Western Kōan Fragments of a Distorted World
Sunset is an angel weeping
Holding out a bloody sword
No matter how I squint I cannot
Make out what it's pointing toward ...
Powers chatter in high places
Stir up eddies in the dust of rage
Set me to pacing the cage
- Bruce Cockburn, from his song “Pacing The Cage”
“No one is illegal on stolen land”
– cardboard sign[1]
***
By some strange coincidence, not long after Toys “я” Us shut almost all its doors, the news of so-called immigrant, mostly Brown-skinned children being put in cages hit the headlines.
***
According to a NYTimes article:
“Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes.”
Even though “a 2016 Lancet study found that universal breast-feeding would prevent 800,000 child deaths a year across the globe and yield $300 billion in savings from reduced health care costs and improved economic outcomes for those reared on breast milk”, at a United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly, the US opposed breastfeeding because they are pro “infant formula manufacturers,” and pro increased health care costs.[2]
“Male calves are an unwanted byproduct of the dairy industry to keep cows pregnant and yielding milk and ripped from their mothers at birth, sometimes before they can even walk, to be sold for “bob veal.” Mothers chase after their newborns and the bellows of mother cows deprived of their young are so loud, they regularly inspire people living near the farms to call the police, according to published reports.”[3]
Products. Profits.
***
“I want what’s best for you,” is a stereotypical statement of many a parent. The long-standing advertising mantra “cradle to grave” could be amended with the tagline: “if you’re lucky.”
***
As shocked as many were to learn of the current atrocious Nazi-esque treatment of children, it is not new, rather symptomatic of a long history – in the US and elsewhere – of locking-up and/or keeping fellow human beings in restricted areas. Africans in chains kidnapped as slaves; many Black People nowadays restricted to ghettos by poverty and policing. Native Peoples restricted to reservations (though about 70% now live in cities), some officially prisoner-of-war camps; forced boarding schools.
“According to, John Toland, Pulitzer Prize winning author, in his book Adolf Hitler (pg. 202) wrote: ‘Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.’”[4]
Also, zoos.
***
“Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places”
⁃ Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
from the poem “The world is a beautiful place”
in the book “Pictures of the Gone World” (1955)
***
NAFTA undercut, for example, corn prices helping create the so-called border crisis. Vicious cycle of wheel of misfortune.
*
**
Some of the water-protectors at Standing Rock who were arrested were put in cages. Due to an extremist rightwing shift in some Latin American countries, the former president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is in prison; attempts are being made to imprison former presidents Fernando Lugo, Paraguay, and Rafael Correa, Ecuador. Red Fawn Fallis, an Oglala Lakota water-protector at Standing Rock was sentenced to 57 months in prison; there is a possibility for less time. More familiar are the fates of a high-percentage of Blacks, Latinos, Natives, and other so-called minorities in the USEmpire Prison Industrial Complex, plus longtime high profile political prisoners such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, and more recently, Julian Assange. Chelsea Manning was released from solitary confinement and prison.
Gated communities.
Pay to go to the beach, the park.
Cage-free eggs.
***
Various mainstream products, movies, restaurants, theme parks, holidays, back-to-school sales, etc. are promoted as family- or kid-friendly.
Kinder, gentler products, profits.
***
“We are family
I got all my sisters with me
We are family
Get up everybody and sing”
- Sister Sledge, “We Are Family”
”If I'm laden at all
I'm laden with sadness
That everyone's heart
Isn't filled with the gladness
Of love for one another”
- Hollies, “He ain't heavy, he's my brother”
“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our mind.”
- Bob Marley, “Redemption Song"
NOTES:
[1] “Those Impacted by Colonialism Speak Out on the US’s Legacy of Family Separation”
[2] “Opposition to Breast-Feeding Resolution by U.S. Stuns World Health Officials”
[3] “Please Eat Our Cheese the Dairy Lobby Pleads”
[4] “Hitler Studied U.S. Treatment of Indians”
Mankh (Walter E. Harris III) is an essayist and resident poet at Axis of Logic. In addition to his work as a writer and small press publisher, he travels a holistic mystic pathway staying in touch with Turtle Island. See his new book of nonfiction with a poetic touch, “photo albums of the heart-mind”.
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