Standing on a Rock

There have been times, over the last few months, when I have wanted to just leave the internet altogether (except for you Amazon, I'll always love you).  Social media has been giving me fits and I have to keep telling myself about one of my cardinal rules: don't argue with people on Facebook or Twitter, it's just never going to make anything good happen.  There is just so much nonsense out there, so much untruth, half-truth and willful obfuscation.  It provokes nausea.

But there are times when the Interweb lives up to it's promise, and one of those times is when the powerful look to flex their muscles against those who would refuse to be oppressed. It has been a core of the protest against police misconduct: the recording and sharing of pictures and videos that make the truth of otherwise confused and chaotic encounters more available and reliable (not perfect still, but better).

Right now, you can hear the voices and see the faces of the group of people protesting at Standing Rock North Dakota.  Their cause has risen into public awareness thanks largely to social media, because very little has been said or written about on the network news programs or newspapers.  You can see pictures of police and security forces in riot gear and with military vehicles looming over lines of protesters in flannel shirts and with traditional native garb.  Tanks versus horses, dogs and guns versus unarmed protesters. The United Nations and Amnesty International are watching how our nation responds to this.

The issue is essentially oil money versus the people of the Standing Rock Reservation.  Their reasons for protest are many, deep rooted in the history of this nation of ours.  To the Lakota people, the Dakota Access Pipeline is just another in a long list of offensive invasions against their place and their identity.  I don't want to engage in doe-eyed idealism of the Native peoples as harmonious stewards of the land.  While there may be some truth in the notion that their sense of connection to the land leads them to a more responsible stewardship of their environment, it is not a purely environmental cause at the heart of the crisis in Standing Rock.

Sure, pipelines are environmentally suspicious, they can leak and pollute the water.  As conduits of fossil fuels they inherently contribute to our dependency on non-renewable and pollution causing sources of energy.  There certainly are valid ecological reasons to oppose the pipeline, but to me the more compelling argument is the human rights and human dignity of this protest.

Imagine if you will, that someone wants to build a pipeline through your church, or your favorite park, or the place where you had your fondest childhood memories.  Even if they could promise that the pipeline would be leak free, even if they promised that they would try to mitigate as many of the "side effects" as they could, would you trust it?  Now imagine that the same people who were making these promises had broken promises to generations and generations of your ancestors, could you trust it?

That is where the Lakota people are standing now. It is about the water, it is about the land, but it is also about the history.  In this history, Europeans, Americans, White People, corporations and the US government cannot pretend to be the good guys. We are being faced yet again with what we pledge our allegiance to: is it money? Is it oil? Is it the "free market?" Or is it human dignity?  What's it going to be? Where are we going to stand?