Look to the future...

People, we do NOT need to eat up the potential of our future trying to right every wrong for the past five hundred years. Yes, reparations as proposed are fair, Yes, giving the national forest lands as proposed to first nations is fair. Yes, what Bob proposes foe the Latin American immigrants is fair, and these are the big wrongs we need to make a sufficiently large gesture in good faith to help heal.

After that, however, we need to look to the future, not the past.

The USA, as it currently exists and as its population demographics are trending, is the most culturally diverse and inter-mixed population on Earth. There is a vast potential here to harmonize the wonderful aspects of all these heritages into something greater. That potential is unique in all the world, and as best we know, in all of human history.

We have a very unique opportunity to forge a new brotherhood far greater than anything that has ever been. One based on kindness, compassion, inclusiveness.

Do we really want to squander that in the minutiae of past wrongs?

I don't think that is why we have come together, or why we have been brought together by Creator at this time.

We must shift to a new paradigm. We need all of us if we are to pass this crossroads in history without traipsing off down the road to doom.

This will require *forgiveness* in equal measure to sincere apology. It will require a true embracing of the fact that we are all human despite the colors we come in, from ALL sides. Racism is not just a poison drunk by whites, although my race seems to have been particularly susceptible to it.

Racism is an illusion fostered by the wealthy elites to keep poor people divided. Look at Indentured Servants, company towns, and the sex slave trades in recent history and the current day, and you will see the wealthy have made slaves of the "poorer" whites as well as any other class. This should speak volumes to everyone who is able to step outside the every day and see the big picture.

These same elites control the mass media at every level, and the same media continues outpouring programming at overt and subtle levels in order to perpetuate the divisions that separate those of lesser financial means. Look at the way the nightly news pours out its daily dose of fear, the way record companies pick up savage music full of anger or angst and despair. We are all steeped in this constant barrage of lyrics and images every day. "Programming." An apt description indeed. Think deeply on it.

Can't you see where this leads? How easy has it been for any of us to reach out with any success to those "on the other side?" Why?

The real question is, as always, who benefits from racial and cultural divisions? Who? You? Me? I think not.

If you put five children of five colors speaking the same language together at a young age, too young to have heard racist "programming," do they act as if they know it? None of us are born with these divisions, WE ARE TAUGHT OF THEM. We have all been sold a bill of goods, a one-size-fits-all casket of fear. It is a dis-service that we should write off as a loss and move beyond.

Think forward, think interconnected, think interdependent. I guarantee we are interdependent, and it is up to us to set the quality of it. The tide will not be turned by any one group alone, unless we are all a part of one group.

In solidarity,

Dan Stafford

Robert Mendelson wrote:

>
> Btw, pre-Columbian Indigenous prophets from Canada down into South America were told by Great Spirit that White folks were on the way, so from a strictly Indigenous point-of-view, Creator intended Whites arrive. Hopi prophecies will tell you that. As will Anishinabe. The Cherokee prophecy of Manataka declares Whites and all races are meant to be here together. Indigenous prophets warned their peoples that Whites may be dishonest and greedy regarding the land, and that the First Nations must come together in the forerunner of the United States if the coming-together of the two civilizations were to be peaceful and mutually beneficial.