Spirit in Action

American Unrootedness & Dysfunction

In his memoir, Not From Here, sociologist & author Allan G. Johnson takes us on an odyssey of introspection about our unrootedness and the symptoms of that dysfunction in our personal and national identities, things like the native genocide, slavery, but also the holes in our lives because we don't belong.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 06 Sep 2015
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Today's Spirit in Action guest is sociologist and author, Alan G. Johnson In his memoir, Not From Here, Alan takes us on an odyssey of introspection About our unrootedness And the symptoms of that dysfunction in our personal and national identities Things like the native genocide, slavery, but also the holes in our personal lives Because we simply don't belong Alan is the author of a number of sociology books, but also novels and this memoir To lead us to engage more deeply with our world and ourselves He joins us by phone from his home in Connecticut Alan, thank you so much for joining us today for Spirit in Action Thank you for having me, Mark You're in Connecticut, but the book, Not From Here, traverses essentially my backyard I mean, you're down in Iowa, you're over in Minnesota, which is right across the border For me in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and you're out to Montana Your mother was from Wisconsin So how foreign is the Midwest to you? It seemed like something of a real expedition for you to do the traveling that you talk about in Not From Here In terms of place, I would say relatively foreign I identify more with the Northeast than any other part of the country The Midwest, for me, is where my relatives are from That's how I think of it And prior to this trip, my time in the Midwest was pretty much limited to my childhood And visiting relatives, and that wasn't very often So I don't have a particular attachment to the Midwest, in that sense Do you like our accent? Your accent is fine, it's as pleasing as my own You know, it's an accent, you know? So you mentioned that the Midwest is where you identify your relatives as being from But the big question in the book is where are you from? And for you, that was a hard question to answer Just explain a little bit about the history of that question for you and what it meant to you Well, it begins as just a memoir with my father And my asking him where did he want his ashes to be placed after he died He shrugged and said he didn't care, didn't make no difference to him at all And at the time, I didn't think much of that because I think it didn't make a difference to me either It didn't present itself to me as something that really would be a problem And then he died and two or three years later, I still had my portion of his ashes And increasingly felt that I had to do something with them, something meaningful And as I sat with that, I realized, first of all, that I had no idea what to do with them And second of all, that I had no idea what to tell my children to do with me So I didn't know where my father belonged, and I didn't know where I belonged And so I wound up standing off on what was the closest that I could get to my father's lived lineage So I started, I flew into Minneapolis and then drove to South Dakota, which was really in many ways where the trip begins Which is where my father went to high school, that period of his life And then I worked my way back through Minnesota to where he was born in Wells And then finished in Iowa where his father was born and where my great-grandparents settled as farmers after emigrating from Norway And throughout this whole trip, I was looking for a place where I belonged and where my father belonged And of course, I wanted those two places to be the same Because it made no sense to me that the father would belong someplace in his son wouldn't Because it seemed to me that's the whole point of being descended from someone, of having ancestors Is that you're from the same place, you belong in the same place Do you think that you would have been called on this odyssey if you had not been a sociologist? I see something essential in your sociological thinking that made this extra important for you It's impossible to know what I would have done if I were somebody else And my sociological sensibility is a huge part of who I am, not all by any means But it's certainly a big piece of it. It certainly would not have been the journey that it was If I did not go out on the land knowing what I know about the stories that the land has to tell That it contains the history of that land not only in terms of Native Americans But African Americans, I mean the whole history of this country is full of those stories And so that one of the experiences that I had was given how much solitude I had I mean this was ten days and almost two thousand miles in which I had myself and my father's ashes as sole company So I had a lot of time and a lot of silence and a lot of solitude One of the things that came to me increasingly as I was on this journey was that my personal story, my father's story, my grandfather's, grandmother's story All of these personal stories are embedded in a much larger story, which is the story of the history But also the history that continues into the present And how our personal lives were as participants in a larger story of a society and what was happening here So I came away from this with a sense of my own story as being part of something larger and my sense of the many different levels On which things happen and that individual people acting as one level But then there is this larger level that especially has to do with land and that is also going on I noticed that it was the question about your father's ashes that drew you on this trip And I noticed from your website and folks at website is agjohnson.us That it was your father's ashes that drew you on this trip Your mother, she had a clear sense of what she wanted done with her remains But since you've written so many articles relating to patriarchy and the whole relationship Men and women, the gender not as one of your books It seems to me