Land Theft Invalidates USA

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by Bill Watkins 9/5//2019

Men will not think that robbers and pirates have a right of empire over whomsoever they have force enough to master, or that men are bound by promises which unlawful force extorts from them.  —John Locke

Land theft is no basis for a valid government.  Someone could appeal to violence and war, rationalize the European conquest of the Americas, but underneath the movement and close to the soil of this land is the truth that crimes against humanity established the thirteen colonies, who rebelled against England to assert themselves as the United States of America, while America’s original inhabitants were to be killed off, subdued, moved and forgotten.  A criminal for-profit enterprise, leaving us with usurped land, its native inhabitants pushed into small reservations—a miniscule percentage of their natural inheritance—people who never gave consent to be governed by Europeans, and never should.

When Queen Elizabeth chartered Sir Walter Raleigh’s exploration of the American eastern coast in 1584, she granted him license “to discover, search, finde out, and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countries and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian Prince.”  The first “Virginia Charter” backed up that thought, as King James urged English adventurers to “bring the infidels and salvages living in those parts to humane civilitie and to a setled and quiet govermente.”  Professed Christianity would help the English usurp the land called Wingandacoa by the natives, James ordering his sailors to propagate the “Christian religion to suche people as yet live in darkeness and miserable ignorance of the true knoweledge and worshippe of God.”

Having studied native American culture diligently for a few years, sober for twenty years, sensitive and aware, hungry for truth, it is clearer to me every day that it was the alcohol-consuming, cursing, armor and gun-loving Europeans—not the natives—who lived in darkness and miserable ignorance of the truth that the Earth was to be honored, respected and preserved. That guns, explosions, killing and noise were not strength but weakness.  And strength?  Witness a piece of it in the eloquence of a great native chief:

From Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit, there came a great unifying life force that flowed in and through all things—the flowers of the plains, blowing winds, rocks, trees, birds, animals—and was the same force that had been breathed into the first man.  Thus all things were kindred, and were brought together by the same Great Mystery.  

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Chief Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Lakota Sioux

Like the English, the Spanish were guilty of land theft, starting with Columbus’ 1492 raid, leading to a threatening letter from King Ferdinand to the Taino-Arawak people of the West Indies.  In the letter, King Ferdinand informs the native people that the Pope is the ruler of the world, the bible’s God is the ruler of the universe, and that Spain shall be the ruler of all non-Christian lands they discover.  Should any of the native tribes resist, the Spanish would declare “war upon you from all sides and with all possible means, and we shall bind you to the yoke of the Church and of Their Highnesses.”  Further that “we shall enslave your persons, wives and sons, sell you or dispose of you as the King sees fit; we shall seize your possessions and harm you as much as we can as disobedient and resisting vassals.”

And so these supposed Christian people stole land, people who touted a bible that forbade stealing.  We erected laws and a Constitution that also forbade stealing, even though the privilege to write laws and hold land here was obtained through armed theft. Usurpation and theft can never be a valid basis for government, something John Locke proposed and I hereby second today.

…the aggressor, who puts himself into the state of war with another, and unjustly invades another man’s right, can, by such an unjust war, never come to have a right over the conquered…

Yes, Sir John, you speak the truth.  So should all of us, so should all of us!

The Greatest Democracy on Earth (lol)

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-by Bill Watkins
(he, she, it, Christian, liberal democrat, unregistered ex-patriot conservative white liberal)

***

Congratulations.  I assume if you are reading this piece, you are:

a. literate
b. intelligent
c. humor-curious, at least
d. alive.

E., you might be confused about your nationality, and I aim to help you with that.  Your sexuality and identity politics are yours, so there, and stop putting it in my face please.  I’m not angry, just enraged as a displaced European land thief, thousands of miles from my roots and hundreds of years since the great theft that gave us the United States of America.

