A Politics of Belonging
Steve Schwartzberg's Congressional Campaign Manifesto for the Illinois 5th District
In this country—where more than half of the voters in November 2024 were filled with such fear and hatred of what they imagined as “the left” that they voted for a would-be dictator—we need a United Front against the menace which that fear and hate has unleashed—a United Front led by a progressive movement capable of mobilizing those who already agree with us on good grounds and capable of persuading the American people of exactly where we need to stand as a country and why.
The three fundamental social democratic commitments of this campaign are intended to win solid majority support by appealing to what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature and—by so doing—to show how a grounding in natural spiritual truth can help redeem our nation. These three commitments are:
Justice for the Native Nations
A Twenty-first Century version of A. Philip Randolph’s “Freedom Budget” to Abolish Poverty for All Americans, and
Abundant Care for All (Medicare for All with an emphasis on home health, “proximal health,” and wellness).
I joined the Young People’s Socialist League in the late 1970s when the great civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin was the National Chairman of the adult organization, the Social Democrats, USA, and became active in politics again in 2016 knocking on doors for Bernie Sanders in Iowa and Wisconsin. I am a former director of undergraduate studies for international studies at Yale University and the author of Arguments over Genocide: The War of Words in the Congress and the Supreme Court over Cherokee Removal. I first ran for Congress in 2018 and received 4% of the vote!
Justice for the peoples of the Native Nations is the issue closest to my heart. I think this justice must begin by rejecting the fraudulent claims of the United States to a “right” to dominate these peoples and their lands and ultimately lead to our recognition and acceptance of the principles of the international laws and usages of Turtle Island (this continent)—before the eurochristian invaders arrived—as the foundation for our living together on and with this land in a good way.
In 2018, I called for a twenty-first century version of A. Philip Randolph's “Freedom Budget” to abolish poverty. Such a budget would not only guarantee employment for all those able and willing to work, it would help to restore natural waterways and wetlands in both rural and urban settings, to increase and rewild our forests and restore mangroves and mangrove islands along our coasts, to fix our shipping locks and roads and bridges, and our railways and mass transit systems, to transform our agricultural and educational and housing and childcare practices with wise public investments, and to fundamentally revise our whole healthcare system so that insurance bureaucrats and “squeeze” artists concerned with “efficiency” rather than medicine are removed from the provision of what I call Abundant Care for All (M4A+).
Rather than pursue tax cuts for the rich, we will pay for what we need with a restoration of American top tax rates as they existed during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s and also by pooling our resources and borrowing in order to invest. If the investments are prudent, they will in time earn enough to pay for themselves many times over. Pooling our resources will enable us to do what we could not do separately.
The approach here is the exact opposite of what has been tried—and what has been found wanting since Ronald Reagan—what has been tried and failed for two whole generations in which average real wages have stagnated. The approach here is to water the tree of our economy at its roots rather than its branches or top leaves; and to support union organizing and collective bargaining. Any other approach—such as one focused on tariffs (even if not pursued with a bullying incivility)—is, at best, just a smokescreen for a continued concentration of wealth in the hands of the 1%. So-called “fair-trade” is worth pursuing whereas so-called “free trade” is not. But it has been bad public policy, and not the mere existence of trade, that has hollowed out the ability of the American working class to earn a decent livelihood—a bad public policy of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.
A similarly bad public policy has hollowed out American foreign relations to the point of tolerance for the genocide in Gaza and, more recently, tolerance for the genocide in Ukraine as well. Far from the “soft peace” towards Japan with which the United States—after the war crimes of the fire bombings of Tokyo and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—sought to take into account something of the interests of the Japanese people as a path to a lasting peace, the United States has pursued its foreign policy with ever greater incivility. The days of the Marshall Plan and the foundation of NATO—the days when we sought a common well-being and a common security with a measure of civility, at least with regard to Europe—are gone.
Only if we begin our public policy from a position of natural spiritual truth—a position of respect, love, and gratitude towards all life—will recovery for our society, and right relations with all our relations, be possible.
A Politics of Belonging
With love and hope for what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the beloved community, this campaign invites all who read these words to join in reimagining and radically revising our relationships to the land and to one another—including to all of the peoples on whose land we abide.
