Not that I’m giving you a hard time. Or judging you. I actually do plan to get on FB again because it’s, unfortunately, the most popular place to connect with my neighbors in my small rural area.
Yeah I don't feel judged I'm not really there thinking I'm making a difference, I'm an animal sanctuary and Facebook is how I connect with local rescues. I'm private I don't do any monetizing through fascistbook but… It's the only venue for broad scale rescue and animal saving networks so many of us are still trapped there because of that issue.
the combination of this subject of voting and the "exit and build" strategy made me think of an amusing and telling segment of a journal from when the Euopean settlers and Jesuit Priests first came to Turtle Island and set up communities (regarding the colonial people's having the ability to "vote with their feet". I share much of it in my most recent post. I`ll share the full excerpt below as well.
For some pertinent historical context, here are my observations of and some Select Excerpts from a book called "1491" by Charles C. Mann
“Deganawidah laid out the new alliance’s rules of operation in the Haudenosaunee constitution: the Great Law of Peace. When issues came up before the alliance, the Tododaho would summon the fifty sachems who represented the clans of the Five Nations. Different nations had different numbers of sachems, but the inequality meant little because all decisions had to be unanimous; the Five Nations regarded consensus as a social ideal…
...Striking to the contemporary eye, the 117 codicils of the Great Law were concerned as much with establishing the limits on the great council’s powers as on granting them. Its jurisdiction was strictly limited to relations among the nations and outside groups; internal affairs were the province of the individual nations. Although the council negotiated peace treaties, it could not declare war — that was left to the initiative of the leaders of each of Haudenosaunee’ s constituent nations. According to the Great Law, when the council of sachems was deciding upon “an especially important matter or a great emergency,” its members had to “submit the matter to the decision of their people” in a kind of referendum.
In creating such checks on authority, the league was just the most formal expression of a region-wide tradition."
- pages 359-360
"Benjamin Franklin was equally familiar with Native American life; as a diplomat, he negotiated with the Haudenosaunee in 1753. Among his closest friends was Conrad Weiser, an adopted Mohawk, and the Indians’ unofficial host at the talks. And one of the mainstays of Franklin’s printing business was the publication of Indian treaties, then viewed as critical state documents.
As Franklin and many others noted, Indian life — not only among the Haudenosaunee, but throughout the Northeast — was characterized by a level of personal autonomy unknown in Europe. Franklin’s ancestors may have emigrated from Europe to escape oppressive rules, but colonial societies were still vastly more coercive and class-ridden than indigenous villages. “Every man is free,” the frontiersman Robert Rogers told a disbelieving British audience, referring to Indian villages. In these places, he said, no other person, white or Indian, sachem or slave, “has any right to deprive [anyone] of his freedom.” As for the Haudenosaunee, colonial administrator Cadwallader Colden declared in 1749, they had “such absolute Notions of Liberty, that they allow of no Kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories.” (Colden, who later became vice governor of New York, was an adoptee of the Mohawks.)
Rogers and Colden admired these Indians, but not every European did. “The Savage does not know what it is to obey,” complained the French explorer Nicolas Perrot in the 1670s. Indians “think every one ought to be left to his own Opinion, without being thwarted,” the Jesuit Louis Hennepin wrote twenty years later. The Indians, he grumbled, “believe what they please and no more” — a practice dangerous, in Hennepin’s view, to a well-ordered society. “There is nothing so difficult to control as the tribes of America,” another Jesuit unhappily observed. “All these barbarians have the law of wild asses — they are born, live, and die in a liberty without restraint; they do not know what is meant by bridle and bit.”
Indian insistence on personal liberty was accompanied by an equal insistence on social equality. Northeastern Indians were appalled by the European propensity to divide themselves into social classes, with those on the lower rungs of the hierarchy compelled to defer to those on the upper. The French adventurer Louis Armand de Lorn d’Arce, Baron of Lahontan, lived in French Canada between 1683 and 1694 and frequently visited the Huron. When the baron expatiated upon the superior practices of Europe, the Indians were baffled.
'When an Indian Child has been brought up among us [Franklin lamented in 1753], taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life. . .and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, when there is no reclaiming them.'
