The Forgotten People: Restoring Justice for Indigenous Cultures

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“The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” —Hubert Humphrey

Join Mark, Corey, and special guest Magdalena Smieszek as they take a careful look at the many indignities and injustices that have been inflicted on indigenous populations in North America and around the world over the last several years, decades, and centuries.

How can we begin to heal the cultural and systemic traumas of the past and create new paths of integration for these populations within a healthy pluralistic space — allowing them to preserve their cultural heritage, traditions, and identities — instead of the forced strategies of assimilation that have historically been imposed upon them? What new wisdoms and opportunities would this new integration offer for all of us?

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More than sensitive, I thought this conversation applied and upheld for cultures (indigenous cultures, anyway) the Integral thinking generally applied to individuals when it comes to development–that growth in consciousness is largely an organic process involving gradual change, which is why “forced” growth/development (e.g. assimilation) rarely succeeds.

Re: the separate conversations about Teddy Roosevelt and about the US Supreme Court ruling declaring Indians as legal “owners” of a vast portion of Oklahoma lands–this is not to “cancel” Teddy :slightly_smiling_face:–I too appreciate that he loved and wanted to protect wild and beautiful places as National Parks–but I wanted to “connect the dots” between those discussions: that connection being that it was Teddy Roosevelt who dissolved Indian territory in Oklahoma, making way for Oklahoma’s statehood in 1907.

Also wanted to mention that less than 20 miles down the road from Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills is the Crazy Horse Memorial, under construction since 1948 but open to visitors. While (ultimately, when finished) featuring Crazy Horse on his crazy horse, the monument honors all indigenous people of North America. https://crazyhorsememorial.org/story/the-mountain/

Finally, just a few words about indigenous people worldwide, who make up about 5% of the global population (370-500 million in 90 countries). If they were all in one place, that would make them the world’s 3rd most populous “country,” just behind China and India. (The U.S. would then be the 4th most populous country.) But because they are scattered physically, some very small tribes sometimes find themselves alone and up against huge corporations or governments when it comes to protecting their land and water rights, their way of life. Yes, there are many advocates and NGOs that assist them, and Standing Rock is a good example in recent times of various native people in the U.S. and Canada coming together to support the Sioux, with many non-Indians also supporting them, but the smallness of some tribes can make for situations in which their extinction is on the table.

Indigenous people own, occupy, or use about 25% of the earth’s surface area. That surface area contains 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity. Insecure land tenure and insecure water rights are major issues for many native people in the world, but we do seem to be in a time when indigenous rights are being increasingly recognized. Still, we all might want to pay attention and think twice when it comes to mining, logging, petrochemical pipelines, dams and river deviations on indigenous lands. While there have always been and are occasionally divisions or different perspectives within a tribe, and also indigenous leaders who sometimes “go rogue” (or corrupt) and act against the best interests and the will of their people and the planet, on the whole, that remaining biodiversity is being safe-guarded by native folks.

Finally, thanks to Mark for sharing his journey to the Black Hills and his ideas about pilgrimage and volunteerism with native people; the sincerity came through. Thanks to everyone.

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Let’s all Be Integral and spend our money with the Native Americans!
Visit your local Indian Casinos and spend your money with them! Their CEO’s, CFO’s, CMO’s, waitresses, bellmen, valets, and groundskeepers are Native Americans.
Stay and enjoy Indian Casino/Resorts. They’re usually very nice and easily best value in the area, in my experience.

And you can talk with the cashier in the gift shop, maids, wait staff in the restaurants to find out what some of the Indians think about.

Head on out to Grand Canyon West. It is owned, run and developed by the Hualapai Tribe!
Take a drive-cation to Pechanga Resort and Casino in Temecula. It’s simply beautiful.
Stay at Hard Rock Hotels owned by the Seminole Tribe of Florida!
Do business with Native Americans doing business!

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OK. My goodness, where to begin. First, many thanks to Corey, Frank and Magdalena.

