So somewhere before dawn on Thursday I was roasting a turkey breast for dinner later that day. While I was waiting for the bird to be done I was reading Daily Kos, where a bit of a shouting match developed between a few commenters and diarists over the use of the term “trail of tears� in contexts other than the forced exodus(es) that claimed many Native American lives in the 1800s. The argument itself seemed to open some other festering issues inside the community, but what struck me was a comment that there are Narive Americans who observe the fourth Thursday of November as a National Day of Mourning. Then later Thursday night we were watching Survivor, where the contestants are camping in a Mayan ruin, where two contestants won a reward challenge to go to a natural hot spring by answering trivia questions about Mayan culture, and where for the immunity challenge contestants had to answer questions based on a story from Mayan folklore – an ancient civilization, rendered extinct and eventually turned into entertainment to sell ad time.
It was definitely a day of some cognitive dissonance. I had to acknowledge to myself that the life I have – with luxuries and opportunities that so many other people on this planet would find unimaginable – is in some part the product of severe injustices committed in the past, injustices whose effects have not been ameliorated but rather compounded over time. But I also pushed that thought out of my mind to focus on the next task I wanted to accomplish. I don’t know if there’s a truly satisfying way to resolve this kind of moral conflict on an individual level. But I’m having a sneaking suspicion that what I have been doing isn’t enough. This is one I’m gonna need to think about some more.