“We have no right over the Indians, whether within or without the real or pretended limits of any Colony,” the Pennsylvania jurist James Wilson told the Continental Congress in July 1776: “Grants made three thousand miles to the eastward, have no validity with the Indians.” We must return U.S. law to such a stance if the nonviolent social democratic revolution this country needs is to have any chance of succeeding.
The central goal of this campaign is to help us in that endeavor; to help us change our collective self-consciousness as a people and begin to develop the social self-understanding needed for genuine self-government.
The egotism, arrogance, and incivility of “America First” needs to be replaced with the respect, love, and gratitude for “All Our Relations” that the Native peoples have shown—and that brotherhood and sisterhood must extend to all our kith and kin: to every being in the web of life. The beloved community that we long for—the beloved community already forming in, and formed by, that sacred web of life—always already exists and at the same time is just beginning to come into our world. That beloved community is both immanent and emergent—a gift that is present from creation and a path of reverence in which we choose to share.
There is tremendous suffering in the world, but the beloved community is always already here in the sense that creation is real, and good, and embraces us all. That beloved community is also just beginning to emerge in the sense that our maintenance of right relations with the Earth, and with each other, must be learned by all of the smaller communities to which we belong and, indeed, every being within them. The needed knowledge is in the original instructions of our spiritual DNA, but it is easy to forget what we know in the midst of what John Trudell (Dakota) has called “tech-‘no-logic’ civilization.”
Writing of the Wendat Nation, in 1648, the missionary Father Lallemant noted that “They are free people, each of whom considers himself of as much consequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them.” Writing of the Montagnais-Naskapi, six years earlier, another missionary reported: “They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases.” The missionary Gabriel Sagard, in an even earlier work that became a bestseller in Europe cited by both Locke and Voltaire, observed: “They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.”
The Native views that can be seen through the filter of these seventeenth century missionary accounts are part of the self-understanding of more genuinely self-governing societies; a self-understanding—if we will adopt it—that is capable of bringing down a corrupt billionaire class and an authoritarian administration threatening to move from trade wars of aggression to more conventional ones by invading traditional friends like Greenland, or Panama, or Canada, or Mexico, while supporting Netanyahu’s grotesque and genocidal attacks in Gaza and while ignoring Putin’s grotesque and genocidal attacks in Ukraine. First, the American people were told that brutality might have to be tolerated in the interests of economic prosperity. Now, we are being told to accept economic misery in the interests of pursuing brutality.
The “civility” of traditional American politics, a “civility” that has always excluded some—such as, for centuries, the peoples of the Native Nations of this continent—is now threatened with destruction. This “civility” has been deteriorating for decades, but now—instead of a corrupt oligarchy more or less covertly seeking to buy elections and politicians—we face the prospect of a fascist president openly seeking to serve the billionaire class by treating the American people—and, especially, the working class—in a closer approximation to the way the peoples of the Native Nations have been treated.
The challenges we face are not simply political—they are relational. Here there is tremendous room for us to learn from the Native peoples how to conduct ourselves in the world. This is necessary to strengthen our capacity for resistance, and is further needed so that once this corrupt oligarchy and its fascist allies are defeated their reemergence is effectively discouraged, and, above all, such learning from the Native peoples is needed so that we can maintain right relations going forward.
We should also seek to learn from the Polish trade union movement, Solidarity, whose success in organizing and conducting a general strike, in the spring and summer of 1980, began the overthrow of the Soviet empire.
Traditionally, and unfortunately, American politics have been shaped by a vision of human beings as separate from each other and separate from the land that sustains us. There is another way: a way of belonging, a way of reverence, a way of remembering that before we are citizens of any state, before we belong to any human tradition, we belong to the Earth and Her cosmic society; that we all begin with what might be called “creational identities.” Knowledge of these creational identities does not erase any other identities, but rather invites us into a deeper understanding of who we are.
In the modern political imagination, virtue is too often reduced to laws and policies—things we have sought to enforce from above. But as Martín Prechtel, who has studied deeply with the Tz’utujil Maya, reminds us: virtue is something we grow into, something embedded in the rhythms of the seasons, in the cycles of birth and death, in the ways we care for one another and the stories we tell our children, and, above all, in the responsibilities we inherit from those who came before us.