A preface note: The indigenous people of America carry several names, five at last count, and for each one there are white people that will explain why theirs is the most proper. I use the name ‘American Indian’ because that’s what they told me they wanted me to call them.

American Indian justice has been a major issue in my life dating primarily to 1984 when the Hupa tribe hired me to develop their first community mental health program, in isolated, rural northern California.

Corey, you made a point of emphasizing, several times I think, that Teddy Roosevelt and American Indians were a lot alike when it came to appreciating nature and respecting the environment. I think it was Frank that managed to get in a comment that Roosevelt was no friend of the Indian, to which you dismissed in favor of emphasizing that positive aspect of the Roosevelt – Indian relationship. How well do you really know this history, Corey?

In the history of the Indian-US relationship, the 1887 Dawes Act may be the single most destructive device used to force American Indians to abandon their epistemologically-construed relationship with land and with life. Not a passing event, to wit:

After many years of having been violently forced onto reservations, under the Dawes Act suddenly all Indian land was violently confiscated and divided into individual parcels with individual owners. Individual Indians were forced to become land owners for the first time in over 10,000 years: an utterly alien, if not epistemologically impossible concept, overnight. Most Indian land was then sold to settlers. Community property was literally made illegal for Indians. The face of violent imperialistic epistemology has no other name.

President Theodore Roosevelt was a profound racist and a leading proponent of using the Dawes Act as a powerful smashing force against the Indians. During his tenure, Indian country was decimated by 50%. Roosevelt’s environmental kinship with American Indians is on par with Hitler’s music and art kinship with Jews. That is a deep insult. Full stop.

Additionally, Corey, if we are going to include Manifest Destiny and the Trail of Tears in the procession of an inevitable “March of Progress/Civilization”, then so too, the Jewish holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of course slavery, civil war, all wars, Chernobyl, Bhopal, and Trump. And Covid, too. Or is it only the Indians that have to bear the burden of this “March”? In fact, what doesn’t get included, here? And so, what’s the point? While I understand the broadest application of that sentiment - that it all happened as it was supposed to happen - I equally get the Bodhisattva vow of acceptance while fighting like hell for what is right. Without this countering perspective, what’s left sounds like the shop-worn dominant-culture responsibility dynamic of guilt and justification.

Corey, I’ve confronted you on a couple of issues, and I welcome your response and dialogue. And especially also, Frank and Magdalena, as participants. And anyone else.

I’ll probably have other issues from the podcast to talk about soon…

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@steven, thank you very much for the feedback. For what it’s worth, I agree with most of what you say. I am definitely aware of the atrocities that were committed by the Roosevelt administration, and did not mean to make it sound like I was being dismissive of those horrors. I assumed the audience would understand why I was putting that history into brackets for a moment in order to make a somewhat different point about Teddy Roosevelt, who I continue to find one of the most fascinating presidents in US history — namely, the painful irony that he shared with the American Indians a fundamental appreciation for “sacred naturalism”, even though they would both describe that affinity in very different ways according to their own development and cultural idioms. So I found myself momentarily wishing that we existed in some parallel reality where, rather than having to learn about these atrocities, Teddy had ceded our national park program to Native Americans, based on their mutual familiarity with these states of consciousness (sacred naturalism, Spirit-in-3rd-person, etc.)

But I also know there is no version of the world where that could have possibly happened, because that value set simply did not yet fully exist at the time.

I also agree that Roosevelt was very much a racist, and in many ways epitomized the imperialist mindset that was typical for the time. At the same time, I try to be very careful not to project contemporary moral standards to past historical eras, conditions, and characters — knowing that our contemporary standards are themselves usually a response to these previous eras, conditions, and characters.

The face of violent imperialistic epistemology indeed has no other name — and I continue to believe that same violent imperialistic epistemology was also very much an inevitable product of history, based on the value stack that was predominant at the time (mostly amber/umber, with a very slim but growing slice of emergent orange). I think this was mostly determined by the LR quadrant. Which is why, at a time when our technological capacity began to accelerate at unprecedented rates, when the technological gaps between different conflicting cultures became so insurmountable, and when a truly universal moral intelligence had not yet had time to fully emerge and saturate through those technologically advanced cultures, then many or most of the events you listed do seem to be somewhat inevitable. Moral development always lags behind cognitive development. Conditions determine the consciousness, which then determines the next set of conditions.

