U.S. policy at Sand Creek, Washita River, Wounded Knee, Sabra and Shatila, Gaza, Falluja, Jenin, Nablus, and Qana

On Saturday, August 12th, I attended a rally and march in Denver in support of Lebanese and Palestinian people suffering under Israel’s occupation and violent invasions. It was darkly ironic that the street from which I walked to the capital was named ‘Sherman Street.’ It was, after all, General Sherman, the famous civil war leader and later head of the Military Division of the Missouri, who wrote to Ulysses S. Grant (the commanding officer of the federal army) in 1866, saying “we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination.” He said that he would stay in the west “till the Indians are all killed or taken to a country where they can be watched.”

Arriving at the capital grounds, I then saw a statue dedicated to Christopher Columbus, who wrote in his log concerning the Arawak people he encountered in the Bahamas: “They would make fine servants….With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” All of this makes me think about the inheritance into which I have been born. And then I remember that the bombs, missiles, helicopters, bulldozers, and other weapons used by the state of Israel to kill Palestinians, demolish homes, and bomb the Lebanese people are bought from U.S. companies with money given to Israel by the U.S. And I realize that this is not something just of the past, something historical. It is something now, something immediate and real. These historic policies have not gone away; they have only been expanded upon and exported into a global context.

flyingears

bell hooks

Greed violates the spirit of connectedness and community that is natural to human survival. It wipes out individual recognition of the needs and concerns of everyone, replacing this awareness with harmful self-centeredness. Healthy narcissism (the self-acceptance, self-worth, that is the cornerstone of self-love) is replaced by a pathological narcissism (wherein only the self matters) that justifies any action that enables the satisfying of desires. The will to sacrifice on behalf of another, always present when there is love, is annihilated by greed. No doubt this explains our nation’s willingness to deprive poor citizens of government-funded social services while huge sums of money fuel the ever-growing culture of violent imperialism. The profiteering prophets of greed are never content; it is not enough for this country to be consumed by a politics of greed, it must become the natural way of life globally.

bell hooks, from "all about love: new visions" (2000)