Pause.  Consider the glory in creating a perfect people-rule democracy after removing the first people of this land!  Brilliant sleights of hand gave us white Euros a sound footing to tell our old world monarchs to buzz off, while with the other side of our mouths we taught the bible to the heathen, earth-loving naturals.  We scared them next with our guns, then threw money around until we claimed ownership of this land, carving our likeness into the natives’ spiritual mountains and worshipping our concrete, asphalt and steel creations.

Pause.  Consider us some more!  People-rule!!  Never mind the earthquake, hurricane, wildfire or tornado, we are certainly in charge!  We bow to nothing because we are white and use gun powder to explode things and kill people better than any living organisms in the history of this world!  Never mind those guns are now turning on ourselves, civilization itself proving that the “homeless” dude living in a tent may have the right idea.

There were many nations here before guns created the United States of America.  Without those guns, we might be a collection of native and migrant nations peaceably trading and honoring mother earth, what a bore!  There might be no roads, cars, mass burning of earth blood, litter and pollution.  There’d be less noise and no mass shootings, but what would happen to the wonderful, perfect people-rule democracy those brilliant ex-patriot British established on land formerly inhabited by earth-adoring savages?

Geocracy?  Earth-rule?  Insane!  Mutual respect of different nations, races, cultures and creeds?  Ridiculous!  Consensus between all people instead of alienating elections filled with winners, losers, majorities and minorities?  It couldn’t be!  Nothing could be better than democracy except the truth itself, which knows of a Power, is humble to it—enough so to refrain from the self-worship of Eurocentric auto-erotic secular religio-politics.

Letting Go of Democracy

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Let go.  Democracy isn’t that great.  Let go.  Civilization is overrated.  Let go.  Money has corrupted the whole thing.  Let go!  Nancy won’t solve it, but neither will Trump.  Biden is overrated in an overrated seat, so stop pedestal shopping!

Live your own life.  Find its meaning, set out on a great adventure for your own personal peace of mind.  Study your roots, ignore your roots, make an investment—sell all your stuff and travel the world…  You feel you lack “privilege” and that I have it as a white male?  Well, I started drinking alcohol on Dad’s lap at five, was blacking out on the substance by thirteen, and almost killed myself in my twenties, OD-ing on lithium and whatever else overrated Western medical professionals prescribed me.

Too much “overrated?”  Maybe, but that’s what this all is.  Sure, democracy beats monarchy, but don’t you think there just might be something better out there in the universe of governing principles?  What about Russell Means’ and the Lakota’s idea of Consensus-rule?  Instead of up-down votes leaving upset minorities and power-crazy majorities, winners and losers… what if we actually took the time to move slowly but surely with Consensus decision-making?

No movement until we’re all on board!  Takes a lot of prayer, meditation and introspection… a lot of work!  But we’re worth it.  So let’s go.  Let’s let go.  Let’s let go of something that wasn’t that great for all people in the first place.  How was “American” (European) democracy for the native people we displaced and violently removed to establish it?  I’d say it’s always been a bummer to first peoples, who lived in harmony with the earth.  With this land they knew through a higher spirituality than that in our bibles no one owned but God.

Higher Power.  Great Spirit.  All-mighty Creator.  Call it what you want, but let’s go.  Let’s let go.  Be humble, know our place in the universe, and the truth that expensive, overrated “people-rule” politics will never solve your problems.  Admit that truth and watch real power roll in and lead us to the promised land.

Wooden’s 2-2-1: Would it Win Today?

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Anyone who knows Coach Wooden’s philosophy knows the answer to the question the title of this article poses…

Yes.  Of course.  Wooden wins in any age or era because success is still a peace of mind resulting from knowing you did the best you could to be the best person you were capable of becoming.

Best person, on and off the court.  Win all day long.  Win every day, like Lou Holtz!

***

So why don’t any of today’s NCAA men’s basketball coaches copy John Wooden, run a 2-2-1 fullcourt press all game-long as his UCLA Bruins did to the tune of ten national championships?  Why not plagiarize, if there’s no rules against that and the system still works?

