Blog 742 – 09.02.2017
Men Are Responsible

It is a reality that many find difficult to face all throughout the human race. The denial that men might be in anyway responsible for climate change or for making once pristine, plush, and plentiful forests into deserts and waste lands is sad and ludicrous. Even a rudimentary look at the true history of westward progress in this country points out that the big push westward was prodded by depleted soil, polluted rivers and generally a big mess left in our wake. I remember reading several years ago in a record of the Lakota tribe’s oral tradition of the life and times of Native American hero Chief Crazy Horse that the white settler trails through their territories could be smelled for miles because of the garbage, discarded trash, and partially eaten carcasses of game killed along their route. The commercial image of a Native American chief with a single tear in his eye as Americans littered the highways with trash from their cars in the nineteen seventies did probably more to quell highway littering than any other campaign. The First People were stewards of this great land for over a thousand years and left it much as they found it, beautiful and unmarred. Westerners have had it for less than half that and cannot say that “progress” has not taken quite a toll.

The great difference is that Native American religions taught that we all, men and women, are responsible not only to father heaven but to mother earth. Any religion that devalues the feminine, and most western religions do, is lacking in the teaching of male responsibility. I saw for the second time yesterday the recently released movie about the deaths of two Native American girls on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming called Wind River. At the end of the movie in large white letters across the screen is printed the caption that there is to date no official governmental records kept of missing Native American girls and that nobody knows how many are missing. I cried like a baby. We are responsible for that, not the Russians, the North Koreans, the Islamic or any other terrorists, but we, the mainly but not very manly and mostly white men who run this country. We owe it to ourselves, to this great land and especially to all the women and girls in the world to be more responsible because we are responsible for the messes we make, the lives we take, and the hearts we break, even our own. No excuses.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White