Post Script: Nobody really reads this blog. That is OK. It is not written for anyone but myself. It organizes my object oriented thinking to focus on the conceptual structure of things....like money, social structures like politics......Truth. The latter is scarce and hard to see or even find as a product of reason and logic driven research. Simple Truth as a reduction of complexity is not so simple to accomplish but the paradox is that our Information Age is structured on absolute natural laws in the physical domain that make computers and networked communication systems among them that work flawlessly built on the simple truth of the binary presence or absence of a real physical granular digital level entity that has properties the electrical, wave length, chemical, orientational...etc. domains.
Then we take that scientific knowledge of the physical universe to engineer science based systems to which we can apply and manage the entire range of conceptual abstractions of our minds that go so far beyond the bounds of the physical world to leap beyond the bounds of any constraints imposed by any natural law that would otherwise constrain what we................
1: Think
and
2. Do
Looks to me that the Self Evident Truth is this: We become individually and collectively what we Think and what we Do. Unless our purely conceptual abstract Thoughts and Actions are based on and derived as a guiding analogy from the model of the environmental structural truths of the physical world we live in then the higher level collective orders in the structure of our "Artificial" conceptual world become detached and diverges from the conceptual principles analogous to the fundamental physical science upon which the entire conceptual social system is constructed.
Our social conceptual systemm structures have diverged from the foundational conceptual Truths that we intended to build them upon.
The Operating System of our Society must be restructured.
Standing Rock, upon reflection, and my time spent there is a microcosm of the Problem Domain called our conceptual American Social Structure Operating System and the Applications that run on that Operating System.
What follows is a day and wake up before the preceding post script. It seems to have assembled itself in my mind while my mind went wherever it goes when I sleep to put things together and present them to me when I wake up with an improved understanding of the structural nature of the Big Marshmallow social, conceptual scheme of things environment that we have created in our minds with which we co-exist in this natural physical world.
This is what I heard my mind saying to me when I woke this morning that conveyed the essence of what it wanted to tell me as the link to all the things it was examining all night long. It is something said by an Elder at Standing Rock that was transparently only something said by his Elders before him and only his to pass on as a truth upon which to build an entire social structure upon:
The Earth does not belong to Us,
We belong to the Earth.
In my Object Oriented view of things I would say it this way:
We are Children of the Parent:Earth and inherit all its physical attribute properties, methods and messages of being in the natural world. At the highest level we share these attributes with all other things in the physical world at the atomic level and become more increasingly unique Children at each lower Parent:Child level. All the way down to the most granular level of the individual person in the physical world domain. Going beyond that we uniquely exist and operate in another Parent:Child domain that is entirely founded our own conceptual design with no physical structural attributes in its design but with ultimate physical expression of methods and messages in the natural world.
The fundamental non-physical granular level building block of our human conceptually created social environmental universe is.....well, I guess it is the Truth. The granular level of Truth where, like our Information Age systems, there is a presence or absence of a condition. One condition is the presence of Truth. The other condition is the absence of Truth.
The dilemma we face in our social system is the ambiguity of distinguishing between the presence or absence of Truth at the granular or collective level.
Our Information Age systems are structured on the reduction of ambiguity. As our Information Age systems evolve rapidly to higher order levels of reduction of ambiguity it is emerging as an Artificial Intelligence. What is beyond the Information Age that followed the Industrial Age?
Who is buried in Grants Tomb?
It is the Age of Artificial Intelligence. The machine become conceptually more intelligent than us.
I have returned from Standing Rock where I stood with fellow veterans as a Protector of the Water Protectors. There are so many personal stories to tell about what I experienced there, what I did. What I did was many small things. Helped put up and army tent, carried wood, water, gasoline, passed food boxes hand to hand in a line. Shoveled snow. Talked with a wide variety of people there. Walked with the veterans followed by the members of the Indian tribes on the 5th of December to the bridge and stood in prayer for almost an hour in the falling snow.
Summing up my personal experience I was simply one body putting itself on the line for my own reasons. Generally shared reasons that bonded us. Extended private reasons shared with fewer that were there. Some reasons totally from my own past and its relationship to my moral beliefs of right and wrong.