Influenced by their proximity to Indians — by being around living, breathing role models of human liberty — European colonists adopted their insubordinate attitudes, which “troubled the power elite of France,” the historian Cornelius J. Jaenen observed. Baron d’Arce was an example, despite his noble title; as the passage he italicized suggests, his account highlighted Indian freedoms as an incitement toward rebellion. In Voltaire’s Candide, the eponymous hero is saved from death at the hands of an imaginary group of Indians only when they discover that he is not, as they think, a priest; the author’s sympathy with the anticlerical, antiauthoritarian views of Indians he called “Oreillons” is obvious. Both the clergy and Louis XIV, the king whom Baron d’Arce was goading, tried to suppress these dangerous ideas by instructing French officials to force a French education upon the Indians, complete with lessons in deferring to their social betters. The attempts, Jaenen reported, were “everywhere unsuccessful.”
In the most direct way, Indian liberty made indigenous villages into competitors for colonists’ allegiance. Colonial societies could not become too oppressive, because their members — surrounded by examples of free life — always had the option to vote with their feet. It is likely that the first British villages in North America, thousands of miles from the House of Lords, would have lost some of the brutally graded social hierarchy that characterized European life. But it is also clear that they were infused by the democratic, informal brashness of Native American culture. That spirit alarmed and discomfited many Europeans, toff and peasant alike. But it is also clear that many others found it a deeply attractive vision of human possibility.
The Huron, he reported in an account to his American years, could not understand why:
'one Man should have more than another, and that the Rich should have more Respect than the Poor. ... They brand us for Slaves, and call us miserable Souls, whose Life is not worth having, alleging, That we degrade ourselves in subjecting our selves to one Man [a king] who possesses the whole Power, and is bound by no Law but his own Will.... [Individual Indians] value themselves above anything that you can imagine, and this is the reason they always give for’t, That one’s as much Master as another, and since Men are all made of the same Clay there should be no Distinction or Superiority among them.' [Emphasis in original.]
The essayist Montaigne had noted the same antiauthoritarian attitudes a century earlier. Indians who visited France, he wrote, “noticed among us some men gorged to the full with things of every sort while their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty. They found it strange that these poverty-stricken halves should suffer [that is, tolerate] such injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.”
I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical citizen of Europe or the Haudenosaunee in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it asked them to judge the past by the standards of today — a fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by social scientists.
But every one of the seven chose the Indians. Some early colonists gave the same answer. The leaders of Jamestown tried to persuade Indians to transform themselves into Europeans. Embarrassingly, almost all of the traffic was the other way — scores of English joined the locals despite promises of dire punishment. The same thing happened in New England. Puritan leaders were horrified when some members of a rival English settlement began living with the Massachusett Indians.
..So accepted now around the world is the idea of the implicit equality and liberty of all people that it is hard to grasp what a profound change in human society it represented. But it is only a little exaggeration to claim that everywhere that liberty is cherished — Britain to Bangladesh, Sweden to Soweto — people are children of the Haudenosaunee and their neighbors. Imagine — here let me now address non-Indian readers — somehow meeting a member of the Haudenosaunee from 1491. Is it too much to speculate that beneath the swirling tattoos, asymmetrically trimmed hair, and bedizened robes, you would recognize someone much closer to yourself, at least in certain respects, than your own ancestors?"
Good read! Love it! As a child, I loved to dress up and act like the native Americans. I was also a literal tree hugger as a child and still hug trees to this day. I am living the Hopi prophecy rock.
It’s very reassuring to note that the social scientists chose the Native Americans view.
Here is a link to the particular image where the author of Rooted talks about Hugging Trees and shares some perspectives from Thích Nhất Hạnh on the subject of hugging.
I shared this to Facebook as a link and they took it down as spam so I've protest that I'll keep posting it stupid fascists over there 🙄🤯
Not that I’m giving you a hard time. Or judging you. I actually do plan to get on FB again because it’s, unfortunately, the most popular place to connect with my neighbors in my small rural area.
Yeah I don't feel judged I'm not really there thinking I'm making a difference, I'm an animal sanctuary and Facebook is how I connect with local rescues. I'm private I don't do any monetizing through fascistbook but… It's the only venue for broad scale rescue and animal saving networks so many of us are still trapped there because of that issue.