As for those other historic events, I believe that the surface structures and details could very well be different, but I think the deep structures basically remain the same. They feel like fixed points, in a certain way.

Nagasaki and Hiroshima? We were always going to learn how to split the atom, and once we figured it out, someone in the world was always going to weaponize it.

Slavery? We’ve pretty much had it from the beginning, but it was always going to worsen as social development moved through red, amber, and umber stages, until we inevitably reach a stage where it finally becomes morally reprehensible in the LL, and economically unnecessary in the LR.

Hitler? Someone was always going to combine low moral development with these rapidly-advancing technologies in order to dominate and/or exterminate other people.

Trumpism? The internet was always going to give rise to social media and the fragmentation of knowledge, which was in turn always going to cause the sort of total epistemic collapse and aperspectival madness we are currently experiencing, giving rise to all sorts of misinformation and personality cults (which is why I often call Trump our first postmodern president, despite being nowhere near that stage in any of his developmental lines).

And here’s the thing — every one of these events directly informs our own moral calculus and sensibilities today. Again, I don’t think our moral development occurs in a vacuum, it emerges in response to the conditions and circumstances of our time, and especially of previous times.

All of this is why I think it’s so important to try to both fully forgive the painful inevitabilities of the past, while also committing and re-committing ourselves to interrupting the inertias created by those historic inevitabilities today, and doing whatever we can to reduce the very real suffering that continues to arise as a consequence of those inevitabilities and inertias.

I hope that is helpful! As is often the case, I wish I was more clear in the video :slight_smile:

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– Braiding Sweetgrass. Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

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Death is inevitable. All of us are going to die. Everyone who lived before us died they were always going to die and there was never a reality where they would not die.

But we still attend funerals and wakes and find someone to speak kindly of the deceased. For those ceremonies we reserve time to address that one issue.

It would be extremely rude and completely improper for a person to yell at the back of a funeral “Well what about aunt Martha? She died! What about my dad? He died, too! What about everyone else who died. Why aren’t you talking about all the other people in the family who died?”

This is the whole problem with “What about ___” and the whole “All lives Matter”.

It’s completely appropriate and healthy to focus on one group and what happened to them without distracting the issue and diluting the poignancy of terrible events with “What about COVID. I couldn’t go to my favorite restaurant for 6 months. What about that?”

If you are at a funeral, I hope nobody distracts attention from the deceased, and if people are discussing the trials of a particular group, I’d also ask everyone to just let them honor the group in question and not attempt to dilute that moment.

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Hello LaWanna,
Thank you so much for your thoughtful words. I so appreciate what you add to our show based on your wisdom in your comments. Deep bows and please continue (I am deeply grateful)! I saw that you mentioned the Crazy Horse memorial as that was something we visited as well. Have you been? I have to tell you I went there excited and hopeful and left there not feeling the love. I left there feeling this family who is building it really will never finish it (it’s been 70 years and they aren’t close to being done). That the contribution to Native causes by this family were minimal compared to what they’ve made. I wish to heck I felt differently. The idea and principle make some sense to me though. Wishing you many blessings LaWanna. I look forward to further interactions on the path. Warmly, Mark Fischler

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Hi Mark,
And thank you for the kind compliments, which I would send right back to you! I like your participation on the IJW show, not just for the legal and teaching experience you bring, or your apparent all-around goodness, but for the fire of compassionate justice that flares at times seemingly in your whole being. More than once my normally inner quiet while watching the show has exploded into a YES! said aloud in response to one of those flares. So I hope you stay around for awhile. The Integral community is lucky to have these podcasts and your involvement.

