Native American Tribal Disenrollment Reaching Epidemic Levels
Amazing how greed can destroy culture....for many reasons, cultures today just cannot stand, nor do they prosper apparently... Yet everyone on the socialist side will tell you how important it is, how you are forced to respect it etc...
Pun: Two guys sitting at a bar. One guy says to the other "I came home late last night and my wife threw a hard cover copy of Canterbury Tales at me. I ducked just in time and it missed me.". The other guy replied, "Let me get this straight, You had a close encounter with a flying Chaucer?"
I was at Canterbury Downs in the poker room playing Texas hold em. There were 6 players and one of the guys phone rings, he looks at it and shuts it off. His friend asks him who it was and he replied it was his wife and that he was supposed to be home 2 hours ago. "well aren't you gonna call her back"? his friend says. "Hell no" said the player " If I wait a couple more hours I'll get the silent treatment, I'll take that any day"
Now it suddenly hits me that what we see here for an enriching themselves ruling class is reminiscent to pig behavior in George Orwell's Animal Farm.
These American native pigs consider themselves as "All (Indians) are equal, but some (Indians) are more equal than others."
In this scenario, greedy pigs get to decide who is less than equal as a device to enrich those left over.
But pigs being pigs--well, let me put it this way: those left over, who are not in the more than equal class, must be in a cold sweat each time they approach their mail box. .
Their most advanced cultures were cutting hearts out of captives so the sun would keep shining.
Not saying Europeans were so great.
Every race I can think of has been mean as hell to their own kind for thousands of years.
I did a little fishing beside an Indian town in Washington years ago. I saw those guys driving their trucks, drinking their hooch, netting salmon and harvesting oysters. They lived in these condos on the beach, a fire in every fireplace. Looked pretty good to me. That was pre-casino.
Does the photo come through? I did a click and drag
I don't know about you, but I have ancestors in several places in Europe where the native there have entitlements. I am not motivated to leave the Land of Opportunity.
As a PS: If you can be enrolled or unenrolled, you can be re-enrolled... These are internal squabbles. By comparison, you must be familiar with the so-called "junk bond" boom of the 1980s that re-invigorated many corporations. What would you say to a group of managers who complained that they lost their townhouses and other perquisites because the shareholders "disenrolled" them from their "entitlement"?
... and stopping to think about it a bit more... Wasn't Galt's Strike a kind of "disenrollment by the enrolled"?
But, as you note, it is easy to tear those bonds.
And, as you say, it can be enlightened self-interest that causes that.
I agree, also, with the "fly in the ointment" problem of a Gulch community. In fact, I joined one in the 1970s; and it imploded before it got started. That is why I am an advocate of urban culture: civilization is literally city life. As the peasants on the feudal manors knew, "Stadtluft macht frei." City air makes you free. Get out of that farming village of 300 and get to some place with a mixed group of outsiders who don't know or care about each other and you will find freedom and opportunity for yourself.
The Valley in Atlas Shrugged was a literary device, not a plan of action. Moreover, at the detail level, the first thing they did when they "banded together" was spread out as far as they could. And their "shared values" were very basic, not very particular. The composer's best friend was tone-deaf. Ragnar's crew did not come from the Valley because the other Strikers disagreed with his choice of actions -- though they accepted his "not-really-altruistic" gifts of gold...
I don't know where you live, but here the automobile repair shops seem all to be named "Salvation" or "Victory" or "Glory." They do good work. That's all I care about. Their philosophical contradictions are their own. (And we will not get into the fact that many gas stations are franchised by Muslims.)
Austin, Texas, is a liberal city in a conservative state. It is the best - and worst - of both worlds. I accept both the gay rights and gun rights, but they also come with violations of property rights and denial of reproductive rights. A good philosophy would sort those out, once enough people read the right books.