In the Enlightenment tradition, from which American democracy has traditionally drawn much of its strength, virtue has long been presented as an individual pursuit, a matter of moral reasoning and personal character. In many Indigenous traditions, in contrast, virtue is not something possessed—it is something enacted, something practiced within the rhythms of right relationships among beings who share creational identities.
These creational identities are rooted in the fact that all beings—animate and inanimate, seen and unseen—are our kith and kin and always already form a beloved community of which human beings are a small and dependent part. We are, all of us, responsible to act with respectful, reciprocal, trustworthy, and consensual conduct towards all life in pursuit of alignment with the balance and harmony and abundance of the Earth. This is part of global knowledge, part of those aspects of Indigenous knowledge that are perhaps easiest for non-Natives to apprehend.
The great Confucian scholar Zhang Zai sought to offer something that may be considered resonant with such global knowledge a thousand years ago:
“Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in their midst. Therefore that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.”
This is the heart of our vision: a society rooted not in domination, but in sisterhood and brotherhood. A politics not of division, but of equal belonging. A democracy that does not merely seek to govern on behalf of the people, but a more genuine self-government in which we remember who we are and who we can be—together.
The deepest problems we confront as a nation are rooted in our failures to see the world through the framework of global knowledge; our failures to treat all as we would wish to be treated, and in our inflicting on others conduct we would not want inflicted upon us. We have mistakenly placed our faith in “benevolent authority” (however variously defined) rather than in a collective self-consciousness committed to a healthy social self-understanding of natural law grounded in love for the Earth.
In a famous political pamphlet in 1774, James Wilson declared that “All men are, by nature, equal and free,” that “no one has a right to any authority over another without his consent,” and that “all lawful government is founded upon the consent of those who are subject to it.”
There is much truth in the understanding of natural law from which Wilson argued. But there is greater and deeper truth in the understanding of natural law from which the elders of the peoples of the Native Nations of this continent have spoken and continue to speak.
As George Manuel (Secwepemc) of the National Indian Brotherhood—known today as the Assembly of First Nations—once said:
“Perhaps when men no longer try to have ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that liveth upon the earth,’ they will no longer try to have dominion over us. It will be much easier to be our brother’s keeper then.”
My claim that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were, in part, the product of efforts at progressive reform—inadequate but worthy efforts—I will assert by championing James Wilson (even though he was an author of the terrible 3/5ths compromise that strengthened slavery; a compromise that he advocated in spite of the fact that he knew—and publicly said—that slavery was repugnant to the principles of natural law and unauthorized by the common law).
Wilson was a social democrat in all but name and—among the many people involved in founding the country—was more responsible for the revolutionary jurisprudence underlying the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution than anyone else. Indeed, the phrase, “We, the people,” first appears in American history in his handwriting.
According to Wilson,
“All will receive from each, and each will receive from all, mutual support and assistance: mutually supported and assisted, all may be carried to a degree of perfection hitherto unknown; perhaps, hitherto not believed.”
That is the foundation of social democracy. It is a powerful starting point. But it is not good enough.
Democracy and human rights as we have known them—better than monarchy or raw dictatorship as they certainly are—can nevertheless be considered as a failed attempt to emulate the more genuine self-government of the peoples of the Native Nations and to belong to the land, and to fellowship with Her inhabitants, rather than to see the land and “its” inhabitants as the property of any ruler.
The American people are barely 250 years old. If we are to survive and flourish for anything like the length of time that the Native peoples flourished before the eurochristian invasion, we will have to do a better job of learning from them and to cease exploiting and oppressing them.
It is only as Native scholars have addressed the spiritual and ontological foundations of their own societies—as, for example, in God is Red by Vine Deloria, Jr. (Dakota), The Gantowisas: Iroquoian Women by Barbara Alice Mann (Seneca), and Aazheyaadizi: Worldview, Language, and the Logics of Decolonization by Mark Freeland (Anishinaabe)—that these foundations have begun to become more accessible to academic audiences. Now the American people are beginning to glimpse how much we have to learn from the peoples of the Native Nations.
