(A letter to fellow members of the dominant culture) ~
By Basheera Ritchie ~
The consequences of hubris ~
We often say we didn’t know, get angry because our schools didn’t teach us, feel guilty about choices we may have made that were harmful at worst, ignorant at best. But the question is, couldn’t we have known at any time? At a certain level, we chose to look the other way–at the bright, exciting futures, money, and possibilities that lie ahead in our own worlds. So absorbed, so busy. And what could we really do about it, anyway?
onegreenplanet.org
Now, however, the dominant culture is crumbling. The bright and shiny futures we bought into are tarnished and not very certain anymore. We begin to see what our “every man for himself” mentality, crafted during the birth of our nation, has created: a planet reeling from abuse; a doctrine of world domination which refuses to heed the Earth’s cry; food, drink, and habits which lead to dis-ease; a segment of the world which believes freedom means the freedom not to care and calls compassion weakness. As you are well aware, there is a lot more to say in this vein!
So it seems very evident to me, and I think to an increasing number of us, that we’ve been doing it all wrong in the name of Might and Money. And now we’re beginning to wonder–now that we’ve been punished by fires, floods, heat, hurricanes, pandemics (even toilet paper shortages!)–if raping the land and extracting all its “resources” might not have been such a good idea. In order to survive, maybe we do need to cooperate. And maybe not just with other people but with the forests and the rivers, and the species we depend upon. And maybe endless expansion isn’t such a good model … Hmmm where could we have turned for models of good stewardship of the land and the plants and animals upon it?
Dwayne Reilander
We called indigenous people impoverished and ignorant because they were uneducated in our ways and uninterested in our “progress.” But today it looks like they were the wise ones. Now we need their guiding hand but we have interrupted their knowledge streams, killed them with our diseases, and squandered our opportunity to learn. Those remaining have no obligation to teach us. Those who will, are doing it for the planet. To us they owe nothing.
Benjamin Henry Latrobe
“Every man for himself” of course also meant “a good woman behind him” and, for best results, a supply of slaves to maximize labor at minimum cost. For those of you who are thinking, “Not me! My family never kept slaves!” the entire country benefited from slavery and we are still benefitting today. No country has grown so quickly from its infancy to the most powerful on earth. This did not occur because of American exceptionalism unless it was our exceptional willingness to enslave and exploit other lives for the benefit of our own.
Josie Desmarais/Getty Images
Yet Black people are still among us. Many are the descendents of those slaves. Their lives have never been easy; they are not easy now. If the U.S. uses a caste system–and there is good reason to call it that-Black people are at the bottom. As a general rule they have the least of everything: money, respect, prospects, you name it. And yet somehow they remain surprisingly resilient. One big reason is because their motto is NOT “every man for himself.” In order to survive, Black communities have passed down through the centuries the power of supporting one another by giving what little they have to those who need it: cooperation, sharing, and mutual aid. What they do not do is trample on compassion for others in order to get ahead, equate worth with success and success with money, or insist that there is only one right way or that if you’re not perfect you are a failure. In fact, they name those ideas as characteristics of white supremacy culture.
And if consumerism, conspicuous consumption, and performative “success” have brought us to the breaking point, will we have the courage to turn away from these models of continuous growth which are killing the earth and all of us–rich or poor–along with it? Where can we turn for models for living with less? Hmmm, maybe we need to look at the populations who have been forced to do so for centuries as one of the foremost tools for oppressing them. People who, originally indigenous on the African continent, we stole to further our own agenda–the very agenda which has brought us to the point of realizing that we should have listened to indigenous knowledge and wisdom all along!
It’s easy to ask, “Why didn’t we listen?!” But the truth is we, as a culture, didn’t even ask–we were so sure we were the only culture that mattered. We were doing big things! But “they” had been quietly, humbly, holding up a planet. It was our “big things” that destroyed it.
Coming soon: Where do we turn, Part 2: The Sufi perspective