that there was something special in the way that your father's story engaged you that your mothers didn't So again, it's one of those questions where I'll never know the answer because I don't get to do it over again I think that the difference in my response to my mother's ashes and my father's had several pieces to it One is that she told us and I was younger then and it didn't occur to me Questions about land and belonging simply didn't occur to me at all as questions So I wasn't ready for this when my mother died, that's one piece of it And she didn't give me a reason to have to think of it, so I just did as she asked When my father died, I had grown a fair amount I was considerably older and he did not give me an easy path out of this I'm quite certain that if he had just said, you know, I want you to bury me in such and such a place I just would have done that, including if he'd asked me to take him to Norway I would have taken him to Norway and I can imagine that it might not have come up for me This question of my belonging Of course part of the issue with that, and I'm sure in your gender studies and writings Men communicating particular of you're in my parents' generation It was just a very tight lift and very little happened I found out, for example, after my father died, he had some papers my mother died long before He had letters that let me know that my mother had had a child when she was 16 It was given up for adoption, so I had a half-brother out there somewhere So in addition to the seven kids that my mother and father produced, there's another one that was from my mother But my father never mentioned it, all those years growing up So this tight-lipped father thing was this in part some kind of connection for you Your reconnection, the posthumous connection to your father that you were doing as part of this journey? I think there was certainly part of that going on It felt important to me over those all those days and miles that his ashes were sitting within a couple of feet of me And I had no illusions that it wasn't him, he didn't speak to me, he gave me, right through the end, he gave me no guidance whatsoever Which in many ways drove home to me that this really was my journey In some ways, yes, I was doing right by him as well as I knew how But I think overwhelmingly this trip was about the question of where do I belong? And I can speculate all I want about did he know what he was doing when he told me it didn't matter? I doubt it, because my father, as you say, the reticence, especially Norman Norwegian men are famous for this There's the joke about him, the joke my father liked to tell about the Norwegian man who loved his wife so much he almost told her And that's only halfway to the joke about the Norwegian who you can tell he's comfortable with you because when he speaks to you He looks at your shoes instead of his own So he was certainly true to that and my experience of him was that he not only reticent but that he lacked emotional curiosity It was very rare that I heard him ask how someone felt in a serious way so that he would then have follow up questions to whatever the response was So that yes, I was doing right by my father, but I think that I was in search of something first for myself But going back again to the sociologist, I was also aware that the experiences I were having were not unique to me And the experiences that I've had since in just living with that experience and what it's come to mean to me is not unique to me That I was taking a journey that in many ways is a journey that this entire nation needs to take in some way Everyone except Native Americans that might not be longing is something that is endemic to this country And that's exactly why I have you here today for spirit and action folks are speaking with Alan G Johnson The memoir he just published is not from here and he's got a lot of other books to sociologists by training By disposition you've taken Alan though to writing both fiction and this memoir as well as all the non-fiction stuff you've written for sociology students and learners along the way It occurred to me that by writing memoir you've included us in the story You've led us to put our hearts in the story in the same way I think maybe your fiction does Did you have a conscious design in moving from the academic say text or orientation to fiction and memoir? Well with the fiction that was of conscious design and that began some years ago was in my 50s and I had written fiction and poetry The boy and in high school and college as a writer that was my first calling really my first love was telling stories There were reports that when I was at a nursery school I was known for telling stories to the kids and the teacher actually remarked on it and thought actually I could pull back on that a little bit But that's very much in my bones is telling story and in many ways my non-fiction I think that it has appealed as widely as it has because it's in the vein of telling a story I'm trying to tell a story about how the world works or some aspect of it And so that the memoir for me was a combining of the two real parts of myself as a writer The one who tells a story and also the one who tries to step back and see that story in a larger context The sociologist and this memoir does both of those things As I read the book I was aware of what you might be doing for me and for all the other readers And I have you here on Spirit and Action because it looks like to me you're trying to get us to look at ourselves Our identity, our nation's identity, both the positives but very importantly the dysfunctions Things like the native genocide that was part and parcel of the founding of our nation Things like slavery and much more Was the book intended for all of us to look within or was it simply you trying to find yourself? Oh I would say both I don't think I could help having it be both being who I am In the most immediate sense as I wrote it I was writing it for myself Because that's what I do when I have something that's presented to me in the way that this was presented to me Then I don't really have a choice but to sit down and write about