The question:

What does it take to get an equal call to citizens of the
United States to help out American citizens who
have, are and will be experiencing metaphorical
earthquakes of their own?

Native Americans. Homeless war veterans. The
homeless. Poverty-stricken people in the United States.
Those who have lost their jobs and homes and had
and are having their lives ruined because
of ignorant, fear-filled human beings like George Bush
and Richard Cheney, who plunged the United States
of America into a meaningless war that caused the
murders of thousands of Americans, Iraquis, and
others, and in turn, created the economic turmoil
that has placed the United States on the brink of
financial disaster. These two individuals live in
warm, safe, secure homes, and are revered in some
circles, as wonderful men. With what legacy will history
books credit them? Because America honors those who
serve in public office, for some strange reason, more
than any other American, they will prevail with
their new libraries, etc.

Who is going to create a text message number for
people to call in to donate money to help out those
Americans who were figuratively destroyed in the
past by greed and self-interest like these two men?
Who? And when?

The United States has always been helpful to
people in other countries. It has helped make
America, in many people’s eyes, the great
country that it is. It is almost cliche. What
about Americans who need help? Think
about it. Where is the outpouring to
help Americans in need, like what is
going on in Haiti now? Where is it,
folks? And that is not to slight Haitians
one bit. The horror they are
experiencing is unimaginable. We
must help them out. I’m simply
saying that we have Americans
in America who are experiencing
the same kind of horror.

Food. Shelter. Clothing. Possibly a bit of
recreation. Where has it gone for thousands
of Americans who have been, are, and will
be devastated by this metaphorical earthquake
that plagues Americans as a people?

It is time for the United States of America to
put forth the same effort it does to help out
Americans like Haitians are being helped now.

It is time, or, the infrastructure of America will
continue to decay, and die.

It is time.

And for those of you, after reading this, who will want to compare me to Rush Limbaugh’s bellowing about American citizens’ income tax money that goes to Haiti, forget it. Rush Limbaugh is a squeaky
conservative. Oiling his hinges would only be a beginning to turning
around his idiocy. For me, my hinges are oiled. I am tired of those who try to make a show by giving others money, when many Americans in their backyards are struggling to stay alive.

We have always given as Americans. So much so,
we are blinded to the fact that there are thousands
of Americans who need the same kind of help
Haitians are struggling to receive. If you want to
argue this point, before you do, I encourage you
to visit some Native American reservations in
the United States. Visit them. Roll in the dirt,
feel their earth. Go to the Conoco convenience
stop in Lame Deer, Montana. Stand in line
with what you want to purchase. Observe
those standing in line with you. Who are
they? They are Native Americans who live
on a poverty-stricken reservation where
drug and alcohol abuse stalks each Native
American who lives there, like actually,
forced to live there, because their ancestors
were shot and killed when they resisted
attempts at curtailing their rights to
follow the buffalo and to live free.

Go there, my friends, before you flap
your tongue about me, and my
pontificating. Sit and ponder there.
Then, tell me that America’s
indigineous people in addition to
those Americans who live in
cardboard boxes under bridges
do not need the kinds of help some Haitians
are presently receiving.

Tell me. Tell me. Churches who
spend all of their might on helping
people in other countries who are
experiencing plight, poverty, hunger,
disease, AIDS, and a host of other
horrifying things that most Americans
do not. Why is it that there are
Americans in America who live
in “Third World” countries, or as
some idiots say, “developing nations”,
which is hilarious to me, here in
America? Check out Pine Ridge,
folks, before you attack me for my
presence of mind here.

Check out parts of Los Angeles,
New York City, Chicago, Denver,
etc. Everywhere, and anywhere you
go in the United States, you simply
need to open your eyes, and you will
see human devastation.

So, close your mind. Kick me in the ass
for this article. Say that I am an idiot.
It doesn’t matter. My plea is simply to
open your minds and eyes to the
devastation in America as you have
opened your minds and eyes to
Haitians. Americans need your
help as well. They also need your
hearts and your love. Who is the
first one to raise their hand and
pledge, as you are pledging to
Haiti, to exude the same passion
for America’s people who are
less fortunate than you? Who?

“When I walked up to the crematorium, I traced the steps of prisoners who could
no longer work or work, like women, children, elders, the sick, prisoners who were gay,
prisoners who were gypsies and other “throwaways”, as Nazis often called them.

“The first room was the room where prisoners had to strip themselves naked.  Then, they
walked to the next room, which had a lower ceiling than the rooms in the rest of the building
and no windows.  They were told they were going to take showers, but instead, poison
pellets were dropped into the room in two hinged box-like containers in one wall that
were filled with the pellets from outside of the building.”

Think about that.  Just think about that.

