March 31, 2010 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • Page 23 Poverty is still with us, and may be in our own neighborhoods. My lips are sealed, but I know some people who are unemployed and many who are underemployed who would just love to be putting in 60 hours a week and cannot find anything to do with their time. The socially acceptable answer to all this is education. Go back to college, get another diploma-mill degree, and all will be well -- for the people who mint the degree. You still may not be able to find work, but hey, that’s your problem. On April 15, the rest of us have to pay for this. Pardon me if I have some problems with it. The idea of education as a solution for all the world’s problem is a great convenience for the education industry, which employs huge numbers of deans, presidents, professors, teachers, teacher’s aides, secretaries, and custodians at wages the private sector cannot dream of paying. At the entry level, these people prepare Americans for work by teaching them the alphabet and the multiplication tables. At the top, they theoretically teach them that life will be better if they examine everything with regard to Aristotle, who believed in spontaneous generation and believed that barnacles turn into barnacle geese. Frederick II von Hohenstaufen shot a few holes in the barnacle goose idea circa 1250 AD. Racists who still take Charles Darwin seriously – fewer and fewer since the Russians dumped Scientific Atheism and stopped giving out the Alexander Oparin Medal – are still stuck with spontaneous generation, despite the best efforts of experimental scientists such as Lazzaro Spallanzani (1727), Rudolf Virchow (1854), and Louis Pasteur (1863) proved that spontaneous generation is a myth. These scientists are responsible for modern medicine, sanitary food processing, and public health. Education without regard to the cerebral intelligence and intellectual courage needed to analyze and evaluate the facts is like herpes: It may not kill you, but it never goes away. The trouble with education is that nobody ever asks -- “education for what?” I remember once, down the corridor of the years, that I interviewed Tina Manning, a Shoshone who had been named Miss Indian America. Tina was asked, “What is the key to helping Indian people today?” Her response had been carefully programmed by her white handlers as “education.” The answer to the problems of the American Indian was always programmed as “education” by the whites who tried to run the Indians’ lives for them. “Education” provides endless jobs for mostly white people, and the failure of “education” to deal with the problem provided endless jobs for the next generation of white people who… Tina didn’t go for it. Her answer was “control of the land.” Her tribe, augmented by the Arapaho tribe who talked their way onto the Wind River Shoshone Reservation in the 1870s, still controlled a significant amount Turning the key that breaks in the lock of land that could be used for productive agriculture and tourism. Most Indians live pretty close to the bone, and the kind of money you can make growing potatoes and entertaining tourists was a better meal ticket than getting some sell-out tribal member into Dartmouth as a phony expert married to a white woman, laying a guilt trip on gullible whites whose ancestors did not even live where when the worst rip-offs took place. Were your ancestors American citizens when King Philip’s War broke the power of the New England tribes in 1675? Did they fight in Sullivan’s Campaign against the Iroquois in 1778? Did they approve the Indian Removal Act of 1830, where the eviction of the Five Civilized Tribes killed 10 times as many people as died in the Bataan Death March – except that most of the dead Indians were women and children? Did your ancestors endorse the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887, which left the Indians with the worst possible land in the aftermath of the Indian Wars, which had functionally ended 10 years before? If they didn’t, you are free from guilt. Your only problem is not doing anything about what has happened since then. Many people living today were around when the Three Federated Tribes – Mandans, Hidatas, and Arikaras, all of them U.S. allies against the Sioux – saw their best farmland go underwater in the 1950s due to a federal dam project, and the Menominees were forced to sell their whole reservation during the Termination program. Americans snored through these outrages because their own jobs were not threatened and because Henry Luce, the publisher of LIFE magazine, hated Indians. The Indians, the first Americans, have been viciously abused because mainstream society saw them as an anachronism. Touting education as an alternative to control of the land is the worst of these abuses. Tina had the courage and the integrity to say that control of land was more important than education. Control of the land produces the near-certainty of income. Education crashes into racism, which means you will never get a job no matter how many college degrees you pile up. This is just as much a problem of American Indians out West as it used to be for blacks in the South. Tina was a genuine beauty and a student at a serious college. She did not take the easy way out of being born an Indian and marry some guy who was one-sixteenth Cherokee and a millionaire due to oil discoveries in Oklahoma. She married John Trudell, a Dakota American Indian activist with a clean reputation. Tina died in a suspicious house fire with two of her children when she tried to defend the land