No, I have never been to the Crazy Horse Memorial. If I visited, perhaps I would detect a sour vibe and, like you, come away “not feeling the love.” I am aware of the controversies, both from reading and from conversations with a few Lakotas I know, have known, and I’m glad that you brought this up and your own experience, so that the community here knows that not all has been smooth chipping and chiseling, and that there are different opinions/perspectives on the monument among the Sioux themselves. They would not have known that from my earlier post alone.

Of the several grievances, all of which I can understand and appreciate, most of them seem rather weak to me, other than this one of possible/probable white exploitation of Indians for financial gain. Nations, including sovereign tribal nations, need surface structures/symbols of pride, and it saddens me a little that the Crazy Horse Memorial, inspired by and intended as a source of nation-pride for the Sioux and other North American Indians, has been tainted by questions of wrong-doing on the part of the original sculptor’s family/descendants. Of course, Mount Rushmore has its taint of shame as well, the interplay of shadow and light seemingly being what makes the world go round.

Last I checked, and you may from your visit know more about this than I, the estimated completion date for the monument is 2120, making it a 172-year project all told. That’s a long time, for sure, but I think of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty between the Sioux and the US Government; that treaty is now 153 years old and is still “in play,” very much alive, with the Sioux, as you mentioned in the podcast, refusing up to this point to take money from the government to settle disputes as they see that as their saying they agreed to sell the Black Hills in 1877, when the government “seized” the land, and they say they did not agree. (As the legal guy here, I’m sure you have a better grasp of those treaty details than do I.) Of course, things change, surprising developments arise, black swan events and such, so this treaty dispute may change too. And actually, so may the situation at Crazy Horse, who knows? I for one would be totally supportive if in some way the Indians could take it over (and also be in charge of managing the National Parks.)

Reading I’ve done and Lakotas I’ve spoken to who are overall supportive of the Monument point to the fact it does provide jobs for some Indians in the area, and the commerce at the site has provided scholarships for native education in South Dakota. As you say, these benefits may be totally out of proportion to those gained by the family managing the site.

But more than this, proponents of the monument hold fast to the seed-intent or formative idea of the Lakota elder who commissioned the sculpture: to show the world that Indians have leaders, and pride in their leaders, equal to those of the white world. As you no doubt know, the last military victory for the Sioux (The Battle of the Little Bighorn, or as the Indians call it, the Battle at the Greasy Grass) was in 1877, popularly known as “Custer’s Last Stand.” Less popularly known is that it was Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull who as chiefs and warriors/military leaders led that attack.

And I too hold (probably not “fast,” actually loosely, but still I hold…) to that formative idea of appreciating Indian leaders. A couple of centuries from now, if indeed the monument is completed, it will be, in the words of one writer I read, a living testament “to the original people who lived there.” It will suggest and point in sculpture form to a more adequate/accurate history than Mount Rushmore alone does or can. That both monuments are in some ways tainted, well, here’s hoping that part of history gets recorded too.

Deep bows to you too Mark, and sincerely, thank you for talking to me about this. If I ever make it to Crazy Horse Memorial, I may find myself thinking “well, Mark told me about this…” in which case, I’ll be bowing to you all over again! Much appreciation.

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Hi LaWanna,
I love this and love you! Putting the years in perspective is true wisdom. Deep bows. I love that you brought up Little Bighorn (and the Battle of Greasy Grass) and it’s old name of Custer’s Last Stand too in terms of all of this. A fact I just learned before our trip was that an old friend from from the Trial Lawyer’s College (whom I’ve lost touch with) wrote a book about the battle as apparently his great grandfather actually was the one who took Custer out. I’m going to get his book and read it. I’ll be interested in your experience when you go. Many blessings LaWanna.

