Buffalo Shooter

 I remember learning way back in the previous century that it was white men who came to the middle of what would become the United States on railroad trains on track built from the labor of Chinese and Irish and African immigrants, brought to their jobs for the minimal wages. These tracks cut across indigenous people's land, and the image that sticks out is that of those white men firing rifles out the windows of their luxury cars at the bison grazing on the prairie. It was made clear to this impressionable child of the sixties that this was in stark contrast to the native inhabitants who hunted with spears, bow and arrows, then using ever bit of their kill to feed, clothe and shelter their families. 

Europeans coming to another country to spoil the balance that had been in place for thousands of years. 

And maybe this was my own culturally responsive learning, but it wasn't as if I was unearthing secrets. These were matters of fact, corroborated by the stories of those who came before me. My ancestors who fled or were kicked out of some of the great nations of Europe just to come and create their own new systems of oppression here in The New World. 

I can remember feeling bad. I can remember feeling embarrassed that I was living the life of privilege in the vacuum created by my ancestors. But I also learned the lessons of those we oppressed. Not to waste anything. To do everything I could to restore balance with the earth and all the lives on it. If is sounds a little like I was a hippie, that would make sense: Boulder, Colorado circa 1970. I heard the talk back then of Zero Population Growth and the rumblings of ecological disaster. I grew up mourning the passing of Martin Luther King, and later discovering the words of Malcolm X. I had friends, adopted Navajo sons who struggled to adapt to their new white life. I met them in, of all places, Y Indian Guides. 

It did not occur to me until much later who impossibly culturally insensitive that was.

The loon with a gun who shot and killed ten people in Buffalo, New York felt none of this irony or ambiguity. He was afraid of being replaced. Replaced by those who he had "learned" had less of a right to live and breathe in the land made up almost entirely of immigrants. This is a mind formed in the new Millennium, rotted from the inside by culturally irresponsible teaching. The Hate Mandate. 

In the 1860s, the U.S. government created all-black regiments to fight on the frontier, protect the western expansion of the railroads, and to drive off any Native Americans who stood in the way. They called these infantry and cavalry groups "Buffalo Soldiers." Irony was not in short supply out on the plains. And this past weekend, there was plenty of irony to be found in upstate New York. 

It will take another lifetime to make sense of all this.