“Sometimes I wish for a simpler time/When you could drink right out of the stream”*
Posted on August 16, 2006 - Filed Under Uncategorized
*From the song “California Country” by the band I See Hawks In L.A.
I love America. Really, I do. I don’t like the basis upon which it was founded, namely the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the practice of virtually exterminating the Native American (which would now be called genocide), but it’s a beautiful place and we enjoy more relative freedom than almost any nation on the globe.
That said, Americans are severly stricken with an intense sickness. We are horribly obsessed with indulging our every desire, regardless of the outcome. This takes every form: our obesity, the size of our cars, the destruction of nature so we can live where forests once stood, and most relavent here, the degradation of the natural environment. We do this, destroy the beauty around, in the name of enjoying it. What we don’t realize is that our ‘enjoyment’ is building up to some horrible outcomes. I will stop preaching and point you to one piece of evidence: the clarity (i.e. how far you can see) of the water in Lake Tahoe, once amazingly deep at 100 feet, has decreased to 74 feet. Read the article.
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Tahoe was decreasing in water level when we were there, it is beautiful ,the view from atop heavenly valley is wonderful The mountain at the time had snow on it (end of july). on the way to tahoe there still was snow going up the mountain. Read where some of the forest has burned how very sad.
Naturally occuring forest fires are actually a good thing. The forests need them to regenerate. The problem is, human activity (at the gluteneous level) encourages and sometimes causes them in places where the forest isn’t ready to burn on its own. Besides the obvious (bad campfire practices, cigarettes thrown into dry brush piles, deliberate arson), logging and overzealous fire supression efforts can lead to fires being much worse than they would have been if we just allowed nature to take her own course.
[…] If you know the movie at all, you know it is in part about Native Americans. One of the themes the movie explores is the ‘white’ man’s impact on the Indians, which I have written about before so I will refrain from boring you too greatly through repetition. One way this impact was manifested was in the killing off of the buffalo. Some even posit that slaughtering buffalo was a tactic used to accomplish the overall strategy of eliminating the ‘Indian threat’ by taking away a primary food source and therefore starving them to death. When I think about these kinds of events, it’s hard to 1. be a proud American…it’s hard to feel anything other than shame and 2. not mockingly laugh at people who say American was founded on Christian principles. By the way, I know many people will reject the premise of the former on the basis of not being someone who actually committed these horrible actions. My attitude has always pretty much boiled down to the following (and please acknowledge the right I have to have my opinion). If you do not accept that you have benefited from the horrors done to others, you are in denial. That is why I feel shame: I would not live in the nice house I do, eat the food I do, type on this computer if it weren’t for the fact that our ancestors went through this country killing people just so we could steal it from them. […]