rights of her own tribe and reservation. She was one of the most honest and honorable people I ever met, which is why I mentioned her in the dedication of my most recent book, “Custer Survivor,” along with my friend Buddy LaMonte, who was shot in the back by a sniper, and my friend Pedro Bissonnette, who was murdered by federally-funded tribal police. They were people who tried initially to work with the system. That is why they died when they were still in their 20s. It is not easy being an Indian today, and education has not made it any easier. If the people who want to control your land can do so by hiring thugs to kill you, believe me when I say they will hire them. This is the wimpy farce of flogging education – the great middleclass excuse for everything, but mostly for the failure to demand a fair minimum wage. The people we found when we got here and the people we brought here before slavery was outlawed are our very own moral and economic responsibility. We ruined their live to improve our own. Europeans of the pre-Colonial era were physically much smaller than we are today and lived much shorter lives than the European-Americans who emigrated. The same could be argued for those African-Americans who were dragged here in chains because white indentured servants from the holding pens of London prisons or the bogs of Ireland and Scotland died within a matter of months and had to be replaced by tribal Africans whose immune systems could cope with anything. Modern AfricanAmericans are part of the American story, and those who were born here are the responsibility of those white Americans who were also born here, even if their immediate ancestors came here from Ireland, Germany, Italy, or the Netherlands. Those Hispanics who were born here, or came here legally, are also part of the American legacy. Checking my own book about Custer’s Last Stand, I note that another book about The Alamo – an instance of history, which, like Custer’s Last Stand, has some problems with the white-makes-right assumptions of the previous century and the one before – could cause some revision of the Manifest Destiny school of history. The fact of the matter is that white people stole the continent from Native Americans and used the forced labor of African Americans to make it economically viable. We also took about a quarter from Mexico, and that too is debt. We owe people, big time. Anything else is charity, which is not a debt, but a matter of conscience. Countries that fail to practice birth control – a nobrainer in counties like India and China, long since so in South Korea and Japan – should not expect the United States or Canada or the weary, worn-out countries of Western Europe to cut them slack. The concept of children as a form of social security was long since finished off in North America by the idea that every kid who can eventually learn to read deserves a four-year college education. Let’s not export this idea overseas, where people will not believe it anyway. America needs a fair minimum wage. Charity otherwise should be strictly voluntary, and in the case of countries that do not worry about birth control, it should be outside the purview of U.S. taxpayers. Take the guilt trip somewhere else. It’s not playing in America anymore. Ordinance addresses gated roads (continued from page 13) The residents, however, argued that opening the gates would lead to the increase of motorists who would use the area as a shortcut between Pulis and Franklin avenues and that the speed of traffic on the streets near their homes would increase. Other residents voiced the concern that if the gates are left open thefts would become more frequent in the area. “Frankly, these concerns are real,” Marcus said, “and we certainly respect them, but we feel the gates remaining open better serve the entire town.” Marcus said it was ultimately decided at the meeting to leave the gates open and put this ordinance in place to restrict the use of the passages where the gates are located to emergency services only. “The police are adamant that with proper signage and substantial fines posted the private use of the gates will stop,” Marcus said. He also noted that the ordinance would allow the police to properly enforce the restricted use of the gated areas. The gates are located on Latch Lane where the ends of Iron Latch Road and Ridge View Way meet, and at the end of Surrey Lane, in the northwestern portion of the borough. The gate on Latch Lane is midway between Ridge View Way and the end of Iron Latch Road and has “do not enter” signs at both ends. There are no signs posted near the gate at the end of the Surrey Lane cul-de-sac, which leads into the Borough of Oakland. In December, the council reached a consensus that the roadway gates should be kept open for safety reasons based on Conklin’s opinion and the recommendation of his staff and the people who respond to emergency calls. Conklin claims when the gates are closed and locked, police and emergency service vehicles have to circumvent the gated areas or stop to open the gates, both of which could result in life threatening delays. He believes that having more than one sure way in and out of any development can and will save lives. The gates were installed in 1985. In the past, they were kept open during winter snow storms and locked during other times of the year. But the increase in the number of homes in the area and the construction of Route I-287, which eliminated Circle Drive as a through street to Pulis Avenue, has changed the area so there is no travel route through the area if the gates are closed.