We live within a plethora of competing world views, and people are prone to falling under the spell of any number. Everybody's got a story to tell. Everybody's got a narrative. Each narrative a world unto its own. There's a narrative that exposes the Elites and their evil designs, another narrative the shining city on a hill, the sea to shining sea narrative, the God bless America and make her great again narrative, a narrative of manifest destiny. Everybody's got a story to tell, a narrative to give meaning and provide a roadmap to a future. It's a maze of possibilities, and if you know how to listen, you can hear these days a primal scream in the collective soul of a nation. If you're of a certain mind, of a certain narrative, you can feel a psychic pain as deep as any yet known in your life. You can see that the Hopi and the Kogi are right, and we Westerners really do have blinders on our eyes, and a steel trap around our hearts. There's a narrative that understands we have brought a certain condition upon ourselves, centuries in the making. Forged in the conquest of pre civilized humans in every corner and the harnessing of nature's bounty without understanding our place in the scheme of things. The scheme at the heart of a narrative that finds no pleasure in this time and place, this America of 2017.
When I graduated from high school in the mid 60's, I had been completely brainwashed by the sea to shining sea, manifest destiny BS narrative. That's how American history had been taught. I'm not sure, but maybe it still is taught that way in grammar school and high schools. This must be the roots of that other crock narrative of modern times, American exceptionalism. And, you know, it's just the nature of things that history is written and taught from the perspective of the victors. Only in the late 60's did we begin to see minority studies ascend in the social science departments of colleges. Black studies, women studies, Native American studies. Maybe partly in response to the Vietnam War, which, for many on the Left, eroded the fantasy that America was always on the side of the good guys. We always wore the white hats. Part and parcel of the notion that the United States was somehow special. On the far reaches of the American right, patriotism merged with that brand of American Christianity that assumed without question that God himself had ordained that America was a nation apart, intended to lead all humanity into a brighter future. There is no doubt in my mind that that fundamental faith is at the roots of the "make America great" mantra that Trump rode to victory.
And in revisiting the Vietnam Era, the last time divisiveness reached a toxic level in the body politic and social fabric comparable to the present, it's no surprise that the refrain most often used by the Right in those days, and directed against the anti-war movement and so-called counter culture, was not "make America great again", but rather "America, love it or leave it". Those whose patriotism was wedded to the idea America was not only uniquely ordained by God himself, but that the Left and the anti-war movement were those who hated America and gave comfort and support to the enemy. And incubated at the same time was a division present almost from the start, long before divisiveness reached toxic levels. Urban America vs Rural America.
It may be difficult to understand why it should be that way, but there's little question urban areas are where new ideas, new lifestyles, and the mixing of cultures occurs, more so then in conservative rural areas. Mass and instantaneous communication, has erased that distinction to some degree, but it seems there has always been these two Americas, the one liberal and free thinking, and experimental, the other conservative, and bearers of "traditional values". The religious right has always been stronger in rural areas. Rural upstate New York was called the "burnt over district" in the first half of the 19th century as uniquely American forms of conservative Christianity flourished. No surprise that Mormonism first saw expression there in the person and words of Joseph Smith. I'm not Mormon, but it has always fascinated me as the single most uniquely American variant of the Christian faith, one that actually transposed Old Testement narrative to the shores of America itself, creating an alternate history of the New World in the process. Yet, at the same time the American religious Right, apart from the unique Mormon faith, strikes me as a form of the Christian faith more mentally unbalanced then any other exponent of that faith. Give me 1st or 2nd century Christian Gnosticism any day of the week.
We are in a civil war even as I write. It's a culture war, and in politics, a war waged between political parties that is far more toxic for anybody's good. This is not the nation, the "American history as a God ordained fantasy" of my grade school and high school days. And it never really was. History is too often the narrative of the victors, and it can be an eye opener to realize history is always a narrative that can be related just as effectively, and with as much truth, if not more, when viewed from the perspective of the vanquished. The Kogi are the sole surviving culture tied directly to the high civilizations of ancient Mesoamerica. Their near inaccessible isolation protected them. They enforce that isolation to this day. But, in recent years, they chose to speak to whom they call "younger brother", the people of the West, to allow us to see history through their narrative, and they did so solely to warn us of what they see is the environmental havoc wrought by a culture that mistakes it's place in the scheme of things. When one views American history through Kogi eyes, the divisions of Right and Left are almost meaningless compared to that error more fundamental to our culture in general. The inability to understand the place of the human species in the scheme of the natural order. Can I blame the assumption, long held by some, that the Earth and its bounty was intended by God to be for the use of humans? I'm not sure, but the squirrel I feed at the door every day, because her teeth are smashed and she can't crack nuts at all, is my fellow passenger on spaceship Earth, and has as much right to live as I do. And I see that Trump and Pruitt and their fellow destroyers of the regulatory state have a much different idea of life on Earth then I do. A much different narrative of history then the Kogi do. The world that Trump envisions is rooted in Ignorance, the world that the Kogi envision rooted in Wisdom.
It would seem the latter stands not a chance, and the former is driving us to the brink. I don't need or want all those old narratives from grade school anymore. I'm free from all that brainwashing. There are only two outcomes to history's timeline that work for me. In one, mankind, despite its diversity of faiths, races, cultures, etc, finally learns to get along, finally realizes we've only this one fragile world and we need to act as stewards to this beautiful blue ball in space. In the other, by natural or human wrought disaster, civilization collapses, much of humanity dies, and the pockets of pre civilized humans that survive yet, represent our species once more. And life, presently undergoing the 6th great extinction event, one caused by our own actions, rebounds. Back to the garden we go. And maybe new myths develop about the time a great civilization enveloped the world, and in its blindness and ignorance, destroyed itself once more.