The stories I could tell of my time at Standing Rock are my granular level experiences. Interesting stories of fact and deep emotion. Summed up in one word perhaps: Redemption. The Elder called it "Healing" in his context. The concepts are beautifully related. I have done journeys from a navy career to hundreds of thousands of miles on a bicycle to multiple Ironman races to discover myself. My own truths of who I am and what I do. Every journey teaches more. The journey to Standing Rock was in retrospect a summing up and extension of all the previous ones. It built upon them. If I ever get to the point where I am doing the same old mile again on a treadmill going nowhere fast then it will be time to get a rocking chair and point it at the past and its stories. That is all I will have left.
No little stories of Standing Rock here. They are mine. There may be some polite interest of family and friends but it is passing, forgotten. Remembered perhaps in the few good words said while I am gone, along with the stories I told. The most I hope is that some inspiration lingers after me. That is my contribution to the future.
Consistent with my conceptual view of things from bottom to top, from the granular personal level to the top collective conceptual level and its particular object name I will skip the little stories of this journey to Standing Rock and attempt to present what I see as the Big Picture that all the granular individual level things called a Person and their actions sum up to collectively in two inseparable ways at the very top level: Physically, and Conceptually.
The terms "Tribe" and "Tribes" popped into my mind at Standing Rock as a way to look at things physically and conceptually with an appropriate singular and plural word. It popped into my mind while deep within my (claimed) -60 degree sleeping bag in my van at an actual 10 degree temperature waiting to go to sleep but thoughts prevented that. Everything was warm except my nose. My down jacket around my head created a small breathing tube but the nose was still cold. It gets dark early and the camp withdraws to its shelters. It was only 6 pm. Lot of time to think.
Tribe was an excellent point of entry to the Problem Domain considering where I was so I ran with the idea. Human Beings are all one Tribe. The higher order Tribe is Animals. Obvious and an easy physical and conceptual scheme of things step up to the next level. The step above that? Maybe all Living Things? That is still an easy upward Parent Level of which we are Children. A Parent Level above Living Things and its equal level sibling Non-Living Things in the Physical Domain? Cut to the chase and it is All Things.
The Oceti Sakowin camp now called the Ocheti Oate (SP?) since the Oceti Sakowin camp Sacred Fire was extinguished by the Elders and a new Sacred Fire was lighted. Chase IronEyes, saying of himself that he is not an older Elder but a younger one, expressed deep respect for the Elders now speaks for the new camp. Not as a leader since all are leaders. It is a younger generation camp but following the traditional ways of the respected Elders. Chase Ironeyes called it the "People's Camp"
https://www.facebook.com/chase.ironeyes.3
https://ironeyesforcongress.us/
The Youtube video: Watch it and hear not only what Chase IronEyes says but the meaning of the message.
Chase Iron Eyes On Birth Of New Standing Rock Sacred Fire
I stood at the Oceti Sakowin camp Sacred Fire early one morning. It was around 4 am. In the sack at 6 pm the previous night I got early. There were only 4 or 5 Elders seated on benches around the fire tending it through the night. I was the only one standing behind them. I had learned the ritual meaning and respect of the Sacred Fire. Each joining the inner circle performed a ceremony. It was dark. It was cold. Soon I was moving from foot to foot. I smiled at the thought of the same foot to foot dance we did in a circle when I happened to be at the Sacred Fire after forming a Prayer Circle around the camp the previous day. It was in response to the announcement that the easement had been denied by the Army Corps of Engineers. The immediate response was one of joy and a circle dance. I learned that the dance was two steps sideways on each foot rather than my awkward one step side step!
Weaving in a personal story here: While I was standing alone behind the few seated Indians at the Sacred Fire an Indian guy that I had seen the previous day working around the nearby donations tent and pile of donations outside came up to me and asked for some help getting gas to a cook tent. I took a 5 gallon can to the tent and with the help of a volunteer at the tent got a generator that had run out of gas during the night going again.