it But I brought to that of course was my own activism my own commitment to engaging with the full story The full reality not only of what's been but what is currently so it's both of those things A parallel that you didn't bring out in the book that occurred to me as I was reading it Is not knowing where you're from Not knowing where you belong geographically or ethnically or familiarly or wherever Having that kind of lack of roots is parallel to being an orphan And I think there's all kinds of strengths as well as pathologies that are associated with being an orphan The fear of and maybe a need for over grasping And I think that maybe you perceive that as part of our national disease But of course I want you to see what your opinion is not echo mine Well I would say national condition and as I was listening to you Mark I was thinking that well Orphan is a particular situation in which you don't have your parents but I think that the displacement The dislocation in some ways the abandonment That we live with as a national condition goes back much much farther So for anyone in this country except for someone who has migrated into this country recently If you go back a certain number of generations depending on who you are You get to a point where there is this disconnect Where all the ancestors that go farther back from that point are from somewhere They're from some people They belong somewhere in that fundamental sense But all the descendants going forward from that point don't belong anywhere And so as a nation going back to our entire history we are a nation of displaced people It's occurred to me that the United States historically has been the biggest refugee camp in the world And I think of all the people who were in one way or another driven here Driven from where they were from to come here And then I think about well what is the life of a refugee like and of course today There are millions of refugees in the world and we hear about them on the news And what is life like for them and especially what is life like for their children Who do not have this deep memory of place and people Who grow up basically in this non-place that is not where they're from And the answer is that it's not pretty It produces tremendous problems for them And I think that we see all kinds of symptoms of that Historically and today in this country of this sense of restlessness of rootlessness Of disconnection and our willingness to move about As if one place is pretty much as good as another What distinguishes them is how good the jobs are or whatever But without any real sense of being rooted in place I think the metaphor of being orphans I think has validity to it But I think it goes much deeper than that and it's something that gets inherited across generations And so could you spell out what you think are the consequences of this lack of rootedness? The consequences exist of course on different levels On a collective level we have been I think and continue to be dangerous in the world Because we don't have any sense of what makes land sacred for example to a people And so we took North America from Native Americans with impunity As if it was no big deal Abrogating treaties which we did I think we made more than 400 treaties with Native Americans and broke every single one You don't behave that way as a nation with such ease Unless you feel like it's just you know it's no big deal You can just do it You can just displace people from their land So we've been dangerous in that way As a conquering people and I think that's our whole history And I don't think we're done frankly Our history is one of the restless conquering people And so on a collective level I think that's a huge consequence of this On an individual level I think that we struggle with And I'm not going to presume to speak for all individuals But my perception is that if there's a pattern that it is We struggle with a certain degree of being lost Of having nothing to hold on to And that the symptoms of this are all over the place in this culture Especially through the rampant individualism in this country The idea that my individual identity is my anchor That's what anchors me in the world Which is the diametric opposite Of what most indigenous people have seen as anchoring them in the world Which is to be part of the people who are defined in terms in relation to a place We have gone as far as you can go in the other direction And it doesn't work And so I think there is this tremendous longing in this country For a sense of attachment and that it is so painful To really look at that for what it is That we have all of these things to distract us from it Alcohol, drugs, work, sex, endless streams of information Texting the internet, all of that And that one of the effects of that is to distract us From the very kind of solitude and silence that I encountered on this journey This was again ten days, almost two thousand miles During which time mark I never thought to turn on the radio in the car I never even thought to plug in my iPod It was a sustained immersion in silence and solitude Out of which I was able to encounter these kinds of questions And my sense of this country is that we are organized to avoid at all costs Any prolonged silence and solitude in which we might actually discover ourselves Both individually and collectively That we are organized against that possibility And that it's dangerous to our well-being And it's dangerous to the well-being of others Probably two thirds of the way into the book Alan I found some phrases that really captured for me What you're just talking about One of them was a sentence where you said We are joined by a sentimentalized alienation in common By the freedom to disregard anything that limits our ability To do whatever we want And I went "Oh my goodness, that is so us" That culture of my interests is Of course, why we can't control guns in this country Why socialism is screamed every time you try to regulate a business But it's not only the political questions It's how we deal with our neighbors Anyway, is that your experience in Connecticut where you live? Yes and no, I mean on one level I like