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"We've GOT to make noises
in greater amounts!
So open your mouth, lad! For every voice counts!"
Thus he spoke as he climbed. When they got to the top,
The lad cleared his throat and he shouted out, "YOPP!"
And that Yopp,
That one small yopp put it over!
Finally at last! From that speck on that clover
Their voices were heard! They rang out clear and clean.
And the elephant smiled. "Do you see what I mean?"
They proved they ARE persons, no matter how small.
And their whole world was saved by the smallest of all!"
- From "Horton Hears a Who,"
by Dr. Seuss
Thanksgiving was like that for me this year.
I thought a lot about small voices, particularly the voices of the colonists who invaded this country. What, after all, is Thanksgiving about? Thanks that the settlers managed to overwhelm the natives who lived here, relegate them to carved-out niches of self-governance on land that wasn't worth anything to anyone else?
I heard my own "Yopp" this Thanksgiving. It wasn't the first time. The first time came one day in high school when I was listening to a "Rage Against the Machine" album because I wanted to disturb the neighbors. I wanted to disturb them with "People of the Sun," the first track off the album, because it was loud, and it showed I was independent and because it had a message.
I wasn't sure what the message was. I knew it had something to do with Mexico, because Mexico is a country to the south, and because the south is sunny. I thought it probably had something to do with the fact that there are a few people in Mexico who are rich and a larger number who are poor, and I figured that made a pretty decent song. You could play it loud, anyway. I didn't care about details - I figured they should be left to the kids in Spanish class who studied things like Mexico.
I was in German class in high school. We studied banks.
Well, curiosity about subjects has a way of breaking into my interest the same way droplets of water can carve out a mammoth cavern before too long. I went to Mexico. I enjoyed the people I met. I found out that Mexicans lack a certain right to self-determination.
Yopp.
The last 70 years, the rule in Mexico has been determined by the PRI - one party, who, with the exception of a few benevolent cases, has warped the media into a cog of its own PR machine and has fixed elections from the local level to the national presidency. A widening gap between the rich and poor - due partly to the North American Free Trade Agreement - has heated the pot of revolutionary fervor almost to boiling. There are a number of Mexicans who believe the dictatorship of the PRI has made it nearly impossible to achieve social change through the traditional routes of democratic government. So, they cite article 39 of the Mexican constitution, which states the people have a right to modify their form of government.
A few of them have taken up arms. They call themselves "Zapatistas."
They are named for Emiliano Zapata, the leader of one of three main factions working to establish a new Mexico during the Revolution in 1910. Their goals and objectives mirror his demands that the Mexican government work to end illiteracy, provide people with the right to education, the right to dignified jobs, respect for indigenous peoples and cultures, the creation of hospitals, freedom for an independent press, cancellation of debts for the poor, the establishment of municipal self-government with relative autonomy, the development of birth clinics and child care and the creation of truly free elections. Their demands come from the founding documents they drew up at the outset of their fight against the government in 1994.
Since about that time, the Zapatistas have centered their activity in Chiapas - a land composed mostly of indigenous peoples. The government has met their calls for reform mostly with disdain and fierce reprisals, which they levy rather indiscriminately among the Chiapas natives in search of the Zapatistas among them.
The Zapatistas tried to make it abundantly clear that their objective is not Marxist, Maoist, Castroist or Communist in nature. It is democratic in objective and in operation. The entire movement governs itself by the same creed as it wishes Mexico were governed. When initial peace overtures were made by the federal government in June 1994, it was rejected by a vote of all Zapatistas. More mundane decisions regarding the daily operations of the movement are not made by one autocrat, rather they are made by a committee of elders from the communities of Zapatista-controlled territory.
If the Zapatistas are chauvinists, they are so only against their clear enemies. They see themselves as a national movement and an international movement representing a nationalism based merely on the belief that the underprivileged share a brotherhood of common struggle.
So I wasn't the only person thinking of the small voices on Thanksgiving. The spokesperson for the Zapatistas, Sub-Commander Marcos, was thinking of small voices, too - including those in our country.
Leonard Peltier is an ailing Native American activist who celebrated this Thanksgiving in Leavenworth.
He ate his turkey inside the prison.
Peltier has been in federal custody since 1977. He was involved in a shootout at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota - the same impoverished Pine Ridge president Clinton visited this year.
On June 26, 1975, a group consisting of federal marshals and FBI agents followed a boy into the reservation who had been accused of stealing a pair of boots. A skirmish erupted between a group of residents and the authorities. No one really knows who shot first, but in the resulting fire fight two federal agents and one Native American were killed. In the aftermath, several marshals and agents went through the reservation burning homes and destroying property.
Peltier might or might not be directly guilty of the deaths. He is guilty of being one of the many men involved in the shootout and is guilty of being an activist for Native Americans. For that reason, he has shouldered the responsibility for the crimes. That is the only fact the prosecution offers with any certainty. No other evidence of his involvement exists.
Supporters of Peltier have given November to him - a national "free Leonard Peltier" month. They are hoping the justice department will begin reexamining his case, the same way they have been reexamining Waco.
Marcos sent a letter to Peltier in October. In it, he commended him for his fortitude and conveyed his own admiration.
This September at Pine Ridge, two Lakota natives were found murdered and stuffed in a trash can. There still were no suspects in October.
Are we giving thanks for justice?
Yopp!