American Original Sin and Life Out of Balance

The daily news is getting harder to take all the time. Mass shootings by seriously disturbed (mostly white) men occur on a regular basis. The United States has an overall gun death rate that is alarmingly higher than in other developed, high-income countries. Cops who kill (mostly black) citizens under the most questionable circumstances face no legal consequences. We have a president who practices nuclear diplomacy by issuing threatening tweets, has abdicated the United States’ role as global leader in fighting climate change, and careens from one appallingly naïve and offensive national or international executive action to the next with no strategic thinking or serious involvement of key cabinet members. The list of disheartening news events goes on and on.

While the actions of our current President are unique in American history in many ways, both he and the issues mentioned above cannot be seen in a cultural or historical vacuum. Our current dismal state of affairs has been a long time coming.

Surely there is some reason why a study published in 2015 in The Journal of American Medicine found that, compared to those living in 22 other high-income countries,

“…as an American you are:

·         Seven times more likely to be violently killed

·         Twenty-five times more likely to be violently killed with a gun

·         Six times more likely to be accidentally killed with a gun

·         Eight times more likely to commit suicide using a gun

·         Ten times more likely to die from a firearm death overall”

Surely there is some reason why racism in so many and varied forms continues to plague our nation.

Surely there is a reason why a man with innumerable serious personal and professional flaws that would have disqualified any other candidate for the presidency before his campaign even began stunned the world when he was elected on a promise to “make America great again.”

Surely gaining an understanding of why we find ourselves where we are today is a necessary precursor to making headway on righting these wrongs.

I love my country, in spite of the bedeviling problems mentioned above and many others not mentioned. I think that America is still a pretty great country, with many freedoms and positive qualities admired worldwide. Yet this greatness is accompanied by many deeply troubling realities, not only the present ones I’ve briefly touched on, but historical realities.

Not the least of these troubling historical realities is American original sin. Many use this term to refer to slavery. I prefer to think of it as the combination of the genocidal European takeover of the Americas from the indigenous people here when Columbus arrived on October 12^th, 1492, and the African (and Indian) slave labor that built the economic base of this country prior to the Civil War. Unless we, as a people, come to fully acknowledge, understand, and take collective responsibility for this tragic past, and make amends for it, we cannot hope to become a whole and healthy people.

 When Columbus landed on San Salvador in 1492, the Americas were fully and richly populated in a way explicated for the layperson in Charles C. Mann’s 2005 book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. The Americas were no virgin wilderness. They were a complex ecological, anthropological, and political web of sovereign nations, some of them Neolithic hunter-gatherer societies, some of them hierarchical agrarian societies, and many some blend of the two.

When Spain, and then France, Britain and other European powers brought germs and guns to the Americas, they triggered the intentional and unintentional genocidal depopulation of two continents that were home to an estimated 50 million to 100 million or more people (including an estimated two to 18 million in what is now the United States), with disease doing most of the dirty work, helped significantly by warfare and violence.

This European-perpetrated genocide first prepared the way for an eventual American toehold on the eastern seaboard, and then was followed by an American-perpetrated genocide as westward expansion occurred during the 19^th century. The end game of the total subjugation of Native peoples in the United States is told in Dee Brown’s heartbreaking 1970 book Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee. By the time of the Wounded Knee massacre in December 1890, Native population numbers in what is now the United States had declined to about 250,000. The brutal treatment of Indians and the trail of broken treaties that accompanied westward expansion is well documented.

Both the European and American genocides were contemporary with the enslavement first of Native peoples, and then with importation of staggering numbers of enslaved Africans (12.5 million total to the New World, including about 305,000 brought to areas currently part of the United States). Brutal enforced slave labor built the United States’ economy from the colonial era up to the Civil War.
 

Should we be surprised that the 2.9 million Americans of Native American heritage, or the 46.3 million Americans who self-identify as at least partially African-American, might be dubious of the project to “make American great again”? Fortunately, both Native American and African-American cultures are strong and resilient in spite of this tragic history, though both communities are beset by problems which are largely the lingering result of this American original sin and the resulting catastrophic consequences for these peoples.

I have no doubt that the violent reality of our nation’s past plays a large role in the violent reality of our present. I have no doubt that the mythology of the strong individual, armed and ready to dispense frontier justice, also plays a role. I have no doubt there are many other factors, but most of all I have no doubt that the inability to honestly come to terms with American original sin is at the root of many of our problems.

I have found myself thinking often the past year or so of the film Koyaanisqatsi. First released in 1982, I had never heard of the movie until I happened to see it on public television sometime in about 1987, and was blown away by its combination of arresting slow motion and time-lapse imagery (courtesy of director Godfrey Reggio and cinematographer Ron Fricke) and Philip Glass’ soundtrack. I was captivated from the opening image of the Great Gallery pictograph in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. Gorgeous time-lapse scenes in the unspoiled desert Southwest, and of billowing cloud- and seascapes followed, segueing to jarring mining and war scenes, frenetic industrial and urban scenes, slow-motion close-ups of faces of despair, building to the dizzying near-conclusion several minutes from the end of the film with a flaming, smoking rocket engine tumbling through the atmosphere after an explosive launch failure. The film instantly struck me as an artistic tour de force summarizing the feeling that I had had since the age of about 16: in spite of the many wonderful and beautiful features of American life, especially for a middle class white kid, there was something seriously amiss with our culture. The violence that we Americans had visited upon much of this once-beautiful land, the disconnection of the mainstream of American life from the timeless rhythms depicted in the opening scenes of Koyaanisqatsi, seemed viscerally obvious and obscene.

The next-to-last shot in the film is this image:

As a roughly 29-year-old eco-freak living in Ronald Reagan’s America, this hit me like a punch in the solar plexus. Crazy life. Life in turmoil. Life out of balance. Life disintegrating. A state of life that calls for another way of living. Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Fast-forward 30 years. As a 59-year-old eco-freak in Donald Trump’s America, I watched this film again a few nights ago, and was struck anew by its power and clear vision. As crazy as life seemed to me, as out of touch with the rhythms of nature as American society had seemed to me as a 16-year-old in 1974, and as a 29-year-old in 1987, it seems even more so in 2017. Coupled with, and perhaps as a natural outcome of, American original sin, this Life Out of Balance is getting crazier and crazier. The stakes for the planet and for the rest of humanity are getting higher and higher, and likely future outcomes more and more dire.

I hope we still have the ability to transition out of this “state of life that calls for another way of living”. Whether or not we can do so without catastrophic disruption remains to be seen. Honesty about our roots as a people and hard work in healing the human and ecological wounds of the centuries are necessary first steps.