my neighbors And we cooperate with one another and all of that And I'm also aware that beneath that is the unspoken understanding Usually unspoken of generally speaking, you're supposed to leave me alone You are not supposed to infringe on my ability to do anything I want But that's the American way As I was listening to you Mark, what occurred to me was that In this country, freedom is seen as the freedom to be unattached To not belong Because belonging is a reciprocal relationship So I can think of belonging as that I belong to my family I belong in my family I can think of that as a good thing for me In terms of its consequences for me It means that I'm accepted, I have a place to go It feels good, all of that That I can think that's what it means to belong There's a good thing there for me But belonging also has responsibilities, it doesn't just have rights And a belonging that does not include responsibilities As far as I can tell, isn't a belonging at all? You might as well be floating in outer space And that I think is one of the bizarre things about this culture Is that we insist on this freedom to not belong Because we are insisting in the freedom to not be accountable to one another It occurs to me that one of the moments of truth That we may be living through right now in this country Especially around issues of the distribution of wealth and income Is two dramatically different worldviews One of them is that it's everyone for themselves Which is a very powerful worldview in this country The other one is we are all in this together And you can't get a whole lot different from those two worldviews And the first is taking us palnel away from any sense of belonging The United States then just becomes a venue for people to compete As free individuals who are not accountable to nothing and no one And the other one takes us back frankly To what we know of pretty much every indigenous society that ever existed How we resolve the conflict between those two worldviews Is going to determine where we go We're going to say more about that in just a moment First I want to remind you folks that you're listening to spirit in action I'm your host Marc Helpsmeet for this northern spirit radio production We're on the web at northernspiritradio.org And on that site you'll find more than ten years of our programs For free listening and download You'll find connections to our guests more information about them So you can track down Alan G. Johnson His website A.G. Johnson.us Again, you can make that connection through northernspiritradio.org When you visit our website please post your comments So we know what you're thinking and make our conversation two way There's also a place where you can support Northern spirit radio by clicking Support your donations going down online or by mail I want you to support even more importantly your local community radio station Community radio provides a view into news and music that we get Nowhere else on the American dial and it's so important to have those alternative Views and sources of inspiration available to all of us So start by supporting them first Again Alan G. Johnson That Alan by the way is A-L-L-A-N Which I don't know if I've ever seen that before Alan My middle name growing up was A-L-L-E-N Of course A-L-A-N is very common Were you just meant to be unique from the start? Probably. Have you run into another Alan of your variety? Not many. I think my mother named me after a singer It was popular in the 40s when I was bored I don't know where I came by that But many people including relatives have dispelled my name So I've gotten used to it Yes. Which is why of course your website is A-G-Johnson.us And of course you did .us If they type in comm it will redirect them right away to it Why did you do us? Is that because you're a sociologist? That's what was available when I first created a website Oh.com.com was not available man I keep looking for metaphysical reasons and gift cards So you'll find them someplace in there I'm sure Keep digging So can I go back to the question you were We were just talking about before you took the break The question of the belonging is reciprocal It's very common in this country I hear very often People saying I'm not responsible for things in the past That were bad because I didn't do them I wasn't there for that Or my ancestors didn't have any part in that Slavery or whatever it is And so therefore this I'm not responsible around that at all That feels to me like a hugely important issue And it's important because if I am not responsible To what this country is Then I don't know how I call myself American And the phrase what this country is cannot be separated from its history Because if you take the history of the United States out That means you take the Constitution out, the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War You take it all out, well there's nothing left We are the living continuation of our past That's literally what the United States is And that means if I'm going to call myself an American Then I have to be responsible to that Not for it in the sense that I'm supposed to feel guilty for things I didn't do But I am responsible to it now And so it seems to me again that the sense that I don't have to be accountable around that I don't have to do anything about that Because I didn't do it Is one more step away from belonging It's one more symptom of our disconnection from any kind of belonging As a nation of displaced people So that what I come out of this journey with Partly is a sense that To the extent that I do belong to anything It is that I belong to a nation of people who are in this condition of not belonging Of not being from here, of being the inheritors of conquest And that's a huge challenge And the question is what are we going to do with that? What is our response going to be to the condition that our history has brought us to? And I think that's one of the questions that I come out of this with It's of course not just for me It's my perception as you say that we pick and choose which parts of our history Except as part of our identity So we say yes, you know, the US we were the