Thompson, McGovern and Chief Sitting Bull
Hi There. Many of you seemed to like the wisdom from Campaign Trail yesterday. I have some more for you today… which, might not be extremely uplifting, apart from its reminds us that every once in a while there are amazing people who make the world a better place. Hunter wrote the following (after quoting Chief Sitting Bull) about one of his favorite human beings under the sun, George McGovern, in Sept 1972. The election was two (2) months away and a horrible realization was setting in, but as always, Hunter kept his eloquence and keen sense of justice.
Hunter loved to point out the fact that, as he was writing it, in the vortex of the presidential campaign, in Colorado, his future wife was being born…
SEPTEMBER
Hear me, people: We have now to deal with another race – small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.
–Chief Sitting Bull, speaking at the Powder River Conference in 1877
If George McGovern had a speech writer half as eloquent as Sitting Bull, he would be home free today – instead of twenty-two points behind and racing around the country with both feet in his mouth The Powder River Conference ended ninety-five years ago, but the old Chief’s baleful analysis of the White Man’s rape of the American continent was just as accurate then as it would be today if he came back from the dead and said it for the microphones on prime-time TV. The ugly fallout from the American Dream has been coming down on us at a pretty consistent rate since Sitting Bull’s time — and the only real difference now, with Election Day ’72 only a few weeks away, is that we seem to be on the verge of ratifying the fallout and forgetting the Dream itself.
So now, 33 years after Hunter wrote that passage, and 129 years after Sitting Bull made his harrowing statement, they are somehow together, watching over us.
Okay, more tomorrow.
Anita Thompson