I wish people would stop using all those FU platforms. I was kinda cued in from the beginning. It took a while to realize it’s a criminal element.
90 mill people in America still have a chance to enter Gods Kingdom. Yay!
I’m all in for pushing exit & build. ALL-IN
the combination of this subject of voting and the "exit and build" strategy made me think of an amusing and telling segment of a journal from when the Euopean settlers and Jesuit Priests first came to Turtle Island and set up communities (regarding the colonial people's having the ability to "vote with their feet". I share much of it in my most recent post. I`ll share the full excerpt below as well.
For some pertinent historical context, here are my observations of and some Select Excerpts from a book called "1491" by Charles C. Mann
“Deganawidah laid out the new alliance’s rules of operation in the Haudenosaunee constitution: the Great Law of Peace. When issues came up before the alliance, the Tododaho would summon the fifty sachems who represented the clans of the Five Nations. Different nations had different numbers of sachems, but the inequality meant little because all decisions had to be unanimous; the Five Nations regarded consensus as a social ideal…
...Striking to the contemporary eye, the 117 codicils of the Great Law were concerned as much with establishing the limits on the great council’s powers as on granting them. Its jurisdiction was strictly limited to relations among the nations and outside groups; internal affairs were the province of the individual nations. Although the council negotiated peace treaties, it could not declare war — that was left to the initiative of the leaders of each of Haudenosaunee’ s constituent nations. According to the Great Law, when the council of sachems was deciding upon “an especially important matter or a great emergency,” its members had to “submit the matter to the decision of their people” in a kind of referendum.
In creating such checks on authority, the league was just the most formal expression of a region-wide tradition."
- pages 359-360
"Benjamin Franklin was equally familiar with Native American life; as a diplomat, he negotiated with the Haudenosaunee in 1753. Among his closest friends was Conrad Weiser, an adopted Mohawk, and the Indians’ unofficial host at the talks. And one of the mainstays of Franklin’s printing business was the publication of Indian treaties, then viewed as critical state documents.
As Franklin and many others noted, Indian life — not only among the Haudenosaunee, but throughout the Northeast — was characterized by a level of personal autonomy unknown in Europe. Franklin’s ancestors may have emigrated from Europe to escape oppressive rules, but colonial societies were still vastly more coercive and class-ridden than indigenous villages. “Every man is free,” the frontiersman Robert Rogers told a disbelieving British audience, referring to Indian villages. In these places, he said, no other person, white or Indian, sachem or slave, “has any right to deprive [anyone] of his freedom.” As for the Haudenosaunee, colonial administrator Cadwallader Colden declared in 1749, they had “such absolute Notions of Liberty, that they allow of no Kind of Superiority of one over another, and banish all Servitude from their Territories.” (Colden, who later became vice governor of New York, was an adoptee of the Mohawks.)
Rogers and Colden admired these Indians, but not every European did. “The Savage does not know what it is to obey,” complained the French explorer Nicolas Perrot in the 1670s. Indians “think every one ought to be left to his own Opinion, without being thwarted,” the Jesuit Louis Hennepin wrote twenty years later. The Indians, he grumbled, “believe what they please and no more” — a practice dangerous, in Hennepin’s view, to a well-ordered society. “There is nothing so difficult to control as the tribes of America,” another Jesuit unhappily observed. “All these barbarians have the law of wild asses — they are born, live, and die in a liberty without restraint; they do not know what is meant by bridle and bit.”
Indian insistence on personal liberty was accompanied by an equal insistence on social equality. Northeastern Indians were appalled by the European propensity to divide themselves into social classes, with those on the lower rungs of the hierarchy compelled to defer to those on the upper. The French adventurer Louis Armand de Lorn d’Arce, Baron of Lahontan, lived in French Canada between 1683 and 1694 and frequently visited the Huron. When the baron expatiated upon the superior practices of Europe, the Indians were baffled.
'When an Indian Child has been brought up among us [Franklin lamented in 1753], taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life. . .and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, when there is no reclaiming them.'
