Daily Archives: October 7, 2020

Jack wrote this in February of 2006:

Hi again, blogsters:

This blogging experience might turn out to be too much for my psyche.  I don’t watch television, deliberately don’t read newspapers.  The reason is that I discovered a decade, or so, ago, that knowing about matters I can’t influence doesn’t lend itself to inner-peace.

However,  I’m finding something just as good as television and newspapers to stir up inner-confusion, dissatisfaction, anger.  About issues that aren’t my business as I define it, because nothing I can do might influence those issues.

The Native American feeds are a microcosm of the phenomenon:

My general feeling about the Native Americans I meet in my daily life is one of respect, of acknowledgement, of consideration.

Yet, on blog sites, I find a daily flow of feeds on Native American issues to inspire the antithesis of respect.

I see whines by Native Americans concerning inadequate health care for the tribes.

All over the US non-natives of all groups, and Native Americans who don’t happen to have tribal census numbers are faced with the daily challenge concerning health care.  Only Native Americans with census numbers are provided total free health care by the US Public Health Service.  Yet they complain and ask for Non-Native support to try to make what they have more comprehensive.

I see complaints about the limitations on tribal sovereignty.

There is no tribal sovereignty.  The tribes, with a few exceptions, are entirely dependent on US Government funding to maintain survival.  US taxpayers have been the mainstay for continued aboriginal survival, for Rez roads, Rez housing, Rez incomes, Rez education and Rez ‘independence’ for more than a century.

• I see nothing wrong with some US citizens getting an easier deal in life than others, if they can manage it.  Inherited wealth and ethnic preference have a strong basis in precedent in the US.
• I see nothing wrong with the tribes continuing to burden the remainder of society with dependence, with holding to life on the Rez without having to hold regular jobs and concern themselves with the daily issues of survival,  as do other Americans, should they choose to make that their goal.  The lure of a free ride through the Welfare State is seductive for individuals of all ethnic groups.
• What bothers me is the litany of complaint that it ain’t enough.  That somehow the ‘rest of society’ muddling along without such benefits, with no safety net, ought to feel more is ‘owed’, based on something that dead men did to other dead men more than a century ago.
• Something in me protests that we’re all born naked.  That we can each make our own choices every day.
• Something in me protests that begging is a lousy choice.  That whining and blaming others for our choices and our lot is not a behavior devised to command respect, so much as guilt.

Which is none of my business.

Jack