By Thomas Ivan Dahlheimer
Sojourners founder Rev. Jim Wallis, while addressing the economic downturn in his keynote address Feb. 28, at the annual Religious Education Congress in Anaheim, California said: “Our goal cannot be to get back to business as usual. We have to say, ‘No, we want a new direction. We’ve tried the greed culture, and it hasn’t worked.’ We need to create something new, a common good culture, rooted in compassion.” This statement by Rev. Jim Wallis was published in a recent edition of The Catholic Spirit, a Roman Catholic Archdiocesan newspaper.
The current economic crisis, a crisis associated with our failed economic system, a system that is based on greed, along with the current ecological crisis – as well as many other serious problems facing our nation, such as, the alcohol and drug abuse health epidemic and related severe social problems, an imperialistic warmongering mentality and mission, racism, the lack of good family values, the severe lack of respect for life (abortion, embryonic stem cell research, assisted suicide laws, etc.), sexual degeneracy, the obesity health epidemic, the addiction to gambling mental health problem associated with legalized gambling, etc. – indicates that we need a new culture based on TRADITIONAL TRIBAL CULTURAL VALUES. Especially, including the essential core value of traditional tribal culture that rejects our nation’s, greedy money loving, materialistic ways.
Our nation’s greedy materialistic ways are the root cause of many of the mentioned above problems. I am hoping that the Minnesota Catholic Conference will come to fully understand this and then take the national prophetic leadership role in respect to helping to create this new culture that I am proposing.
Recently, both my bishop, Bishop John Kinney, the bishop of Saint Cloud Diocese and Archbishop John Nienstedt, the bishop of the Archdiocese of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, sent me letters thanking me for the Catholic activist initiatives of mine that support Minnesota’s indigenous peoples. One of my indigenous peoples’ rights activist initiatives, an initiative that is related to my initiatives that support Minnesota’s indigenous peoples’ rights, has gained support and correspondence from the two internationally renowned Indigenous activists who are on the forefront of the movement that is trying to influence Pope Benedict XVI to publicly revoke, or apologize for, a fifteenth century papal bull [Inter Caetera], which is the source of the racism being committed against, both, Minnesota’s and our nation’s, as well as many other nations’, indigenous peoples.
Inter Caetera denies indigenous peoples some of their basic fundamental human rights. If Pope Benedict XVI would be so kind to publicly revoke this papal bull, or apologize for it, and then write and publish a document that states that indigenous peoples have the same fundamental human rights as all other peoples, this would go a long ways toward helping to create a new U.S.A. culture based on traditional tribal cultural valves.
Pope Benedict XVI made the following statement during his message to young people for World Youth Day 2009.
“Make choices that demonstrate your faith. Show that you understand the risk of idolizing money, material goods, career and success, and do not allow yourselves to be attracted by these false illusions.”
In the summer of 2004, Pope John Paul II lectured American bishops about how their people were” hypnotized by materialism, teetering before a soulless vision of the world.” And Time Magazine reported that: “In 1979, Pope John Paul II bluntly compared Americans to the rich man in the Bible story who is dammed for all eternity after a life spent feasting – contentedly oblivious to Lazarus, the beggar who longed for the scraps from the table.”
If the Minnesota Catholic Conference decides to take the national prophetic leadership role in respect to helping to create a new U.S.A. culture, it will require the conference to adopt a peaceful cultural revolutionary mission. Or, radically repent from being a part of the culture of greed. Hopefully, the conference will [now] admit how right some youth of the 1960s counter cultural revolution were and how righteous some remaining counter cultural revolutionaries still are. And do so, in respect to our protest against the dominant culture’s, money loving, materialistic value system and our assimilation into many of the holy and wholesome aspects of traditional tribal cultures.
Albert Bates, is an internationally renowned counter cultural revolutionary. We occasional correspond. He recently sent me an e-mail in response to the above article, wherein he expressed, in respect to our combined efforts to promote the counter-culture’s promotion of traditional tribal cultural values, his “brotherhood†feelings we have toward each other. Bates is also a very prominent member of The Farm, the largest hippie (counter cultural) community in the world.
Stephen Gaskin is the founder and leader of The Farm. And he is an internationally renowned leader of the counter cultural revolution. Gaskin once wrote: “The word wakan has a strong and universal concept and people around the world know something about it.” The work wakan, sometimes spelled wahkon, is a Native word, when translated into English it means holy or sacred. The purpose of the The Farm’s 250 members, is to be wakan (holy) and influence the whole world to become wakan. This counter cultural community once had 1500 members, and according to Stephen Gaskin, it is a demonstration project for a sustainable future, a nonviolent eco-friendly cooperative community of pioneers ushering in a new age.
In 1990 Bates published one of the first books on global warming, Climate in Crisis, complete with a preface from fellow Tennessean Al Gore. Bates is a civil rights and environmental attorney who has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court and who reinvented himself as a pioneer in the intentional communities movement, published The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times. Bates invented the concentrating photovoltaic array and solar-powered automobile displayed at the 1982 World’s Fair. He served on the steering committee of Plenty International for 18 years, focusing on relief and development work with indigenous peoples, human rights and the environment. He has taught courses in sustainable design, natural building, perm culture and technologies of the future to students from more than 50 nations.
Skip Stone, founder and Webmaster of Hippyland, the world’s largest counter cultural (peaceful) revolutionary site (an interactive site with over 23,000 registered members) recently contacted me to let me know that he posted this article of mine on hippylands sister site Coolove. It can be viewed and read by clicking COOLOVE – Creating a new culture based on tribal values
On a hippyland interactive forum Skip Stone wrote: “So much of what happened in the 60s is repeating itself again. This is because the “movement” never finished what it set out to do. Well now we have one last chance to change the world.”
“Are the activists from the 60s ready to finish the job with several new generations of activists alongside them?”
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