives them a lecture that seems fitting even today. http://www.itsworthashare.com/jack-webbs-the-big-departure-speech-still-holds-true-today/#isGACLTqKEAVq3Af.99

Every generation feels dissatisfied with what they possess even though they have opportunities and wealth that other nations can only dream of, but they expect the world to understand their misplaced dissatisfaction. Without a real poverty baseline or point of reference, they have no idea how well off they truly are when compared to other nations or other points in history. Nothing is ever perfect but usually each generation lives better than the previous one.

“You are taller, stronger, better educated, and you live longer than the last generation. And we don’t think that’s all together bad. You probably have never seen a quarantine sign on your neighbor’s door, diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough. Probably none of your classmates have been crippled with polio,” said the Dragnet character Jack Webb.

Leftist academia is quick to point out that Americans are war mongers and thus immoral. But a lot of people around the world are “free today to make their own mistakes because of it” and to spew the venom of progressivism.

“You are in a hurry, you grew up on instant orange juice, flip a dial--instant entertainment, dial seven digits--instant communication, turn a key, push a pedal--instant transportation, flash a card--instant money, push a few buttons--solve a problem, but some problems you cannot get quick answers to no matter how much you want them.”

You want equality, social justice, instant gratification and reward without effort. How can you justify stealing from the rich and the middle class and giving to the welfare class as “entitlements” when they never made an effort to earn it, paid taxes into such a fund, nor were they entitled to? How can you hurt somebody or steal from someone who was never responsible for the wrongs of the past? Where is the social justice in that?

Jack Webb’s advice resonates for people with experience and common sense. “Don’t break things up in the name of progress. Don’t break a stick over someone’s head to get them to see the light. Be careful of his rights! Your property, your rights, and your person are not any better than his. And next time, you may be the one to get it. You knew a man who killed six million people and called it social improvement.”  A new country will never solve your problems-- just make the old one work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZo2hhvvlpw (Dragnet, Jack Webb’s the Big Departure speech)

A 1981 movie, My Dinner with Andre, explained reality through the lens of boredom, an “unconscious, self-perpetuating form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money.” In this theory, the process of boredom makes a person fall asleep and a sleeping individual cannot say no.

“I met this Swedish physicist who told me that he no longer watches television, reads newspapers, completely cuts them out of his life, because he really does feel the wind leading into some kind of Orwellian nightmare and everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot,” explained one of the characters.

New Yorkers, he said, are a classic example of people who want to leave their town but they can’t because “New York is the model for the new concentration camp that has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards and they have this pride, they built their own prison and they live in this state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners and, as a result may have lost the capacity and the ability, having been lobotomized, to leave or even see it as a prison.”  

He lamented that he and his friends should get out but “the problem is where to go because it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction.”

He continued, “It’s quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before it was extinguished, and this is the beginning of the rest of the future. From now on, all there is going to be around are these robots, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there will be nobody left around to remind them that there was once a species called a human being with feelings and thoughts, and history and memory are now being erased, and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet.”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68JLWyPxt7g