Influenced by their proximity to Indians — by being around living, breathing role models of human liberty — European colonists adopted their insubordinate attitudes, which “troubled the power elite of France,” the historian Cornelius J. Jaenen observed. Baron d’Arce was an example, despite his noble title; as the passage he italicized suggests, his account highlighted Indian freedoms as an incitement toward rebellion. In Voltaire’s Candide, the eponymous hero is saved from death at the hands of an imaginary group of Indians only when they discover that he is not, as they think, a priest; the author’s sympathy with the anticlerical, antiauthoritarian views of Indians he called “Oreillons” is obvious. Both the clergy and Louis XIV, the king whom Baron d’Arce was goading, tried to suppress these dangerous ideas by instructing French officials to force a French education upon the Indians, complete with lessons in deferring to their social betters. The attempts, Jaenen reported, were “everywhere unsuccessful.”
In the most direct way, Indian liberty made indigenous villages into competitors for colonists’ allegiance. Colonial societies could not become too oppressive, because their members — surrounded by examples of free life — always had the option to vote with their feet. It is likely that the first British villages in North America, thousands of miles from the House of Lords, would have lost some of the brutally graded social hierarchy that characterized European life. But it is also clear that they were infused by the democratic, informal brashness of Native American culture. That spirit alarmed and discomfited many Europeans, toff and peasant alike. But it is also clear that many others found it a deeply attractive vision of human possibility.
The Huron, he reported in an account to his American years, could not understand why:
'one Man should have more than another, and that the Rich should have more Respect than the Poor. ... They brand us for Slaves, and call us miserable Souls, whose Life is not worth having, alleging, That we degrade ourselves in subjecting our selves to one Man [a king] who possesses the whole Power, and is bound by no Law but his own Will.... [Individual Indians] value themselves above anything that you can imagine, and this is the reason they always give for’t, That one’s as much Master as another, and since Men are all made of the same Clay there should be no Distinction or Superiority among them.' [Emphasis in original.]
The essayist Montaigne had noted the same antiauthoritarian attitudes a century earlier. Indians who visited France, he wrote, “noticed among us some men gorged to the full with things of every sort while their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty. They found it strange that these poverty-stricken halves should suffer [that is, tolerate] such injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.”
I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical citizen of Europe or the Haudenosaunee in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it asked them to judge the past by the standards of today — a fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by social scientists.
But every one of the seven chose the Indians. Some early colonists gave the same answer. The leaders of Jamestown tried to persuade Indians to transform themselves into Europeans. Embarrassingly, almost all of the traffic was the other way — scores of English joined the locals despite promises of dire punishment. The same thing happened in New England. Puritan leaders were horrified when some members of a rival English settlement began living with the Massachusett Indians.
..So accepted now around the world is the idea of the implicit equality and liberty of all people that it is hard to grasp what a profound change in human society it represented. But it is only a little exaggeration to claim that everywhere that liberty is cherished — Britain to Bangladesh, Sweden to Soweto — people are children of the Haudenosaunee and their neighbors. Imagine — here let me now address non-Indian readers — somehow meeting a member of the Haudenosaunee from 1491. Is it too much to speculate that beneath the swirling tattoos, asymmetrically trimmed hair, and bedizened robes, you would recognize someone much closer to yourself, at least in certain respects, than your own ancestors?"
- pages 363-366
Good read! Love it! As a child, I loved to dress up and act like the native Americans. I was also a literal tree hugger as a child and still hug trees to this day. I am living the Hopi prophecy rock.
It’s very reassuring to note that the social scientists chose the Native Americans view.
I must learn more.
Thanks for reading and sharing your experiences. I shared a few pages from another book that may resonate with you called "Rooted" in this post: https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/a-few-books-i-am-currently-readingre
Here is a link to the particular image where the author of Rooted talks about Hugging Trees and shares some perspectives from Thích Nhất Hạnh on the subject of hugging.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1bed01a2-f464-4920-bf49-9e2db8f866d5_3264x2448.jpeg
The ultimate white pill 💊
Hell yeah. Never have and never will vote. EVEN locally. WAKE UP 💰 🏦 🇨🇭
It is unlawful (immoral)for felons not to own a vote.
They will return when there are a choise. Today, they select and we believe we gave say.. we dont