victors in World War II And, you know, we made the world safer democracy or whatever We pick and choose that kind of thing And we say, oh yeah, well slavery No, we say, oh yes, we've written the finest document The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution And we ignore the fact that written right in there Is the inferior status of all men Doesn't happen to include people whose skins are dark So women or women, yes, all men are created equal As my t-shirt says, is a half-truth So it's true that we pick and choose Now, I have the sense that your sociology study is about the US Is the psychology different in the rest of Europe or in India or China or Senegal? Is it your perception that their way of doing it is any different? And I'm not saying that to excuse ours I'm asking whether it's a human condition as opposed to a US alienated condition Well, I would say it's a human condition in that it's something that human beings are capable of Denial is a human capability, which sometimes saves our lives If you're being abused as a child, being able to go into denial can be what saves your sanity in that situation So yes, denial is a human thing and we differ in the degrees to which we engage in it So one of the problems with the United States is that we never lost the wars Germany lost the Second World War, which meant Germany could not escape looking at the Holocaust And other things that were done during the Second World War And so Germany has had to come to terms with that In a way the United States has not had to come to terms with its own genocides And ethnic cleansings and the whole institution of slavery One can imagine if Japan had won the Second World War They wouldn't be apologizing every year to China or the atrocities that there was a recent story in the news about that Or to Korea, if they had won, then they wouldn't have done that So there's a certain arrogance of power that comes with not being humbled in that way And we have not been humbled in that way Which is, I think, why we can get away with it But certainly in different countries, I don't pretend to know exactly why There are different levels of willingness to look at those things than in the United States It occurs to me, as I think about this, that Given the insecurity that comes out of not belonging of not being from here Then it occurs to me that the United States probably does have an elevated need to justify itself And one of the ways that we can make ourselves feel more rooted than we really are Is by these displays of patriotism and superiority telling the world that we're better than everyone You don't see that a whole lot in the world The degree of self-congratulation that you get in the United States All the massive displays of flags all over the place And there's a sense of trying too hard to convince the world of how wonderful we are That says to me, we're trying to convince ourselves how wonderful we are And the reason we have such a strong need to do that is there's such a weak sense of we That there really is no American people There is no American ethnicity And so that we keep trying to construct this sense of the we that I belong to That doesn't exist And what substitutes for that we is the state, the nation And particularly the military, which is why there is so much adoration of our military in this country Because they come as close as anything To being something that we can all look at and admire and feel proud of It comes as close as we get to being a nation Do you count what happened in Vietnam as a loss? I mean, we declared that we won and we left or whatever, so maybe it wasn't And I haven't actually read nothing left to lose Which is a novel that you wrote about Vietnam era fiction, about war And the whole grappling with it Do you count what happened in Vietnam for us as a loss? And is that maybe why we had the malaise of the 70s? It certainly was a loss And it's interesting to watch the Pentagon now putting together its observance So the so-called anniversary of the Vietnam War, which does not portray it as I think with much historical accuracy But Vietnam was a very different kind of loss When Germany lost Germany was played low It was destroyed, it was occupied by foreign armies for many years The reorganization of its society was dictated by others So that's a very different kind of loss So the United States was never humbled in the sense of being subject to a superior power That had beaten us and was in a position to then dictate to us How we were going to see ourselves We had no Nuremberg trials Because there was no one who was in a position to force them So that I think Robert McNamara actually said that There are many ways in which the United States, if we had lost in those ways Would have been held accountable for war crimes But when you don't have someone who's in a position to dictate terms to you Which was not the nature of the loss in Vietnam Then you escape that, which we managed to do Which means that we feel free to sort of write the history Any way we want, which we do Yes, to the victor goes the right to write the history And we've written it in a way that I don't think our younger generation fully understands The lesson we could have learned from Vietnam As you do your journey through the Midwest Where your ancestors on your father's side Living, you talk about identity Where you're from geographically And you talk about it ethnically Familiarly, you discover all these cousins that you haven't ever met before and other relatives I was surprised by one thing that you didn't include Even though you remarked on it Your grandfather was a Lutheran minister Your father, whose middle name, by the way, was Luther He reacted totally, had nothing to do, I take it with religion And you've had certainly some kind of a religious spiritual journey Including your half hour of meditation each day I know you've mentioned that you spent a year worshiping with Quakers along the way You don't talk about the alienation in terms of a religious rootlessness And I was curious if that was a conscious decision Or if you didn't happen to see that as significant It stood as glaring to me