It could work, if a coach was as humble and spiritual as John Wooden.  Such a coach could instill that humility and spirituality in his or her players, emphasize the name on the front of the jersey over that on the back, and decide that college student athletes aged eighteen to twenty-three are going to run every moment they’re on the court.

They would be the best conditioned team in the land, as Wooden’s Bruins were.  They would start out with some fair players over-achieving, then the best high school players would come.  Winners attract.  Never mind recruiting, they’ll come to play for the best conditioned, most over-achieving, hardest working team in the NCAA because that’s where the trophies are.  Where the lessons thrive.

Where real men and women who can contribute something great to this world are born.

The Cowardice of NATO

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Stuck in 1984, NATO is frozen inside its borders, holding meetings, wearing fancy suits—looking good—while Ukraine suffers.

Cowardice.  Lack of backbone.  Lack of facts!  Lack of leaders making sound decisions based on facts, instead of cowering to irrational fears of nuclear threats.

Like Trump, Vladimir Putin is a blusterer.  The core of him is fear.  But no sober analyst has pegged him as suicidal!  No credible reports have spotted his desire to end life on earth.

It’s just that his army’s not that great.  He thought he had USSR power, but he’s quickly realizing he’s got 2022 Russia power, built by a so-so Russian economy.  So how does he generate the fear of USSR power, to enable him to kill Ukrainian children today?

He talks about using nukes, to make NATO cower.  NATO members are so in love with their suits, fancy cars and current peace inside their borders, that they stand on the sidelines watching Ukrainian children die at the hands of Putin, and they weakly hit back with economic sanctions.

“We don’t want a direct war with Russia” was 1984’s line, but Joe Biden and other NATO heads love to issue it to cameras, reporters, and President Zelensky of Ukraine—who of course looks to a force like NATO to stand up for freedom in Europe.

Cowards.

Backbone

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“We don’t want to set a red
line because then we’ll be boxed
into that decision.”

“We don’t want to confront
the world leader killing civilians
because he might get mad and
turn on us.”

“Ukraine is our friend, but since
they are not members of NATO
we’ll fight a proxy war on the
sidelines, issue sanctions…”

“We are standing with Ukraine!”

“We are standing up to Moscow!”

Bombs dropping on hospitals and
schools, apartment buildings and
a Holocaust remembrance museum.

The Russian army surrounding towns,
about to starve out the people, while
they bomb civilians that try to
escape.  Frigid.  Heat cut.  Cold.

Cold to the bone…

We have no backbone.

In America, the government has
appealed to nuclear fear for eighty
years to help keep us out of a
direct confrontation with Russia.

I mean the Soviet Union… I mean the
USSR… They’re the same thing, right?

No, they aren’t.  One was a legal member
of the United Nations and its Security
Council.  The other is not… “Russia,”
re-established as a Federation in 1991,
did not formally apply and get voted
into the UN, as they should have been.

Give the Devil an inch and he’ll
take a mile.

Allow Russians to form on the Ukrainian
border without a direct response:

an invitation for them to come over
and kill a bunch of Ukrainians.

Where’s your backbone, Joe?

“But we don’t want to…”

Yeah, the spineless always have
an excuse not to confront evil.

Letter to Someone Considering Suicide

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by Bill Watkins, formerly suicidal
3/10/2022

Dedicated to the memory of Robin Williams

***

I would have told Robin just to sleep.  Stop trying to breathe.  Stop doing stuff and thinking you have to do stuff.

What suicidal people sometimes forget is the glory of the “mini-deaths” cleverly built into this life: sleep.  The complete cessation of activity.  The suicidal want to stop, want all thinking to stop, so… STOP!

Complications arise with drug and alcohol addiction.  Next to that, or maybe the same thing, is a bedevilment of negative thinking, insane thoughts—which any human being is capable of thinking from time to time.