The Native peoples are our elder brothers and elder sisters in the cause of genuine self-government—far more advanced than we are in the history of their accomplishments—and entitled to the respect in the world that we claim for ourselves with our democracy, or were proud to do before Trump began to sully our international reputation—even in our own eyes—in striking new ways. We must remember that where these Native peoples now suffer with extreme poverty, and often inadequate Tribal governments, this situation is one that we have imposed upon them by committing genocides and land thefts against them and by forcing upon them governments under our control.
We have, for centuries, claimed a right to rule over the peoples of the Native Nations and their lands. We have done so through “federal Indian law”—a body of “law” that is repugnant to the Constitution and that systematically denies these peoples their rights under constitutional law to say nothing of their rights under the international laws and usages of Turtle Island (this continent) before the eurochristian invaders arrived.
At the root of this “federal Indian law”—as at the root of chattel slavery and racism—is the doctrine of Christian discovery that John Marshall and a unanimous Supreme Court chose to make the basis of U.S. property law in Johnson v. McIntosh in 1823. The American people—and particularly those of us who consider ourselves Christians—have yet to come to terms with the licentiousness and outright evil produced by this hybrid of fifteenth century religious jurisprudence and ethnonationalism—this covert idolatrous worship of the United States as a “Christian” nation and this covert adoration of aggressive “Christian” violence on its behalf.
The Supreme Court actually claimed, in 1823, that because some representatives of a “Christian people” saw the land on this side of the Atlantic centuries earlier, their government acquired an “ultimate dominion” over it. This was not merely a lie, but a treaty-violating fantasy that is repugnant to the Constitution. The Supreme Court’s further claim that the magic gaze of the discoverers meant that the sovereignty of the Native peoples—“the heathens”—was “necessarily diminished” is what has led to the “legal” denial of their constitutional rights and sanctioned many genocides and land thefts as well as more recent horrors such as the boarding “schools” and numerous additional treaty violations.
In the words of the papal bulls Dum Diversas, in 1452, and Romanus Pontifex, in 1455, King Alfonso V of Portugal and his descendants were authorized to “search out” and “enslave in perpetuity” all “Saracens,” “pagans,” and “other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed.” That was what Willie James Jennings has called the “womb” from which white supremacy was born. That was the “legal” basis of what Bayo Akomolafe has called the trans-Atlantic slave thefts. And its legacies continue to be felt.
Following this, beginning in 1493, in order “that barbarous nations may be overthrown and brought to the faith,” various additional papal bulls sanctioned Spain’s invasion of the so-called New World, somehow allegedly giving to Spain’s monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella: “the aforesaid countries and islands thus unknown and hitherto discovered by your envoys and to be discovered hereafter, provided however they at no time have been in the actual temporal possession of any Christian owner, together with all their dominions, cities, camps, places, and villages, and all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances of the same.”
This doctrine of Christian discovery—embedded in U.S. property law since 1823—has yet to be repudiated by the Supreme Court of the United States or, for that matter, even by the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian churches which have—at most—issued half-hearted denunciations without really appreciating their ongoing responsibility for the continuing significance of a doctrine they once explicitly accepted and have yet to successfully confront.
The continuing significance of this doctrine in the law is an ongoing violation of “the rule of law”—a zone of exception whereby the Constitution simply does not apply to protect the rights of the peoples of the Native Nations as the framers intended it to, as is the plain logico-grammatical meaning of the text, and as is the clear meaning which that text would have had for an “original” reader.
“If it be true that the Cherokee nation have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those rights are to be asserted,” was the despicable way John Marshall put this exception into plain speech in sanctioning the Trail of Tears and the numerous genocides and land thefts that followed in his majority opinion in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. The situation is analogous to Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson somehow being considered settled law by the Supreme Court today and “separate but equal” somehow compatible with the Constitution.
The continuing significance of this doctrine of Christian discovery among Christians comes down to two questions. The first is the question of human equality which all “American Christians,” and indeed all Americans, are complicit in denying as long as they tolerate this doctrine. And, second, the question of whether Christians can learn of Christ from the peoples of the Native Nations regardless of whether they are or were “Christians” or not. Are we, in other words, worshipping the American nation and its alleged “discoveries” or are we worshipping God and God’s presence wherever we encounter divinity?