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Quick story that both now and at the time I found humorous.
I had driven past an “Indian Trading Post” at least a 100 times before I stopped in hoping to find a new drum. When I asked about a drum suitable for a proper drum circle he lamented that he was having to find overseas sources for his merchandise and said “The Indians just don’t make the crafts like they used too.” With a hearty laugh I replied, “That’s because we’ve become plumbers, nurses, doctors, hair dressers, professors, engineers, CPAs, truck drivers, farmers, executives, cashiers.” LOL

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How rich is that? I can only hope the person took the experience as a teachable moment for himself and others. Love it. Thanks for sharing FermentedAgave.
Warmly,
Mark

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Part 2 Comment - distilled into 2 areas: first, continuation of this thing about TRoosevelt; second, deterministic inevitability.

Corey, I’m pushing the Roosevelt point here because there’s something highly significant that still isn’t clarified. You speak of “ the painful irony that (Roosevelt) shared with the American Indians a fundamental appreciation for “sacred naturalism”. OK. Let’s play it out:

Roosevelt, to the Indians: “The land that your ancestors have called home for 5,000 years is beautiful and sacred.”

Indians: “Thank you. We think so, too.”

TR: “I love your land so much and think so highly of it that I’m going to take it from you, because my God wants me to, and I will kill any of you that get in my way. But I will make sure to appreciate the beauty of nature along with you, you sub-human scum.”

There is no Venn diagram overlap with TR and Indians; it’s two completely different things. Red apple, red fire-truck; two things. It’s like holding a portrait of Hitler against the face of a Jewish patriarch admiring the similar jawline. In addition to reflecting deep ignorance, it reflects deep disrespect, intended or not, and it needs to stop.

There’s another point that I think you are not getting about the contextual differences between TR and Indians. It reflects the epistemological oil/water relationship of Roosevelt/Indians. TR is the epitome of Modern, rugged individualism and God-given dominion over nature; and that, in all regards, is in utter and total conflict with American Indian relationship of mutuality with nature. That difference – it’s epistemological, a difference in kind.

In my post, I thought you could tell that I was not asking you about those specific historical catastrophes, but was just listing them as representative of world horrors. Thanks for your individual attention there, but not what I meant. (Or were you being facetious?) Also, I am not going to take or follow this into idiosyncratic Integral or SD theories (yeah, I know, even though it’s a kw site) because those specifics are not relevant to my points here.

But I do get what you mean.

You are saying that not only was it inevitable that TR impose extreme violent actions against Indians, (assessed anyway you want), but that it was spiritually inspired eg Manifest Destiny.

In addition to TR, this deeply concerning issue involves a basic philosophical foundation that kw lays out and you plug it in when you repeatedly say, “I continue to believe that same violent imperialistic epistemology was also very much an inevitable product of history” and you say “many or most of the events you listed do seem to be somewhat inevitable” and you say “As for those other historic events, they feel like they are fixed points, in a certain way” and you say “historic inevitability.”

**** Rearview-deterministic-inevitability is always accurate. And if that’s what you are looking for, pathogenic causations can everywhere be made to glisten; that is a very Modernistic thing to do. Every event of every moment of history can be framed, (or punctuated, in Bateson’s terms) in that manner, and any chosen horror will be justified by the historical conditions surrounding it, in which it arose. It means nothing because it applies to everything, and if that is your default position, the effect is to kill all dialogue. ****

Corey, it seems to me, following an Integrally informed perspective, as you are interpreting, the basic response to any harm would be “Given the immediate and historical circumstances, your harm is an inevitable product of history; sad, unfortunate, but inevitable.” This descriptive dynamic would presumably apply across the board, whether the harm is to a rape victim, war crime victims, 9/11 victims, financial fraud victims, Palestinians, Indian tribes, Jews.

Oh, and South Africa; they didn’t accept violent-imperialism-as-an-inevitable-product-of-history. The perspective of rearview inevitability would undercut the philosophy behind ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ commissions throughout the world. “Since it was inevitable, we can all just turn out the lights and go home; what’s the point, or the use, of talking about it since it was predetermined? It amounts to, ‘You want to talk about it, talk to God’.”