about something about your family tree And how that affected you For an interesting question My first thought is I don't know I don't know So try me again, give me a translation of the question Maybe I will then It just strikes me that somehow the definition of who we are You could say we're Lutherans or we are Norwegians Or we're vegetarians People identify themselves in various ways to say where they fit I just see a very different pattern over the three generations from your grandfather to you Does that play a part that maybe it's the sequel to the book? I'll tell you what comes to me as I listen to you That's the best I can do My sense is that organized religion, which I've never really been a part of Especially the monotheistic religions are geographically portable Which is why you can have missionaries I mean Christianity can just be sold and take root anywhere in the world Place is irrelevant The kind of spirituality that indigenous people practice is the opposite of that It cannot be separated from place And so that if you go to Thor, Iowa Which is where my great grandparents settled to become farmers After coming from Norway, that the town is, I don't know if I could call it a town You can drive through the center of town, which is where two roads cross at right angles You can drive through the town in probably about 10 or 15 seconds The only prominent building that I remember was the church So in a way that was the town That became the anchor in the absence of anything else And I think this is very much true for the whole history of this country That that place was a substitute for a deeper kind of belonging to place And it was portable, the people that immigrated brought it with them What I was encountering on this trip was a different base of spirituality I should say what I was looking for was a kind of spiritual connection That did not come out of organized religion and its ideology But it spoke to me from land itself And before I took this trip mark, I didn't even know there was such a thing It never occurred to me, which again I think is why my response to my mother's ashes For example was so different than my response to my fathers And even then delayed by several years I didn't know there was such a thing And it was in the quiet hush and solitude Especially in South Dakota, which was the farthest out I went on this trip That solitude and quiet was for me in many ways Spiritually significant more than anything else I will never forget being at the grasslands in the south of pier I don't know, it's hundreds of miles of grass The way I think of it is that you're looking out over an ocean That sort of this has rolling waves, gently rolling waves And it's ocean as far as you can see and this huge bowl of sky above you And all around you, all you see is grass And I'm standing there by myself Looking out at this vastness And the feeling I have is one of sadness It's one of grief because I feel small and unattached This is not mine And I feel that most intensely in that moment when I am aware that an indigenous person I imagine a Lakota Sioux standing there, especially an elder Lakota Sioux Looking out over that expanse, that vastness would see himself reflected back from it The land would be speaking to him about who he is, who his people are And I felt in that moment the absence of that so profoundly And I realized that the legacy that we have inherited from the history of this country Is one of not knowing who we are And yes, there are lots of ways of knowing who you are There are lots of ways of experiencing what we would call the feeling of belonging But in this way, I think we have no idea who we are And that it creates a huge whole My wife Nora has called it "immigrant grief" And that it's inherited, across generations, we are never free of it As long as we don't turn and look at it for what it is And then engage with it, not only individually, but together That deeply touches me I have to comment, though, however, that that grief is probably common to the native peoples And I don't know how many native peoples actually are living on, have reservations On, have control of the land where they originally were It's like the Cherokee and all the others from the east were pushed west And so they're native peoples, but the land is nothing like their land And their mountain and their creek, the one that they knew so well So I wonder if that immigrant grief is not common to a large portion of the native peoples Native to this continent, but not necessarily anything about the environment Climate that they are now situated in I could not agree with you more, I mean, I was responding in terms of people coming from outside North America Because that's what we were talking about But except that they weren't immigrants, or immigrants They were expelled, they were forced refugees They were ethnically cleansed, I mean, whatever the language is, it was by force, not by choice And I think, for example, of the Cherokee who, you know, went from Georgia and the Carolinas to Oklahoma As so many other tribes were forced to move to places that were so unlike the land where their ancestors' bones are buried So in that sense, North America is full of grief And most of it is unacknowledged, and unacknowledged grief is toxic And the efforts of native peoples in North America to deal with that And I think there is a great deal of effort, not only to reclaim their cultures, but to engage with their grief Because that's what's required The rest of us in North America are denial and are refusal to engage with the grief Because, you know, the pursuit of happiness is one of our watchwers We're not supposed to feel that in this country It's not okay to feel that But that's precisely what's required if we're going to deal with our share of the grief that has been imposed by the history of this country You know, there's a question I have, Alan, and again, it could sound defensive, but it's actually meant constructively And that is the grief that's not acknowledged or owned And I find that, again, to be a human condition in so much of the world And I do think it's pathological, I do think it comes out in