There is a snowball forming, and suicidal people might start to believe the lies they are telling themselves that all would be better, if they were dead.  If they took an action to stop the heart and stop breathing… for good.

I was a victim of a suicidal depression that lasted about three or four years.  Parts of it are cloudy still, but I can now sum it all up as:  Alcoholism.

I started drinking Dad’s last sip of bourbon when I was five.  I started drinking the flammable, volatile, toxic liquid on my own with friends by the age of twelve.  I was blacking out on the substance by thirteen.

The above facts were not of interest to the multiple doctors I saw for depression at the end of the last millennium.  They saw and heard some symptoms, started to prescribe me drugs.  One of those doctors is now a recovering alcoholic, but because they missed my obvious alcoholism I sometimes think all of them were either alcoholic, drug addicted or just plain incompetent in the field of mental health.

I forgive them.  Alcoholism is “cunning, baffling and powerful,” to quote Alcoholics Anonymous—a powerful, tough, formidable foe.  I don’t blame anyone for my alcoholism and subsequent suicidal depression, but have come out of it to celebrate twenty years of consecutive sober days to distrust Western medicine in some areas.

They and all of us are fallible!

To the person who is at the time of reading this letter considering suicide, I say: “I love you. Thinking of suicide is a normal response to pain, when the pain builds and builds and sustains over a long time.  Love and accept yourself in this moment, but if you have a place to sleep that is warm and sheltered, be grateful for it and ‘die’ the mini-death that is sleep.  Stop trying so hard to breathe.  Slow down.  Do nothing.

“Do nothing for as long as it takes, with no time limit.  Based on my experience, the good rest and permission to stop will after time become a meditation or dream that makes you want to ‘go’ again.  You might get a vision that is positive.

“As far as managing life through a suicidal depression, stop doing that. Get out a piece of paper after your rest, and write down one or two things you want to do.  Eventually a bucket list (since you’ve been craving death anyway) of passions and activities.  Today, of course, you can only manage one or two of those things.

“Do them.  Love yourself for this one day.  That’s the only day that matters and exists.  If something makes you smile (that is not harmful to anyone, drugs or alcohol), note that and do it.   Repeat it, and follow that bliss throughout your day.  Your day is now your life!

“Note stuff in life we can’t control, like results or the future.  Let them go.  Maybe even consider prayer to a power greater than yourself.  Call it whatever you want to call it.  Just know you’re not in control of everything, and if you let yourself go… if you stop trying so hard and just rest… you’ll find the world continues to spin, and I do believe based on my own experience that positive thoughts and dreams are within us all…

If we wait for them.”

American Cowardice

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We come from a long line
of runners.

I’m talking about the white
people who left Europe to
establish a new nation on
First People blood.

Now the Ukrainians ask for
help and the American answer
seems to be:

Bleed first!

“We don’t want to enter into
a war with Russia, so…”

So we’ll watch on TV while
Russians kill Ukrainian babies,
raze towns and nuclear sites,
satisfied that we have levied
“strong sanctions.”

Sanctions.

Suspect, stop raping that girl
or we will be forced to levy
sanctions against you and your
closest friends!”

Sanctions.

Because we don’t want to make
Putin mad.

Heaven forbid, we upset the
murderer into more murders.

He wields a nuclear threat
and takes the world hostage,

while the West cowers like
it’s 1984;

like the threats have not come
from a third rate economic power,

but the mighty USSR.

Locked in the 80-year Cold War
flinch, that yells out “No Nukes!”
like a TS tick.

Sure we hit the D-Day beaches,
acts of courage from every era
apparent.

But how many Jews had to die
on our watch before we
showed up late to that fight?

The ultimate courage is to
stand up without a loud,
dishonorable exploding gun!

To face an enemy with your heart
exposed, counting coup, Jesus’ turn the
other cheek, love them to change like
Gandhi and Martin taught us
could work!