The guy from the donations tent arrived with a woman in a van to get the empty gas can and other cans there to add to the empty cans in the van for refill. So many times during my stay at the camp I saw so many simply spontaneously cooperate doing whatever needed to be done. Pushing cars, stacking wood, etc. The spirit of the the Sacred Fire radiated out to the entire camp and warmed us all together. I said to him that gas was life too, unfortunately and money that I offered to buy the gas was also life, unfortunately. He had not asked for it but said that it was slow to get money through the tribal procedures and I think he might be going to pay for the gas himself and may have not had enough. There were maybe a dozen cans in the van. The spirit of the camp was sharing whatever we had whenever we could contribute.
A second generation Sacred Fire now burns at the Oceti camp where I was. Often I heard reference to the 7th generation. The responsibility of the current generation to think and do things in a tradition that considers their purpose and benefit to the 7th generation.
Of all the places I have been in my life and things that I have done there are many that relate to current major events and milestones as well as past ones. A sort of Forrest Gump thing. This 7 December 75th anniversary reminds me that on the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor I was taking off from Hickam Field in a C-141 that began its take off roll at precisely 8 am. The day happened to be a Sunday morning too! Standing Rock is a place where history was being made that will be remembered by the 7th generation. I was a witness participant to the history made there. I walked with the Vets and Indians in a Healing Prayer walk to the bridge on 5th of December and silently stood in the falling snow for almost an hour at the same time that Wesley Clark Jr. apologized for past wrongs done to the Indian nation. I wished I could in both of these places and times at the same time!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWU1NBcElSQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_generation_sustainability
While at the Oceti Sakowin camp I had time to learn more on the internet using my IPhone. Either the police or Tiger Swan was attacking internet cellular devices. Mine drained its battery rapidly. I discovered that the push up from the bottom did not give me the expected flashlight but a push up music screen. I had also noticed that there was no audio on Youtube video. State Police aircraft of the type that carried Stingrays circled overhead. I am sure they were probably collecting IMSI IDs and perhaps conducting other electronic surveillance.
In spite of cellular disruption I learned much then and continue to learn more now that I have returned home. One of the sites I found to be a greater value for far more than what it intended to present (that being the real truth) was this one:
http://standingrockfactchecker.org/
While it spins the truth from mild to wild and includes a few things that are most likely maybe even absolutely true it picks and chooses among the "Truths" to present it to the advantage of its agenda.
Another site that proclaimed the truth about Standing Rock took a more legalistic approach of making the legal case for the right of the DAPL citing all the agreements, laws, meetings, required procedural steps, etc that grant DAPL legality. Looks like a good legal case. It is however all presented in the "frame" of law. So was segregation. The strategy of "framing" is to move the issue into a framework box that has set of conceptual ideas in its design that favors the "framers", the ones that move the issue to their frame of reference, their set of meanings and their set of terms and language. The "Law" is a strong frame to move any issue into.
The "Law" has been bought and paid for. On one hand by those that defended it with their lives in the highest traditions of our country. On the other hand by those that buy it with money, the power of money, the power to influence or outright create "Laws" with money as well as eliminate regulatory power to enforce existing "Law" that they did not buy that was not in their best interest.
Indian reservations are products of the Law. Legal entities called Sovereign Nations yet the citizens of those Sovereign Nations have all the rights of all citizens of the USA. This matter of Indian Nation Sovereignty is something that I started to study and now continue to investigate and learn about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_sovereignty_in_the_United_States
At this point this free range blog entry that is wandering around various things is coming back to reflecting on Tribalism that was covered earlier. That started out to frame the nature of "Tribe" in its broadest concept. All things belong to the big top level collective all encompassing thing called "Tribe" far beyond the frame of defined collections of human beings or even the total collective of all human beings. Animals are a tribe. The rivers are a tribe. The air is a tribe. Conceptual things like the past and the future are a tribe. The earth is a tribe.
More to add to this later.........
This covers why vets went. I agree it works for me. I was at some of the places, did some of the same things, had the same experienced. Shared it with other vets.
https://popularresistance.org/why-they-went-the-inside-story-of-the-standing-rock-veterans/
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