We're either all Americans or we're not (Fuck You, Mitch McConnell.)

When the earliest settlers poured into a wild continent there was no one to ask them where they came from. The only question was: Were they sturdy enough to make the journey, were they strong enough to clear the land, were they enduring enough to make a home for freedom, and were they brave enough to die for liberty if it became necessary to do so? And so it has been through all the great and testing moments of American history. Our history this year we see in Vietnam. Men there are dying; men named Fernandez and Zajac and Zelinko and Mariano and McCormick. Neither the enemy who killed them nor the people whose independence they have fought to save ever asked them where they or their parents came from. They were all Americans. It was for free men and for America that they gave their all, they gave their lives and selves. By eliminating that same question as a test for immigration the Congress proves ourselves worthy of those men and worthy of our own traditions as a nation. ~Lyndon B. Johnson.

I saw this last night.

Mitch McConnell said "If you look at the statistics, African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as American voters."

Like I keep saying, like shitty little kids, these motherfuckers simply cannot wait to tell on themselves.

Whether it was some kind of a slip, or on purpose, What Yertle McTurtle And Other Lies is telling you is...well, it's the same old shit, isn't it? "American = White" and everybody else gets hyphenated.

“The vastness of life around us helps eliminate self-centeredness. We are not doing the Vision Quest to make ourselves feel important or to be interesting to our friends but to realize the vastness of the universe and our oneness with it.” 

~Ed McGaa (Eagle Man) US Marine Corps Aviator, later lawyer and New Age writer.

Never mind it ain't even our land, and I say that as a white person.

Native American people...regardless of White American conceits, were here for 20,000 and some years before we were even fucking thought of.

Central America and Mexico had empires every bit as great and cities as mighty as Rome, and pyramids every bit as impressive as those of Egypt. When our ancestors came here, they destroyed whole civilizations...yes, that's right, plural. Think about that for a second. 

Not just civilizations, but a vast, interconnected web of them...and some Bands or Tribes even had the equivalent of monopolies on certain products. Look up the history of a place called Pipestone, Minnesota, and the nearby National Monument of the same name. The red stone used to make the traditional Native American ceremonial pipes was (and still is) quarried there...though the area was claimed by several different tribes throughout its history. These pipes were vitally important to the plains tribes, and to a lesser extent used by Great Lakes Anishnaabe...for everything from negotiation to spirituality even before all the cultural mixing that resulted from Native people having to adopt a variety of each other's cultural practices in order to maintain as a wider culture within the United States.

And again, the reason that was necessary absolutely was because we White Folks were very destructive and disruptive of their overall system, on purpose, with malice aforethought.

Now keep in mind that in spite of that, at every single Powwow I have ever been to...and I've been to plenty of 'em because of my roommate and his girlfriend and invitations from the Ogitchedaw Warrior Society...the American flag is always carried out first during the grand entry.

One of the officers...and later the head of the Warrior Society...was also a buddy of mine. He said that even though the land was no longer their own...those who had the 'warrior spirit' as he called it...had to serve it still.

And they do, oh my gods, do they ever.

Native Americans serve in the United States Armed Forces and work for Federal and State governments in numbers well out of proportion to their small percentage of the population. And they did so especially before they attained full rights to practice their cultures and religions. If you go to the reservation down where I used to live and you speak to a Native American man around my Mom's age...there's a better than average chance he served, likely, he got drafted. If it was during Vietnam, likely that's where he went. Dave, the guy I mentioned above, fought with the 7th Air Cav at the battle of Ia Drang in 1965.

Please, do me a favor and take a minute to think about that bit of historical irony and just how far, even then, we'd come in 100 years.

Now I spent most of the last 20 years being employed by a Native American tribe. Hell, if I play my cards right next week I might just be employed by another one. Trust me, I've heard their side of our illustrious history.

And oh yes, they have such. It's some pretty amazing stuff, sometimes.

My roommate for a number of years was Native American, a US Navy veteran and a member of the aforementioned Ogitchedaw Warrior Society, the veteran's group of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe. 

Dude got mail.

One day, his veterans group newsletter had an article about the battle of Fort Necessity, a major engagement of the French and Indian War///the American portion of the Seven Years War...between British colonial forces under George Washington and French and allied Native forces in Pennsylvania. Members of my buddy's tribe...the Little Traverse Bay Bands...as well as the ancestors of our then-employers...had gone all the way to western Pennsylvania, mainly by canoe and foot trail...to fight.

With muskets and tomahawks, birch-bark canoes and iron courage.

And they were recruited and given their orders via networks of messengers and traders every bit as complex and convoluted as modern chains of communications and supply despite their relative lack of technology.

There is a whole vast well of cultural history and knowledge and spirituality that literally, in a lot of ways, helps to define the United States, historical as well as modern reflected in place names and verbal idiom and the food we have on our plates, and a vast history of conflict from San Salvador to Wounded Knee...that defines not just the Native Americans...but us Black and White and every other kind of American, too. There's a reason the Four Colors Of Man is a common Native American symbol.

In spite of everything, they recognize us as human beings, I think people like Mitch McConnell should stop and think about that.

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.
I will give you no hiding place down here.

~Maya Angelou, On The Pulse Of Morning.

The history of Black Americans is American history too.

Their culture has often...still does...defined our wider culture.

It was a long journey from slavery to citizenship, from Goree Island and the Door Of No Return to the Emancipation Proclamation, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry and the battle of Fort Wagner.

To citizenship, purchased with blood and death.

And the Klan and racist terror and segregation. 

The Harlem Hellfighters fought in World War I and came home to horrors like the Red Summer and the Tulsa massacre.

But It wasn't just Black folks were proud when Jesse Owens won the gold in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin and showed the world that the Nazis racist beliefs were nothing but lies. It wasn't just Black folks who were proud when Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling.

The Tuskegee Airmen never lost a bomber to enemy air action, at the cost of many of their own lives. They fought with superhuman courage and skill for a country that still regarded them as "Separate, but equal" and that equality was in name only, a cruel mirage in a country where anything from a family vacation to a military PCS was taking a fucking risk.

The Civil Rights movement and people like Medgar Evers and MLK and Thurgood Marshall left such a mark on this country that this last Monday, even Republicans had to recognize.

And for my generation...it was people like Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, and Michael Jordan who (right or wrong) were responsible for some of the shit that defined our younger years.

And Barack Obama not only was a pretty good President for eight years, but he so broke the Republican mind that because a Black Man said "Yes We Can" all Republicans can do to this day is say "No We Can't."

And because other people get to have a say, and be Americans too...and because our tradition of expanding liberty includes such people as I couldn't have imagined existed 30 or 40 years ago...suddenly Republicans don't even want to be Americans no more.

And they're telling you so. They're telling you what they plan to do, and that if they can't steal our democracy and elections in perpetuity, they are going to want to steal a part of this country and make their own and they don't care who they have to colonize or ethnically cleanse or kill to do it.

Because they don't believe anybody other than them is an American, and that includes not just people of color but a lot of other white people, like me.

And if you're reading this, probably you too.

Now the only real question is "What are you going to do about it?"

Either you stand up to these anti-American, fascist sons of bitches or you don't. There's no middle ground.

Together we rise, or none of us do.

We're either all Americans, or none of us really are. It's just that simple.

And that complicated. 

Citizenship is complicated, freedom is complicated.

Only a fool or a Republican believes in simple answers.

And so tomorrow, as we take the campaign South and West; as we learn that the struggles of the textile workers in Spartanburg are not so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas; that the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of L.A.; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people, we are one nation. And, together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea. Yes, we can. ~Barack Obama