But if the military is your brand of
defense, as the USA claims:

Use it to defend the innocent
against bullies around the world.

Use it in the face of empty threats
of nuclear bombs – folks like Putin
who will bully with that threat,

who will hold cowards hostage.

March to Moscow

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Caring folks of the world, unite!
Don’t tell me this isn’t your fight.

Fear makes and shoots bombs,
killing children every single night.

Love is the most powerful weapon
forged in the fire of Creation…
Adults who make and shoot guns
to kill have lost sight of naked life,
have replaced it with love of nation.

Give what you got, wake up at
the sound of another mortar blast!

Get up now, grab a bag, take your
kids to the East not West!

Yes, I said it… It’s time we paid a
visit to the source of hate.

Bring love, food, flowers and music
before it is indeed too late!

They paint a picture and it’s tempting
to judge.  But I’ve never spent a day
in someone else’s shoes, I need to
purify so start with myself—

Who?

Me and my band of loving thoughts
we’re marching to Moscow to confront
the big boss.

We shall bring love and food and music
and flowers, straight up the gut of fear,
many yelling at us that “we’re headed
for a nuclear power!!”

We hurdle obstacles but do not
hit back when they hit us.

The press snaps photos, others tell
stories, and the human heart that’s
in each and every man, woman and child
will beat as one because love is

Love is actually what we all want,
even Vladimir Putin.

A Power Greater Than Evil

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We run and we run.  A virus drops or a guy goes wild on the world stage with big explosions, and it’s tempting just to run, run, run.

What’s a virus next to balanced, thriving, healthy days of life?  What’s the virus against a well-oiled immune system, eating good foods, working, playing and loving in a vibrant proactive fashion?

What are Vladimir Putin’s bombs and aggression next to a mother’s love?

***

Let’s stop running and square up our problems like men and women.  If someone bombed my hometown I wouldn’t refugee away from the bombing, but march to the source and have a talk with some people.  Unarmed, Christian, loving, direct talk.

Of course evil exists.  It always has and always will.

What’s your response to it?  Run?

I say, let’s live toward our problems, not away from them.  Live with the Power that ignites us all!  Live toward our enemies and love them back to sanity!  Live so well that our blood will pump into every extremity with a beating heart that will never stop for a measly virus!!!

There is a Power greater than evil, so align with it.  Never cower to the bully!  Love him.

Never cower from a virus.  Love today!

How to Properly Stand with Ukraine

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What created this moment?  How did the world come to watch on television a six-year old Ukrainian girl succumbing to her injuries from a Russian bomb in tragic, senseless death?  The most powerful military force in the world watching on the sidelines?  The most powerful military alliance in the world standing by, thousands of miles away?

Fear of nuclear war is seemingly rational, but fear itself is a poor decision-making paradigm.  It seems that it is this fear which drives U.S. decisions to steer clear of direct confrontation with Putin’s army, which is currently bullying Ukrainian population centers—even willing to shell nearby nuclear power plants.

Confronting bullies with economic sanctions is not “standing with Ukraine.”  If you witnessed a defenseless child being assaulted in the street, how would she feel about you promising to go after her attacker’s bank accounts and ability to be economically mobile?  The child would yell out, “No! Please help defend me against my attacker!”

With knowledge comes responsibility.  With power the same… We all know Putin’s army is committing wrongs against innocent people, threatening the peace and safety of Ukraine, Europe and the world at large.  A military defense exists to defeat Putin…  Why not use it now to control air space above a largely defenseless Ukraine—

Pushing back on the bully.  Scaring back the bully.  Making the bully rethink his aggression until he backs down as the Soviets did when we pushed them back in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.  Repeated appeals to “our NATO allies” and waiting for Putin to take all of Ukraine in a bloody, unnecessary invasion represents fear.

A fear of confrontation.  A fear of the bully.  Is that America?