Beds Are Burning

“How do we sleep

While our beds are burning

The time has come

To say fair's fair”

    Midnight Oil

Every time I hear Australian band Midnight Oil’s anthem on behalf of aborigine peoples I think back 25 years ago to an oral history conference in Brisbane where I learned that in my lifetime Native Australians were forcibly taken from their parents be the Aussie equivalent of Americanized by families free to treat them like servants. Just a generation or two before that native American children were shipped off to “Indian schools” like one in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where many died of tuberculosis and other contagious diseases while others were stripped of their long hair and native dress.

Bubba Wallace

The recent actions of Trump seem politically suicidal – what pundits said about many things he did four years ago.  Then he branded Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, now he’s defending Confederate statues, calling the noose found in Black NASCAR racer Bubba Watson’s garage a hoax, and ridiculing as “political correctness” the efforts to change the nicknames and logos of the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians.  As a Washington football fan, I agree with the fan who thought the new logo could be the skin of a red potato.  Ray Smock worries that Trump’s strategy of holding onto his base could work if he can convince another 20 percent to stay home through smear tactics against his opponent or otherwise deny them the vote through various nefarious means. Trump has gotten away with so many lies, and like totalitarian rulers everywhere tries to brainwash followers into believing that any critical story in the mainstream press is suspect a HOAX.




Post-Trib contributor Jerry Davich wrote a column headlined: “Trump versus Biden, a disappointing decision for voters.”  I replied: “Wrong! It’s an obvious choice at a time when we need steady at the helm.  Trump will use any smear tactic to make people believe the candidates are equally “disappointing.”  It worked in 2016.

 

In the “Forum” section of the Sunday, July 5, Northwest Indiana Times appeared a column by Inez Feltscher Stepman (above) titled “Revisionist history tries to discredit rich legacy.” As a historian who holds the U.S. Constitution in high esteem, has no quarrel with July Fourth patriotic celebrations, and bemoans the excesses of those defacing monuments honoring George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, I must take exception to her mischaracterization of revisionist historians who have attempted to redress gaps in the story of the American experience.  Stepman admits that the Founding Fathers, like men in all eras, were flawed and at times made terrible mistakes. Yet to claim, as she does, that the American Revolution was fought simply for liberty and independence is to ignore the complexities of history.  Foremost among the colonists’ grievances against Great Britain prior to 1776, along with taxation without representation and the quartering of foreign (Hessian) troops on American soil, was the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which prevented colonization beyond the Appalachians and reserved that territory for Native American tribes. So far as whether or not the Constitution was a slave document, one need look no further than the three-fifths compromise than gave slave states representation in the House of Representatives by counting their human property as that percentage of a human being.

 

In the 1960s I visited Monticello and Mount Vernon, as did thousands of tourists, and saw no evidence that Thomas Jefferson or George Washington were slaveholders.  School textbooks made no mention of Christopher Columbus having enslaved indigenous people and tended to emphasize States Rights rather than slavery as the underlying cause of the Civil War. Rather than disparaging educators and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies responsible for pressuring states to remove Confederate Battle flags and statues of rebel leaders from government property, including military installations, we should be celebrating this belated recognition that justice too long delayed is justice denied.  We can still celebrate the Fourth of July while finally acknowledging that Juneteenth is a more appropriate “Independence Day” for African Americans.  And, parenthetically, for the President to go the sacred (for Lakota people) Black Hills and label protestors looters and fascists while not even consulting with tribal leaders whose land, according to a 1980 Supreme Court decision, they are rightful guardians, and uttering nary a word about a pandemic that especially threatens poor people living in nearby areas is beyond obscene. Little wonder his pledge, if re-elected, to create a monument park honoring 25 American heroes contained not a single Hispanic or Native American.

 
I concede that the USA may have been a land of opportunity for Inez Feltscher Stepman, a self-described first-generation American; but I wish she showed a measure of compassion for the ancestors of people brought to our country in chains who still endure police harassment or understanding of acts by which our Founding Fathers, and Trump’s favorite President, Andrew Jackson, stole our land from the original inhabitants.

18th birthday

With the coronavirus spreading due to Trump’s incompetence, educators are grappling with how to deal with fall classes.  Unlike many private universities, IUN is in relatively good shape, having launched quality online “distance education” courses almost a decade ago. Granddaughter Becca missed the final month of her senior year and wonders whether she’ll be able to go off for college. Her friends at Chesterton H.S. have made due with, for example, a mini-prom outside with about 2 dozen classmates. She’s done other group activities and even held an outdoor party at home when unable to have her open house at the American Legion Hall.