“The next room was the crematorium.  I stood in front of the ovens as the tour guide
explained that towards the end of the war (World War II), the Nazis escalated the job, or
as they called, the final solution.  They backlogged at Dachau.  The tour guide showed us
how bodies were piled up, both inside and outside of the crematorium waiting to be
burned.  Pictures taken at the time were prominent there.

I stepped back from the photos.  I realized that anywhere I stepped, I stepped where
Nazis and people condemned to death by ignorance had either once stood, or lay.  I
know I am unique, different, because there is no one else who is me.  I just don’t like
the idea that killing is a solution to solving problems.  Genocide is ignorance based on
fear.  And according to some, fear is the second most powerful human emotion next to love.

The tour guide mentioned that the German people, as recent as 1999, had decided to
“come out” with their horrific past.  German children are now required to study World War II
Nazism and come to the camps to learn.  The tour guide said the reason the German people
had waited so long to “come out” was because of their shame for the
terror  and devastation the Nazis had perpetuated on millions of others.”

It is time, now, for the American people to do the same thing.  We must come out
of our shame and stop genocide in America.  That is the very least we can
do for the native people of America.  Our children must learn about native people,
their cultures, their history, and who they are as human beings so that they can relate
to them as human beings.

No one is better than anyone else regardless of achievements, social standing, religion ,
culture, race and/or material wealth. We are one because  we are human.  We are a collectiveness
consciousness.  When we hurt someone, we  damage that consciousness.  This, in turn, causes
all human beings to lose some of the positive energy this kind of
consciousness brings to each one of us. 

If one isn’t convinced, walk in the hidden recesses of a building next to Princes Gracht Canal
in Amsterdam where thirteen year-old Anne Frank hid from the Nazis with her family for three
years until they were betrayed and sent to camps. Walk in the rooms.
I did.  Guess what?  Anne Frank was a talented girl, a writer, a young person with
dreams and goals.  A Jewish girl who loved her family more than anything else
in her world.  A human being.

Feel her there.  Feel the terror.  Anne Frank, at age sixteen, died from typhoid in a concentration
camp because of ignorance fueled by fear.  Genocide in its finest form.

Then, there is the Sand Creek Massacre.  I’ve been at the site several times.  Sat in the grass
by Sand Creek, camera in hand, alone, recording sounds, the sun warm on my back.  I felt like
others were there.  You know, invisible, but there.  Perhaps apparitions, if I looked hard enough.
On November 29, 1964, there were over five-hundred Cheyenne lodges there, perhaps a thousand
or so Cheyenne people, seven-hundred soldiers, their horses, their equipment, their canons,
their guns, their sabers, and Indian dogs and horses.  Their ignorance.  Their fear.  Their  hate.
And there was murder there.  Rape. Mutilations.  Carnage.

There is a prominent person who has done work at the Sand Creek Massacre Site.  I asked
her if she ever “felt” anything while she was there doing her work.  She said, “No, not really, but I’ll
never go out to the site at night.”  I asked her why.  She said, “I don’t know why, I just won’t go.”

You might want to check it out, see how it makes you feel.  Perhaps it can remove you,
even for a moment, from your reality and plunge you in the depths of losing sight of who
human beings, all human beings really are, human beings, just like you and me.

####

Contact:

Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103


One Story of Horror At Sand Creek Duncan Kerr, the scout, found the body of One Eye lying near the camp.

“Some of the boys had scalped him, ” Kerr wrote, “but they either did not understand how to take a scalp, or their knives were very dull, for they had commenced to take the scalp off at the top of the head, and torn a strip down to the middle of the neck.”

A short distance beyond, he found One Eye’s wife sitting alone in a buffalo wallow: “I went up to her and laid my hand on her head. She looked up quietly, and recognizing me said; ‘How de do Dunk, me heap dry. Gib me some water.’

I asked in the Cheyenne language, if she was seriously hurt. She replied by throwing the blanket back and showing me aghastly wound in her side, through which the entrails were protruding. The wound must have been caused by a fragment of a shell.  I gave her a drink of water, and left my canteen. As I turned to leave, she took my hand to detain me, and begged me to shoot her with my gun….But I could not do it, for I had known her a long time; a lively, sprightly, mischievous, little thing, that fairly worshipped her Chief One Eye.

This is the squaw that One Eye brought into Ft. Lyon with him and was on our trip after the captives. When she saw I would not kill her she covered up her head and began singing her death song again….I had not gone very far, when I met a soldier.  I pointed her out to him, and told him I had just shot and wounded an Indian and had fired my last shot; that the Indian was badly wounded, and could not help himself, and I wanted him to creep up behind the Indian and shoot him in the back of the head. The fellow crept up close behind her and shot her dead….
-“Sand Creek: Tragedy and Symbol Pt. 1” G.L.Roberts, 1984

Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado