Article: 261645 of talk.bizarre
From: madmagic@io.org (madmagic)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: Raw Materials (550 words)
Date: 2 Dec 1995 15:19:33 -0500
Organization: none of the above
Lines: 67
Message-ID: <49qccl$s7d@ionews.io.org>
Status: O
X-Status: 


At first they came for the fish and fur.

In schools of small smelly boats, swarming across the great water in
spring, headed home with their prize in fall, returning larger and fatter
and always more of them every year. Once they started coming they never
stopped. 

They took the fish and they took the fur. When there was no more, they
went further and deeper and took the rest. They cut down the forests as
if trees were cornstalks and built ugly villages of houses that grew and
grew and grew, taller and wider and louder. 

There was stuff in the ground they wanted. They dug it up. They left the
holes. They were so clever and so stupid at once, and always so busy.
They did not seem to understand how bad they smelled, or even see what
mess they left behind. 

Soon there were more of them than there were of us. Always, they were
stronger. They brought guns and diseases to kill our people at a distance
and took our children away from us. 

They drank the land empty of silence and filled it to the brim with their
chatter. They made even the air carry their invisible voices. And when
they had conquered and tamed the water and taken away the horizon they
rode right into the sky and even beyond the sky. 

We thought they had taken everything. We made our peace with the new
dispensation. We sold back to them the same deathdrink they had used to
destroy us; we sold back to them their packages of our sacred tobacco,
wrapped in tinfoil and plastic as if it were candy for children. Our
first purchases with their money were the best guns we could buy. 

Few of them saw the irony or noticed we were making our own people strong
again by defying the government they had used to crush us. If they looked
at us at all, it was with the scornful pity of a conqueror for the slave.
A slave has nothing. 

Now, their world is changing. There are so many of them, they have shrunk
all distance to a doorstep, and they blunder over each other's feet like
clumsy puppies. They call the world a village yet they know nothing of
custom, nothing of duties. They are blind to truth and deaf to sense,
groping in the dark of their own false light. But perhaps, now, they are
finally ready to learn. 

We have no choice. They have made our world into their world. We have to
make them whole or we too will die. 

They have asked us to sit with them at the council fire. They have humbly
begged for an entrance to our sweat lodges, they want instruction in our
ways, they want to learn how to see in the distance, they want to stand
on the Great Circle and feel it move. 

But you know how they are. Once they start coming they never stop. These
ones are respectful, yes. Now. But who can say they will not invade the
Great Circle just as they invaded the land, the water, the air and the
sky? There are still holes they have never filled. 

And to us, they all still smell the same.


-mm
 written on december 1 1995 for FTS day
-- 
"I am the Emperor, and I want dumplings." 
                          -- Ferdinand I, mad Emperor of Austria
 <URL http://www.io.org/madmagic>