poisonous ways Do you know of a place anywhere in the world, and, you know, over the past thousand years, let's say That they have a healthier way of doing that I mean, I think of the Dutch who I really like, I've visited the Netherlands a number of times And I really like so much about their world viewing approach And yet, they are the ones who are responsible for apartheid in South Africa I mean, they seeded that I try and find a place somewhere in the world, is China, India, Burma, you know, any of those places Do you know of a healthier society, having lived out something better That we could take as a role model or some inspiration for how we might do better I think that virtually every nation was established because they conquered it And I think the native tribes here conquered each other and took over places And there were successive waves of it I'm just not sure where I look to find some peoples who somehow got it right Who somehow, they moved into the neighborhood without displacing the natives And they acknowledged their grief and their powerfulness and powerlessness All of the things that I think make for healthy worldviews and living out As I understand the history of Native Americans, I think they have come much closer to this than we ever came They did not come to North America and conquer and displace other people In the way that white people came here and conquered and displaced But most nations were founded upon conquest, I don't know that I think that's true Most nations grew out of migration flows that go back thousands or tens of thousands of years Native Americans, you know, were here about 10,000 years ago I mean there's some dispute over that, but really many thousands of years So the question becomes, are there nations that are like us In the sense that we were founded by people who came over an ocean With the express purpose of setting up shops someplace else And we didn't have to The impetus to come to North America was creed People came here because they wanted something They wanted to have all the land they could have and they wanted to get wealthy That's why it was bankrolled by the monarchs Australia was a prison colony So the white people in Australia are in a way indigenous to that place And they didn't come there through some kind of natural process of moving from one place That doesn't have enough food, for example, to a place that has more game and more food These are countries that were founded A process that I think is almost completely different than pretty much any other country in the world Where you have these people who are clearly outsiders Who do not have any real reason to be there The land that they're from isn't even contiguous to the land that they're conquering They're getting in boats and ships and they're sailing for weeks and weeks and weeks to get to this place And then they proceed to take it by force and any other means they can I don't think that there are very many countries in the world where that's true But I also want to go back to my question to you Mark, if I may, of are you talking about engaging with grief? I think most countries in the world do much much better around grief than we do Because in most countries of the world they do not fear death to the extent that we fear death in the United States And I think the fear of death is directly connected to our lack of rootedness And our fear that there is nothing to receive us when we die That to die is to go into a kind of non-existence Compared with indigenous cultures in which they have a very clear sense That when you die you join your ancestors and wear your ancestors Well they're in the land that you're going to be buried on Or burned on or whatever it is, but you know where you're from Which means you know where you're going to go And if you're displaced people, if you're atomized into all of these supposedly autonomous individuals Who are accountable to no one and nothing Then I think it's really easy for death to appear as something really kind of horrifying And we are death phobic in this country And that means that we are also grief phobic When someone dies who's close to you I think in general you get like a couple of weeks to get over it And start moving on maybe a month And then people expect you to start moving on If you're still in grief, you know whaling, gnashing your teeth Then they think there's something wrong with you I would depress, they need some medication, whatever, some kind of intervention We don't honor grief in this country Because we also don't honor and have a place for death But that which of course all life is impossible You have to have death for anything to live So I think that our inability to deal with grief And our inability to deal with death Marxists is quite unusual in the world Most countries are a whole lot more attuned to the reality of dying as the natural outcome of life Than we are And I think it speaks to our dislocation, our degree of being lost You know there's about 50% of what you said That I agree with just absolutely fervently And about half which I question as if it's a reality Let me mention first that I agree specifically Deathphobic in this country, 100% Because I really perceive the major religion of this country as materialism That's one of the reasons I think that we're very deathphobic And a lot of people who would identify as Christian would say No, I'm a Christian, I'm not materialist But in fact, as we've seen There's some very strong alignment of this Christian ideal with materialism It's our God-given right to accumulate things That's because it shows God's favor or whatever So I'm totally with you on that But maybe for multiple reasons beyond what you cited I lived for two years though in Africa I was in Togo, West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer And I caught one glimpse that was just stunning for me I happened to be at the beach and the ocean, Atlantic Ocean And someone drowned and I saw the rescue attempt to get the person and so on Half an hour later or so his wife showed up And she was gnashing, yelling her teeth, speaking local language Which I didn't speak enough to understand what she