In this context that you construct, one of deterministic inevitability, the whole notion of Truth and Reconciliation falls apart. Your position is that it was all God’s will, after all. A very vengeful, hateful vindictive Christian God, but a God nevertheless – the Manifest Destiny kind of God that your position continues to vitalize. Note, this is not the same as saying that they thought it was God’s will – obviously a bunch (but far from all) did think that. Here, you are going beyond that; you are actually vetting it as a viable truth. You are agreeing that it was, in fact, God’s will, or spiritually inspired. Is that really your intent?

Personally, I consider Manifest Destiny an evil of epochal proportions which represented nothing more than a lo-ball capitulation to greed and deceit, even by standards of that day. Volumes have been written on alternatives to the genocidal narrative of Manifest Destiny.

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Hey @steven, thanks as always for the feedback. It’s clear to me that you care very deeply about these issues, and very knowledgeable about them. And I absolutely agree that I spoke ineloquently about this in the actual recorded discussion. It’s one of my major flaws that I try to be mindful of when doing these episodes — I communicate much more clearly through writing, than I do through speaking. So I thank you again for the pushback, as it helps me clarify my own views and positions, and hopefully do a better job communicating them. I am always 100% wiling to take critical feedback, so long as it is being delivered with kindness, respect, and good faith. So thanks for the opportunity to engage!

So, just to reiterate — I was not speaking to the very obvious developmental and cultural differences between Roosevelt and natives. I was speaking purely in terms of states of consciousness, and I very much believe that it’s possible that Roosevelt was experiencing very similar states that are common to many indigenous cultures. That state, of course, then gets interpreted VERY differently, according to their respective kosmic addresses.

So: Roosevelt’s opinion of nature? Most likely the product of a series of state experiences. And since we can ALL experience these states, regardless of our developmental achievements, then I think it is definitely possible that it was a similar state experience as was being commonly had by native peoples.

Roosevelt’s opinion of the natives themselves? This was a the product of a) Roosevelt’s development in his moral, ethical, emotional, and spiritual lines, among others, and b) Roosevelt’s surrounding ethos and prevailing worldviews and moral standards of the time. Roosevelt was an imperialist who was elected by imperialists during the era of imperialism, and that was the primary filter he was enacting reality through.

Spiritual states are different than developmental factors. They are even different than the spiritual line. Two different people can be at two very different places in the spiritual line, while having essentially identical state experiences. But of course, how they then interpret and enact those states will be very different.

(Which reminds me of a science fiction story I always wanted to write – one day, everyone on the planet has a spiritual satori experience. Every man, woman, and child on the planet tastes Spirit-in-1st-person, all at the same time. As a result, the world ends the very next day.)

So I agree that there is an epistemological difference here – and that difference is largely the result of development, both individual and social.

I think this kind of interpretive flexibility — and always being careful not to impose contemporary moral standards on previous eras — is tremendously important when we are enacting history. It’s what allows me, for example, to appreciate the incredible achievements of, say, the Aztec empire, while simultaneously being horrified by their rituals of human sacrifice. I can plainly call human sacrifice “evil”, and I am sure you agree. But we both probably also know that specific perception of evil is itself coming from a higher/deeper/greater moral development than was available to the actual Aztec people of the time. (And this, of course, was one of the common justifications for how the Conquistadors treated these people.)

But I don’t think that is what I am doing. What I am doing, is looking at the prevailing moral and ethical standards of whatever era I am focusing on, and trying to limit my judgment to those constraints. I expect my eight year old to act like an eight year old, not a 20 year old. I expect the Aztecs to act like Aztecs, and not like 17th century Europeans. I expect an imperialist like Teddy Roosevelt to act like an imperialist, and not like a 1960s San Francisco hippie.

So it’s not about “determinism”, but rather the inevitability of changing selection pressures up and down the spiral, in all four quadrants. Yes, there could have been – and likely were – individuals who criticized the horrors of the status quo of any given era. The point I am making is, those individuals and ideas had no chance of being selected for by the rest of culture and society, at least until a certain threshold of social development occurs. Once more people can resonate with those higher, deeper, kinder values, that’s when they begin to seep into the rest of the culture, and then transform the culture from the inside out. Until then, the vast majority of people are simply products of their time. The same way your own views and values are, in no insignificant way, an accident of birth (as are mine of course).

