Part 1 [6 min.]

MUSHROOMS

I thought as most Americans do on the subject. I was so proud of America for being the bastion of equality and freedom for all its citizens; the land of the free and the home of the brave. I was in my late forties before I began to find out the sad truth. And, in order to do so, I had to become one of the small percentage of Americans who has a college degree with post-graduate level study; and one of the even smaller percentage who study the ethnic history of our country. That is where the information that refutes the circular argument is buried, far from the inquiring mind of the average white American.

The average white American can only learn what the schools, the publishing industry and television producers will tell them. Those responsible for the output of these sources of information are mostly white Americans. They are Mushrooms like the rest of us.

They still think as I once did that negative information about our national history comes from the distortions of malcontents and Communists; that if I checked their sources, as many I respected claim to have done, I would find that the events reported were actually inevitable, or the person portrayed was merely acting out of the universally accepted understandings of the time; that, were I in their shoes, I would have done the same as they. I felt that no good is served wallowing in the mistakes of the past; that we have a duty to ourselves and our children to glorify, even sanctify, selected persons and events in our past and gloss over the less-than-glorious. All of this in order to provide as magnificent a national fable as any other country has, and to prevent the supposed chaos and trauma that public knowledge and discussion of our mistakes would undoubtedly cause.

I subscribed to and perpetuated these precautionary tactics because I was told the average American cannot deal with these negative truths without irreparable damage to the national psyche. Therefore, negative information must be watered down, rendered harmless, elevated to a level available only to a few university-trained individuals, who then claim that they alone have the enlightened intellect to understand it. This is an ancient practice which accounts for much of the "mystery" surrounding so-called social Progress.

It does not matter, then, how many of the educated few discover the truth; they are always too few to be able to cause change. Change can only occur if the general public is given access to the information. This home page is inspired by some who are trying to do just that. Howard Zinn has written, A Peoples' History of the United States; Ronald Takaki has written Iron Cages; Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man. All were written for popular consumption, yet all have been shunted to the university book stores for the consumption of the few. Read these books and check some of the referenced sources. And, also, click on the Znet link on my homepage where you can dialogue with Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, among others.

But, I also listened to the oppressed minorities, themselves. Listening in my post-graduate level studies to their testimonials and the results of their research, my eyes were opened to the enormity of the gulf between what I had been led to believe without question, and what has really happened in the United states of America. And I was humbled by the realization that most of the people of color in this country already know these things without having to receive "higher education" to find them out.

Over the years, I have several times come across a woodcutting, or etching, showing a pastoral scene with peasants in the foreground hoeing a field, leading beasts of burden out of the nearby woods, in the background, a walled castle and town. Overarching this scene, like an immense band shell, is the vault of the sky showing sun, moon, and stars on its convex inner surface. Outside the vault, not visible to those within, can be seen what looks like a giant clockwork of gears, all connected by drive shafts to the heavenly bodies. At the left edge of the vault, a solitary man thrusts head and shoulders through the vault. He is gazing in awe at the workings of the solar system, while his fellows go on about their business in comfortable ignorance. The etching represents the age of enlightenment in which Copernicus and Galileo participated.

After my studies, I felt like that man. I had been transported outside the bubble of contrived American history, and was seeing for the first time how the lives and toil of countless other humans, here and abroad, were being wasted to support the standard of living of white Americans. And those inside were either ignorant of it, or had been led to believe that life inside the bubble of white privilege was a matter of choice for all humans (a color-blind white society in America has this utility); that if those suffering outside would but embrace the ideals of capitalism (masquerading as democracy) they could share in the abundance.

This is the vaunted "American dream."

I have learned it is the nightmare of much of the rest of the world.

[Go to Part 4]