MY DAVY CROCKETT HAT When I was young, my favorite television program was Davy Crockett. In the show Davy Crockett was portrayed as making the west safe for civilization. It never occurred to me that I was watching the genocide of a people. In all those years, I never once thought to ask why native people would be so angry. The question never even entered my mind. I had learned on television and in school that violence does not begin when the colonizer seizes the land, it begins when the colonized people rise up to resist. When we look out at the world through the eyes of the colonizers there is much we cannot see. Just as the author of Psalm 2 could not understand, neither can the powerful today understand why the heathen rage and attempt to break their chains. Just as the author of that horrifying Psalm did, so do we falsely imagine ourselves to be Gods appointed leaders on earth. As an American, I was taught in school to look at the world through the eyes of the conquerer. Even my childhood games were exercises in domination. In all the years my brothers and I played cowboys and indians I routinely killed them across vast distances with my cap pistol proudly wearing my Davy Crockett hat. They vainly tried to resist with their suction cup arrows. Martin Luther King once said there is a world revolution and America is on the wrong side of it. I do not know how the lowly people of earth will outlast the current invincible empire, but they have outlasted every former invincible empire in history. Every empire falls. Whatever it costs us personally we must renounce imperialism in all its disguises. Our only hope of remaining human lies in casting our fate with the suffering people of the earth -the anvil which has outlasted every hammer.
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 21:30:33 +0000
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