No, my position is that it was evolution’s will. That is a somewhat different argument, I think :wink:

Thanks again for engaging Steven, and I hope my clarifications are helpful in some small way.

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Well, ditto, since you said it–love you too :slightly_smiling_face: Your friend’s book should be interesting; wow, so close to the action. Maybe you’ll share at some point. Have a great rest of the day after the Afghanistan segment; I need to debrief! LaWanna

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"Remember last summer when a mass grave containing the remains of hundreds of children was found on the grounds of a former government boarding school for indigenous children in British Columbia, Canada?

In the seven months since this shocking news broke, not one body has been found, and not a single shovel-full of dirt has been excavated from the site in question. Contrary to the worldwide media coverage last summer, nothing, in fact, has been “discovered” on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

In a healthy society, this would be a scandal. A story that grabbed headlines for a week and inspired arson attacks that destroyed dozens of churches in Canada turns out to be based on flimsy, unexamined evidence at best, and an outright, pernicious lie at worst."

" And then came the arson. In June, dozens of churches across Canada, most of them Catholic and some of them more than a century old, were burned to the ground. No church was safe. As my colleague Chris Bedford reported at the time, “In Calgary, 10 churches of various denominations were vandalized in a single night. A few days later, a Vietnamese church was set on fire — just hours after it held its first full service in more than a year.” "

Overall more than two dozen churches in Canada have been targeted over the past few weeks — and people are cheering it on. Not just anonymous people, either: On June 30, Harsha Walia, the executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, responded to a story of another church arson, saying ‘Burn it all down.’

Others rallied to her defense. Naomi Sayers, a lawyer and blue Twitter checkmark, said ‘I would help her burn it all down … and also, I would help anyone charged with arson if they actually did burn things.’

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Here’s the fun thing about this - this sounds an awful lot like Trump.

This is EXACTLY what I was saying to you six months to a year ago @FermentedAgave, but you accused me of living in existential dread or something like that.

I said that if you think the burning will be restricted to only Liberal Communities, you are in for a big surprise - because once public figures start saying violence is ok against the “other side” - then violence will not be restricted to just one community.

This is what happens when “Red” is supported by a large part of the population against an opposing group within that population.

Now, before you accuse me of anything - also remember that the emotion I expressed then and will express now again with these church burnings - is sadness. I was sad because I saw things similar to this as almost a “cause - effect - effect - effect”. The President of the United States advocates violence against people outside of his ethnocentric group - those groups respond against those outside their ethnocentric group, and you have a little giggle about liberals burning down their own cities. Then the burning moves to churches and suddenly you believe there is a problem. The irony is, I can go on to quote your Savior Jesus about how all this is us-them is wrong. But you know those verses, I’m sure. You just choose to ignore them and instead beat the us-vs-them drums.

As I said before, this cycle will continue and expand and will not be restricted to any one demographic group. That is sad, but it is the direct result of looking towards other groups and people who live differently as enemies, then descending into violence and believing violence is ok as long as it is against the other groups.

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I hope you’re wrong and also think it won’t play out this way. I’m optimistic but also fairly well prepared for a suburbanites, just as are the majority of my wonderfully kind, gracious and generous neighbors.

It will be an extremely soul searching decade for Progressives as their failed ideologies are flushed out of the system.

For what its worth, many churches now have armed security. Very low key ear buds and undershirt bulges.

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See - you just don’t get it. You are still stuck in you vs them.

Armed security at churches - that’s hilarious. I’m sure that’s the plan Jesus would have come up with.
By the way, I’ve done tons of security work. Never been armed and never been harmed. A building isn’t worth my life and I’d never be paid enough to take another’s life over a physical possession.
But hey, maybe I should go to church and get my mind right, eh?

If you think progressives have soul searching to do - the soul searching Christians will have to do will blow your freaking socks off.