Dialogue with the peoples of the Native Nations, as my friend Negonnekodoqua Blair (Anishinaabe) has observed: “can help Western philosophers return to the roots of their own humanity and discard the cloak of objectivity, exceptionalism and colonization that blinds them from seeing that the world is a democracy full of intelligent beings, not things. We’re not so much interested in joining Christian Nations that live outside of nature’s laws, but we welcome them to find restoration, balance and greater accordance with true Christian values. Many of our traditional healers are also Christians because the core teachings of our spiritual beliefs are so similar. We lived as true Christians before Jesus even walked on this Earth. And we haven’t forgotten our original instructions.”
Three recent books have dismantled both the doctrine of Christian discovery and, with it, the claim of the United States to a “right” to dominate the peoples of the Native Nations and their lands. The first is by my friend Steve Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape) and is titled, Pagans in the Promised Land. The second is by my friend Peter d’Errico and is titled, Federal Anti-Indian Law. The third is my own: Arguments over Genocide: The War of Words in the Congress and the Supreme Court over Cherokee Removal.
We must return to our beginnings as a people and correct, as best we can, the lingering underlying reasons for our government’s worst misconduct—the underlying reasons for slavery and genocide—and so address their legacies and ongoing aspects in a way that will contribute to healing for all the peoples involved, including ourselves. Rather than embark on quick and doubtless misguided efforts to “fix” matters, I think the situation requires us to sit with the grief of those upon whom—and not just upon whose ancestors—we have inflicted tremendous suffering. We need to open ourselves to a new and more democratic way of being in the world by strengthening our hearts in this way and by aligning our minds with them in what Trudell calls “clear and coherent thought.”
Peoples, in our collective rethinking of our American peoplehood, might be likened to bodies—might be understood as a matrix of affinity among human beings linked together in a unity that is responsible to maintain right relations with all life. Nations might then be likened to the minds of these social bodies—to their collective self-consciousness. States—and even some private concentrations of wealth and power, in contrast—could then be likened to egos (to that part of the mind that seeks to control and even somehow constitute the whole, as if that were possible). Connecting with our true selves—and overcoming our egos—both as individuals and within collectivities—is the central task before us if we are to understand ourselves in anything like the way the peoples of the Native Nations understood themselves before the eurochristian invasion; if we are to be anything like truly self-governing.
We expect ourselves as a people to be sovereign. That is what we have always claimed our democracy meant. If we are to be truly self-governing, our minds will have to remember to identify with, and be attuned to, our bodies rather than to any egos—we will have to see ourselves as all that we are together, and not merely as some separate and allegedly superior part. In fact, far from being “superior,” our egos—to the extent that they refuse to respect the presence of the whole—in our bodies and in our minds—to the extent that they fail to defer to this whole and to the maintenance of right relationships with all life—these egos are a distraction from what truly matters and an obstacle in our path.
As a matter of honesty—as a matter of minimal intellectual hygiene—we must acknowledge that we have no valid claim to exercise domination over the peoples of the Native Nations or their lands and that each and all of them have a right to a viable land base on which to restore their genuine self-government and free and independent way of life. The transformation of our shared social worlds in accordance with the principles of the international laws and usages that were present on Turtle Island before the eurochristian invaders arrived will be a major challenge for these peoples and for the American people as well. I think it is the direction in which we all should seek to move together. Here our endeavor might be greatly helped by reaching out to the elders of the Native Nations.
As Oren Lyons (Onondaga) has noted, as a result of the conduct of our “civilization,” a great storm is here. His reaction to those who have brought this storm on all of us is striking: “I said I’ll help you. I’ll be right there. And that’s our elders’ position. When they ask for help, we better be there.”
Words attributed to Tecumseh (Shawnee) express a credo in support of the sacred birthright of the Native Nations to what Steve Newcomb has called their original free and independent existence:
“Live your life that the fear of death may never enter your heart. Love your life. Perfect your life. Beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long, and its purpose the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the food and the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only with yourself. Abuse no one and nothing, for abuse turns the wise ones into fools and robs the spirit of its vision.”
