Clinton focuses on American Indians
President Clinton turned the attention of his national poverty tour this week to “arguably the poorest, most forgotten US Citizens of them all: American Indians”, according to an Associated Press story.
Clinton is in Pine Ridge Reservation, home of the Oglala Sioux and couldn’t believe the story of an Indian woman who explained her housing situation in a crowded and dilapedated trailer.
Tribal President Howard Salway said Blue Bird’s Igloo neighborhood–a collection of foam-green shacks with crumbling porches–is typical of housing conditions on the reservaton. “In the winter, the hardship it puts on our people increases tenfold”, he told Clinton.
President Clinton vowed to correct the difficult housing situation, including getting the Oglala Sioux tribe jobs.
The president’s visit–the first to a reservation by a president since Franklin D. Roosevelt–called attention to American Indians, who are so raked by grinding poverty that his advisers suggested he comes up with special proposals geared specifically to the Indians’ plight.
Clinton deserves credit for descending upon Native Americans–for the first time in more than half-a-century since Roosevelt–to listen to the real and sincere voices of people of color at the grassroots level who have long been neglected by the federal government. He was disbelieving as he listened to Blue Bird, an Indian woman, living with ten others in a trailer house, perhaps meditating of his commitment to ascertain that the “economic good times” is equally shared by all Americans. He couldn’t believe that there in fact are those who are “left behind” by the “economic good times”.
It’s a good policy though I felt a sigh of relief at the thought that even Native Americans, the real indigenous Americans, have endured more than 200 years of neglect by Washington. Imagine their living in the US mainland yet so excluded from mainstream America. Imagine our fate in this remote archipelago being used as pawns by the US Textile Labor Unions being raped of our mind, soul, respect and dignity to salvage the complacency of a US apparel industry that has been snoozing for more than a century.
If anything, American Democracy is simply that long and arduous road all uphill where your rights as a citizen is a good as the fight you had to endure to protect them. True or False?
Singing “Long, Long Ago….”
Many of us learned this nursery rhyme song in grammar which I find most appropriate to acknowledge our plights, hits and misses, mostly the latter in the hard lessons of real American Democracy.
At the beginning of our first constitutional government, the guaranteed Covenant funds was taken for granted that it’ll never end. It did. We should have established a strong planning office equipped with economists and not bureaucrats and politicians, sing it altogether now, “long, long ago….”
We took for granted that medical referral cost will forever be paid for by somebody other than ourselves. We learned in recent years that it is in fact a personal responsibility. We should have known that there’s no such thing as free lunch, “long, long ago”.
If adultery is part of the Ten Commandments, why replace it with statutory law when in the first place the guys and gals violate it like there’s no tomorrow? The author should have learned his catechism “long, long ago”. A` Saina!
Government is never in the business of profit-making. This basic premise should have been learned and fully ingrained in the nimble minds of bureaucrats and politicians “long, long ago”.
During the boom era of the eighties, we should have established a reserve for that rainy day, but we didn’t. We should have learned how to live in both good and bad times “long, long ago”.
We should have been allowed assimilation into the greater American Economic Community “long, long ago, long ago….” A` Saina na checho` diskriminasion lao buente pot man-Amerikanon pao asu hit, hafa mohon?