was saying But they had friends holding her back, she was going to cast herself into the sea And the outward expression of grief was just amazing I think the way that they do funerals, which are multiple days' events Lens credence to what you say But on the other hand, then I think of how it's done in multiple other Asian countries Where I would say that they're probably prohibited to speak of grief Even it's a very closed and impassive thing from the outside So I do know places where, yes, grief is better expressed But there's an awful lot of places where I think it's at least as stuffed as what we do here in the USA We're known for being rather emotional in some ways Your take? Well, I do not know everything about it everywhere Wait a minute, Alan, that's why I had you on this joke I knew you knew everything I also don't know that something isn't done outwardly It doesn't mean that it's not supported inwardly So I can't speak about every culture in the world And I think that you can have similar patterns for different reasons So that the imperative in this country to be happy But to be happy to be sad is being a drag It's an imposition on others, you know, we are not supposed to be sad Which means that grief makes people uncomfortable And I think about the way in which those who are in grief get isolated as a result of that They either fake it, they either, you know, quote, get over it and quote Or they face being alone with it after a while They face being alone with the profundity of it I imagine, I've been married to Nora for 35 years now And I literally cannot imagine a life without her Even though that could really happen One of us is going to die first, most likely And that could really happen, and I try to imagine the depth of loss and grief that comes out of that And it feels to me not that I'm going to be unhappy or miserable for the rest of my life But that the grief will be something that I will live for the rest of my life And that's the way it's supposed to be, it is a testament to my connection to her But of course I would not get over this And my sense, if I can make a leap, is that to be a part of a people calls for the same thing So that we as a nation are not supposed to get over the genocide of Native peoples We are not supposed to get over the institution of slavery We're not supposed to get over Vietnam and so on We're not supposed to And then people will respond by saying, "Well, I'll feel bad, you just want me to feel bad about that" And I think, but why not? And what I come back to Mark a lot of times as I think about these things we're talking about Is that how do we live loss? And I think about, I've used this example a lot now in interviews, I think "Well, what if I had an accident and I lost my sight permanently?" And at that time I would have a choice to make about how is I going to live the remainder of my life And I could be angry and it's not fair why me, all of that Or I could also say, "Well, I guess this is the way it is now" That this huge loss is now a part of who I am and it's a part of my life So that I imagine every morning waking up and knowing that when I open my eyes I'm not going to see anything And how hard, how horrible that would be How grievous that would be, I will never ever see anything again And at the same time that that's true, I'm also alive and I have a life to live So it seems to me that the challenge is how do I carry both of those things? How do I carry the reality of the loss and the reality that I still am alive? And I'm accountable to that life, to the soul that animates my life I'm accountable to that too But now I have to incorporate into that this terrible loss that's permanent And I think that the challenge for us as a nation is how to incorporate those two truths into our experience of ourselves as Americans That to be an American is as much about the horror as it is about the things that make us feel good It's both the loss of my sight and the rest of my life And that we have to find a way to carry both And I think that what I encountered out there in many ways Mark was having both of those things held out to me The sadness of the fact that my longing was never going to be satisfied But also the fact that here I am and after this I go home and I continue And that I have to take both of those realities with me You know, there's so much that you've given us to chew on both in the book, not from here But all these other publications that you've had I do want to encourage people to go to your website Alan The website is a.g.johnson.us And there's a link on nordancebitradio.org You can check out links to his book's privilege, power and difference There's the gender not There's novels that he's written like nothing left to lose or the first thing and the last thing There's also essays, one of them that I glanced at that was interested in It's different from men That's one that grabbed my interest because I'm part of a men's group now for 24 years There's also answers to questions under the title, you know, I'm glad you asked Are you just into white guilt or is affirmative action racist? And he poses a question at one point, I'm going to post, should men open doors for women? There's so much of valuable chewable material there Alan And I really hope people do go to your site and check it out As well as reading not from here your recent memoir Alan, again, I feel vastly nourished by traveling with you Across the Midwest in your memoir The ideas you shared here today and the richness of your spiritual path Thank you so much for joining me today for spirit in action Thank you Mark, it was a real pleasure to be with you The theme music for this program is turning of the world performed by Sarah Thompson This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern spirit radio You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website northernspiritradio.org Thank you for listening, I am your host Mark Helpsmeet And I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light This is spirit in action With every voice, with every song We will move this world along With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing You