Hi Sondra...
-> Look at the Nanticoke living in South Jersey and in Maryland.  Not
-> given any official recognition for a couple of hundred years (as a
-> matter of fact declared extinct), forced to attend Black schools
-> (because they weren't white, and the Nanticoke didn't exist, so they
-> must be Black), and forced to all sorts of shinnanegans in order to
-> own property, they still have a sense of thenselves as a separate
-> people.  The same thing is true of the Shinnecocks in New York State.
The Lubicon Cree in Alberta are facing continual extinction on paper.
Efforts have been made over the years and are still being made to keep
the membership list as short as possible.  I don't know the original
reason, other than devilry, but the reason now is that a lot of oil and
gas are being extracted from their land.  They're being 'encouraged' to
join the Woodland Cree.
-> He ended up writing it as a poem, and I replied more to the poem than
-> to the ideas in it.  Not all of his ideas were altogether bad,
-> although his concept that we already have a level playing field is
-> absurb.
It sounds like, as he thought about it more closely, he moderated his
ideas.  That's encouraging.
Sometimes people message that Canada shouldn't honour our treaties.  I
think that some believe a treaty between nations automatically expires
after a generation or two.  But a treaty is a contract, and contracts
don't end with the death of the signatories.
We could default on our treaties, and make up excuses that would make us
feel justified, but we would still be defaulting.  I see nothing
theoretically wrong with re-negotiating treaties, but not if one party
is in a coercive position.
-> Implied in his poem, but not actually stated, was the idea that we
-> lack spiritual leaders today; all we have are politicians.  I think,
-> for the country as a whole, that there is a lot of truth to that
-> idea, although we would probably disagree on what constitutes a
-> "spiritual leader."
Well, speaking from Canada, I've concluded that we don't have political
leaders.  We have our politicians too, and from what I read, there's a
lot of corruption, and we don't have the mechanisms to root out the
corruption even after it's been exposed.  It seems that our 'leaders'
are just very very successful parasites.  They don't lead; they exploit.
Canada might be breaking apart slowly, but the Prime Minister makes his
political survival a greater priority than the survival of Canada.  For
example, the official opposition party in Ottawa is the Bloc Quebecois,
a party that exists solely in Quebec and whose stated purpose is to
separate Quebec from Canada.  It is not constitutionally necessary for
the Bloc to be the official opposition; another party could have been
chosen.
The reason for having an opposition party is to have debate in
Parliament.  You can imagine how little meaningful debate the Bloc
raises on subjects of interest to all Canadians.  Having no real
opposition suits the Prime Minister right down to the ground of course.
I wouldn't want to have 'spiritual leaders' who were leaders of this
sort   I know I wouldn't want to live in a priestly society.  I think
we're paying a heavy price for being a secular society, but I wouldn't
want to go back to mixing church and state.  The church can be corrupted
by power and lose its real spirituality.  Then we'd really be in the
dark.  I am, of course, thinking of examples from my own WASP
background.
I remember you in my prayers.  I was told I had MS and that it was
incurable.  There was nothing to be done but look sorrowful and lapse
into disability while singing hymns of praise to the doctors.
Well, I prayed to be cured. Now I've been diagnosed with something else
that's treatable and that accounts for every single symptom that I
thought was MS.  I've just heard that Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which
diagnosed me with MS, has produced a lot of false MS diagnoses, and my
doctor is asking me if I really have MS, because nothing's going wrong
neurologically.  I think I don't have MS after all.
I'm the one who kept sifting through my medical history and the medical
references to puzzle out my real problem.  I wouldn't have made the
effort if I'd taken the 'scientific' approach that told me there was no
hope.  That's what the concept of prayer did for me.  I asked for the
impossible and I got it.  I don't understand it, but prayer is something
powerful.
--- PCBoard 15.2
(1:134/10)
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