Punishing Free Speech

In the spirit of #Occupy, young warriors from as far as Cherokee Nation, Navajo Nation, New York City and New Orleans merged with the spirit of the descendants of Crazy Horse to defy the mechanized aggression of the petrostate. Met with militarized police, they've suffered concussions and loss of limb, and now they will have their day in court.

Represented by the National Lawyers Guild, they have filed a class-action suit, claiming they were the victims of excessive force by police. As Alleen Brown reports, "It argues that the tactics were retaliatory, punishing those involved for exercising free speech rights."

Splitting Hairs

Perhaps the Milosevic regime analogy is more appropriate for understanding the Trump transitional government than the Hitler parallel promulgated by so many in the humanitarian blogosphere.

Maybe that's splitting hairs.

Making Sense of Nonsense

Secular Rapture on the wings of Golden Promises visits the Louisiana bayou to probe the depths of Tea Party bigotry and Biblical nonsense of Trump supporters was the mission of a Berkeley liberal. Her suggestion that we should all hold hands is equally nonsensical.

Displacement

In Beyond Vacationland: the Native American Cape Cod Story, photographer Matika Wilbur describes her 2015 encounter with Wampanoag and Narragansett tribal members in the region of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. We all know the story of these tribes welcoming the Puritans, only to be betrayed for their hospitality, but what interests me is the fact they carry a "unique burden of conscience" for everything that transpired afterward.

While it might not make logical sense for them to blame themselves as a people for being welcoming and generous, they nevertheless feel a "sense of complicity" in the horrific genocide that ensued.

Like other tribal peoples who struggle for cultural wholeness and identity in the face of globalization, the tribes of Cape Cod have a vital connection to place, that physical displacement from their homeland makes tenuous.

As non-tribal people are displaced today, due to the ramifications of venture capital, a possibility of empathy and understanding has arrived. Dispossessed of the ability to participate in cultural creation, due to this displacement that severs community ties, rent refugees become disconnected from American society in ways that can provide insight into what it means to be homeless in the greater sense of the word.

While modern states and international institutions still routinely annihilate tribal societies to expropriate their territories and resources, the American psyche--shattered by the tremors and upheavals of a civilization in collapse--can gain valuable perspective on displacement from people who have been coming to terms with this phenomenon for four hundred years.