Radioactive Babe

"Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know."

THE SECOND COMING

And I hate it because, yes, 9/11 was a tragedy. But compared to other countries and incidents? Terrible things happen the world over, all the time. But this one, because it happened here and (despite the school shootings and everything else) there’s this collective “things like that don’t happen here” mentality the nation went batshit.

The media started whipping shit up, the 24-hour news cycle really amped up, and patriotism became The Thing. Like everything was just coated in a veneer of the stuff. And if you objected? You were the antichrist.

Also, certain songs like TNT got taken off the radio, everyone suddenly had an American flag somewhere, my peers were rabidly signing up for the military (with very, very racist commentary the whole way), etc.

Everyone fell for it and they fell hard.

I remember them talking about going to Iraq after Afghanistan and everyone just acted like that was always the plan. And me, being a teenager still in English classes, just had a flashback to reading 1984:

“On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming of guns—after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces—at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.”

Then this happens:

“The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.”

I will never forget this scene in the book because watching as the war shifted in real life and the way my country reacted to it was like seeing it play out in real-time.

And when I pointed it out to people?

Frequently I encounter non Native folks who tell me they think reservations are some form of reparatoins to Natives from the US government. I even had someone close to me tell me they thought reservations were places to “reserve” our cultures.

Where I’m from (South Dakota) reservations were concentration camps where they sent us to die after they stole and colonized all of the land every US citizen occupies. In the early SD Rez days our ppl had to get permission from district agents (white settler men) to get food, fix our homes, or even leave our community to travel to another community on our Rez to visit relatives. We couldn’t hunt cuz they killed millions of our buffalo. If we didn’t get permission from the white settler agent we couldn’t eat, fix our homes or visit relatives because we would be violating US law & could be arrested. Also our cultures & ceremonies were illegal under US law until the Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978.

So plz educate the ppl you love and care abt because everyone in the USA is living in an illegal settler colony, Indigenous ppl survived their genocide & we’re her to say these settlers never gave af abt us & never will.