This is a credo rooted in this land; a credo that is part of the deeper natural spiritual truths that we, the American people, should remember and adopt. We are each, as the philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva has noted, unique expressions of everything else in the universe. And this is true of all living beings. We are intimately entangled and connected, and, in a profound way, all of us, are both sacred and equal. Until we see ourselves as such, and see all of us as in this together, our political movements will inevitably fall short of our aspirations. We will continue to think in terms of what is (allegedly) “progressive” or “conservative” or whatever rather than in terms of what is required to live in right relationship with the Earth and with each other.
“Love and justice are not two,” as Rev. angel Kyodo williams has said, “Without inner change, there can be no outer change; without collective change, no change matters.” This campaign is an opportunity to join together with people informed by such truths. It is an invitation to champion social democracy while knowing that it is inadequate; and an invitation to help lessen its inadequacy by lessening our collective investment in any kind of “benevolent authority.” What we are most in need of is a change in the spiritual foundations of our shared social life together. This is something that each of us can address: one conversation at a time.
The path of reverence is not an abstract ideal but a lived practice—one that flows through gratitude to the Earth and all of Her plants and animals, winds and waters, mountains and magma, and through the daily choices that reflect our alignment with the balance and harmony and abundance of Her cosmic society. In embodying this reverence—through our respectful, reciprocal, trustworthy, and consensual conduct—we not only honor the sacredness of all life but participate in the deepest purposes for which we exist. We respect our embodiment, as the author Sophie Strand has written, in bodies that are doorways into a cosmos that is itself alive and that is filled only with life and life abundant.
As a candidate in the Democratic primary, and, if need be, as an independent candidate for Congress in the Illinois 5th District, I will caucus with the Democrats, if elected. It is my position, however, that both parties must learn to grasp the complex political truth of America: That our country was founded not only on slavery and genocide, but on deep dreams (some of them worthy) of building both a better country and a better world, and that both of these aspects of our reality are central to who we have been as a society. The civility that at least some of us have enjoyed has depended on those deep dreams which, at the same time, have often served as cover to hide the ongoing abuses that those outside the circle of civility have suffered. This has been true both domestically and in American foreign relations as well.
If we are to do markedly better in the future—and to live in genuine self-government rather than simply dream it—we must choose the way of reverence as a people and as human beings: We must change our collective self-consciousness and adopt a new social self-understanding grounded in the wisdom of this land and our maintenance of right relations with each other and with our grandmother Earth.
We will find the energy and political will necessary for this campaign in:
• Compassion and respect for the Native peoples, and a strong sense of the justice of their cause (their right to have their stolen lands returned and their right to live in domination-free zones in which to recover their genuine sovereignty),
• Solidarity with the poor that will sustain the investment needed not only to lift them all out of poverty but to put a solid floor under all of our wages, and
• A widespread desire for a fundamentally new approach to health and care—enacted through Medicare for All with an emphasis on home health, and an additional emphasis on co-creating health in how we live, work, learn, and play; that leads (at no financial expense to patients) to our becoming a much more healthy nation.
The campaign accepts no money from corporate PACs and, until we have raised enough to hire a treasurer, we will only be accepting pledges. They can be made here: https://www.crowdpac.com/campaigns/425285/justice-for-the-native-nations-and-a-21st-century-freedom-budget-for-all
1 May 2025
© Steven J. Schwartzberg 2025
Beautiful.
"The deepest problems we confront as a nation are rooted in our failures to see the world through the framework of global knowledge; our failures to treat all as we would wish to be treated, and in our inflicting on others conduct we would not want inflicted upon us. We have mistakenly placed our faith in “benevolent authority” (however variously defined) rather than in a collective self-consciousness committed to a healthy social self-understanding of natural law grounded in love for the Earth.”
Wishing you the very best of luck!
YES!
Beautifully written
Wado ꮹꮩ🙏🏽 Chi-Miigwech ᒮᒃᐌᑦᒡ 🙏🏽 Nia:Wen 🙏🏽
for your commitment and passion to Sense us, then and now, and offering your talent / energy / essence to broadly communicate, influence and reSpect - look again at what we have to offer.