Tim Giago: Leaving the anger and the meanness

Opinion

Monday, September 21, 2009

There is a lot of anger and downright “meanness” flashing across the landscape of America these days. The anger is so great that it seems to coincide with the predictions of the Mayan cycles of life predicted thousands of years ago.

The Great Cycle of the Mayan Long Count calendar ends on the winter solstice of 2012 A. D. Following Mayan concepts of cyclic time and World Age transitions, this is as much about beginnings as endings. According to the Mayan Long Count calendar we are almost at the end of the fifth and final 5,125 year cycle, the year when the calendar began.

There are now 1,187 days left for the Age of Transition to begin; December 21, 2012. How that transition will be carried out is the unanswered question.

Upheavals of epic proportions are sweeping the earth. Religions are in as much conflict as they were 2,000 years ago. Christian extremists invade the lands of the Muslims as Crusaders, and Muslim extremists destroy the twin towers of capitalism, the symbols of Western decadence, on September 11, 2001. In 2008 the city of money lenders and exchangers with its Wall Street façade, nearly spirals into oblivion spurred by unrestrained acts of corporate and the capricious greed of the investment banking industry. The Nation shudders, but somehow survives; for now.

And a new administration is caught in the whirlpool. Money is once again the instigator of the hysteria spreading across America. “The government is spending money like a drunken sailor.” I hate that metaphor because I was in the U. S. Navy. “Barack Obama is driving this Nation into bankruptcy.” “I don’t need the government telling me how to spend my money.” “Obamacare will cause a huge increase in taxes.” And the beat goes on.

Conservative talk radio feeds the flames. Glen Beck thrives on it. And the “Nation of Sheep” flocks to the call. I am an Independent, but I cannot help but be taken aback by the extremism exhibited by talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham. They scoff at the predictions of global warming, perhaps having never read any of the prophecies of the Mayan or Hopi civilizations. And if they had read them, they probably would have turned them into a new point of ridicule.

When I was in elementary school I observed in class a small sampling of the way the democratic process should work. A show of hands was all it took to come to a majority vote. If the vote went against my vote, I just sucked it up and got in line with the majority. Majority ruled.

I was a firm supporter of Hillary Clinton. As an Independent I voted for her in the primary elections. I did not support Barack Obama. But he won. He won by majority vote. And as an American, and as I learned in school, I now must get behind the man who was elected by majority vote. We close ranks and support the winner. It is now apparent that many Americans do not feel this way.

2012 is not that far away and I predict that we will have a one term president. There is too much time left between elections and the important issues left to be solved by President Obama are now obscured by dubious hints of race and since I live in a state, South Dakota, as an American Indian, a race that is often the object of overt racism, I fully understand the implications.

The constant hammering by the far right has just begun and 2012 is the year the Mayan calendar and the presidential elections of 2012 cross paths. The light of change the Mayans predicted could be snuffed out by the darker prophecies of that year.

The Mayans predicted that “Going into the 5th dimension, it will be the start of a new era. At sunrise December 12, 2012, Earth will be crossing the equator, aligning itself with the center of the galaxy for the first time in 26,000 years. This will make a cosmic cross. This cosmic cross is considered the ‘tree of life.’ This will open a channel for universal energy to flow through the Earth, cleansing it and all who dwell upon it, rising all to a higher level of vibration. This process has already begun.”

According to Mayan prophecies, “The earth will not be destroyed December 21, 2012. The Mayan view this date as a rebirth – the start of the world of the fifth Sun.

Participants in the Hopi ceremonies and celebrants of the Lakota Sun Dance felt the anger and frustration sweeping our Nation in this year of 2009, but they also felt the small hints of a new beginning. Perhaps the spirits of the ancient ones will lead us out of the darkness and into the light predicted by the Mayans.

Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, is the publisher of Native Sun News. He was the founder and first president of the Native American Journalists Association, the 1985 recipient of the H. L. Mencken Award, and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard with the Class of 1991. Giago was inducted into the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2008. He can be reached at editor@nsweekly.com.