The struggle between nothing and something

The kids and Peter went to panto in Derry yesterday early evening. After they went i managed to indue amild headache by watching 9 hours of TV straight. Yep, that's nine hours. I began with No Country For Old Men, then Scrooged, followed by Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, Father Ted, Black Books and finally Cider House Rules. It was something which i hadn't done for a long time and it was weird being able to just sit and watch one thing after another, not get up, not have to something for someone else, not feel guilty that you're not doing something 'worthy' for the children... i did feel guilty that i wasn't doing something useful - like cleaning the house or writing a novel, but it seemed impossible, the TV pulling me in, saying what about this, and this and this...

TV Must Watch Less. It's not like we didn't watch TV while the kids were here. But so often with the TV when it's on when the kids re on, i'm cooking or doing the laundry or doing something else for the kids.

I've developed a new banner. Not entirely happy about it. Reckon its a work in progress.

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee was so sad. I was supposed to have read the book in 1990 for the AMARTS course, but never got round to it. We were reading like 15 books a week, and i think that's fair enough. It was also the time when we were totally immersed in the plight of the First Nations people. I was also discovering feminism, so imust have been a real joy to be around.

Their plight that still continues today. I did not realise the fight was over gold in the Black Mountains. I wonder if they ever found gold there... but the frustration and injustice was so awful. At that time though white people were going around all over the world fucking it up.

If the West ever talks about human rights, i think they should compensate all the peoples whom they robbed first BEFORE insisting that other countries clean up. In any case most of the human rights abuses that we have now were first trailed in the great old time of colonialism. I remember being so angry, unjustifiably, with all my classmates. How can they sit there and be normal like that? How do they feel that it is their people who have been responsible for this outrage. From Atearoa to Africa... it was also interesting to hear the young boy's father day, the white man owns the earth, you must follow it.

Because he doesn't now, does it? And under his ownership the earth has been totally fucked up. My dad told me that the health and safety standard ISO2000 was a protectionist measure. It is and it isn't, of course. It is, like the law they used and the Bible they bashed, an awful action and intent disguised in goodness.

Of course i don't feel like this about white people any longer, if at all i'm more likely to direct that frustration and loathing toward myself for not doing more while this still continues. The Sioux were betrayed for gold, now we betray people for a lot less. Gold we can live without, but palm oil, the fool's gold of biofuel, we are trying to find a way to heat our houses, feed our families, keep the lifestyle we are accustomed to still there. The fight is coming closer and closer to the wire. We are beginning to fight, not about excess, but survival, and we must realise that if we continue like this we are all going to end up killing each other.

What i really liked too was the refusal to make the Sioux some kind of purer that pure noble savage. Sitting Bull was proud and ridiculous at the same time, but that did not stop him from being right, the Sioux were killers too, but they were also human. Two wrongs do not make a right. And sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease. As in the various treaties they made with the nations and then the 'education' they used to bully and coerce them into relinquishing their culture, for civilisation.

Charles Eastman/Ohíye S’a was a fascinating character. Tortured and torn, trying to find him way through the linguistic nightmare that was his world and the hellish schism of neither being Sioux or white. He was used and used and used over and over again... Finally, he stops being used and begins to do something - to become that cataract. Because unless a person carves a meaning for themselves, unless we become our own waterfalls and cataracts, we are going to be trapped in someone else's reading of ourselves. 

Which brings me to Cider House Rules. Homer Wells makes this wonderful speech near the end. It talks about doing nothing. He is trapped too, between leading a life of responsibility and duty and a life of possibility with a woman who is a coward. Whenever he asks her, what shall i do, she says nothing. Or wait and see. And he does, for a year. But it becomes intolerable. Her boyfriend who has been wounded in the war is coming home and he needs to do something. But she says, do nothing.

Well, he tells her, if i do nothing, maybe i'll be really lucky and someday, someone will come along and make the decision for me about what i am going to do. But i'm not lucky, and that's not going to happen, no one is going to come along and do this. So i am going to have to do something, because doing nothing is not an option.

And the truth is that even if we do nothing, we are doing something. We are drifting, into oblivion. In Copenhagen, in our rainforests, in our lifestyles, in the way we treat those who society - that is we - have trodden over, while we choose to do nothing, something is happening. That something is people who are not doing nothing, people who are doing something, are getting the upper hand and that upper hand tends to be horrific - tends to be dipped in blood and sorrow and greed. So for us who are doing nothing, stop imagining that we are doing nothing and do something.

Decide which side we are on and then stand up. Because something is always coming. And we are most certainly going to be in its path.