A New Birth in … What?

On this Fourth of July, a day to celebrate liberty, we’re all at risk of losing ours. The unlawful ambush and incarceration of undocumented workers diminishes your liberty too. Scapegoating the LGBTQ+ community diminishes all of us. Stripping healthcare from the poor to further fatten the rich denigrates the entire experiment we call the United States. If you’re not feeling it, pinch yourself, hard.

Lies are winning. History is literally being rewritten, erasing people of color, tidying up all signs of the struggle. Democracy is giving way to oligarchy, for sure. The way out of it is to go through it and the way to go through it is to bring everybody in. We rise or fall on inclusion. E Pluribus Unum is now a warning. Let’s not let our greatest strength be our greatest weakness.

Black history is American history. Indigenous history is American history. We cannot understand ourselves without understanding those who came before and those with whom we share the same spaces and more often than not the same dreams.

The very flatness of the High Plains makes it a compelling place to see how history has been written, revised, and white-washed over the centuries. Today we risk a second desecration of the land we stole from Indigenous peoples, the first desecration being the attempted extermination of the tribes that called North America home 10,000 years before Europe showed up. The land was stolen, but the people and their culture would not be extinguished.

In The More We Take, three unlikely heroes, wrestling with painful personal histories of their own, find a connection to the history of the prairie and form the nucleus of a ragtag band of resistance to the corporate greed that is draining the Ogallala Aquifer of its ancient, sacred, and irreplaceable freshwater.  This matters because all of nature matters and because the Ogallala almost single-handedly supports life as we know it in the Midwest, including one-third of the meat and produce this country consumes.  And yet history tells us that we will go right ahead and pollute and deplete it until it is gone, forever.  

And then even the Oligarchs will suffer. There’s no replacement for fresh water.

Are we even capable of doing better? Must we always war upon one another and upon the planet? Wisdom-keepers of yesterday show us a better way is possible and that is why they reappear on the Plains in The More We Take to fight and struggle alongside Clete and Irene and Kathy and their band of misfits: a brain-injured rodeo star, an old hippie marijuana farmer from New Jersey, a 10-year-old savant. 

We’re all misfits in this story. E Pluribus Unum. Don’t sit it out.

READ . THINK . ACT

Kevin