A view of 9/11 from a rock in the Clark Fork River

Today I had breakfast in a small motel on the Flathead Indian Reservation, in or close to Ravalli MT. My blog has been full of contradictions I am painfully aware of, paradigms and stereotypes that have been confirmed or busted, and a shifting, more positive worldview.
I grew up in the Four-Corners in Colorado on a remote ranch to feral people. Around me were the reservations of the Dine', Jicarilla Apache, and Ute Mountain and Southern Ute Indian people. I learned Navajo before I learned English. My observations then and now are of the tremendous contradiction between the image of the earth-loving people of literature and common speak and the reality of the living conditions these people endure. My friend Cliff, a South African journalist, brother of my friend Peter who lives in SLC, told me that our reservations were not in the running for crime, squalor, poverty compared to the shanty-towns in South Africa. I agree.
Another friend of mine, the keeper of traditional/cultural ideas, values, knowledge for a Tribe in Utah told me (with a crooked smile)  when I asked him about the number of non-Indians wanting to be part of the Native American Church: "you people (whites) all want to be Indians but none of you want to live on a reservation to learn how!"  He went on: "the American government gave us blankets with smallpox to try to kill us. Got some of us, so they gave us whiskey and now drugs, and STDs. It's killing a few more. But the worst thing you gave us was Jesus Christ who invented the Native American Church, and the National Park Service who reinvented our histories and traditions. That has been deadly not so much in lives but to our spirit. We don't have the energy to fight off your (white people) crazy stuff and pick up trash!"
The Flathead Indian Reservation has probably transitioned through these feelings. There is still visible poverty, the impacts of drugs and alcohol, the visible contradictions between the traditional view of Indians by whites and the reality of being forced to live apart from mainstream America. But they have also do wonders with their farms and ranches. The Tribe has set aside the National Bison Reserve and seems to be interested in ecologic restoration. I will come back up here and spend time visiting with Tribal members.
Before I leave this area for Missoula I want to visit the St Ignatius church just north of here. I have no desire to worship, because I do not and have not since I was about eight or nine. I want to sit in the church and think.
My mother converted to a Pentecostal faith around the time my brother was born. She was a fragile woman who always seemed puzzled by the intricacies of personal relationships. Even though we lived in the country and she had just learned to drive, she drove my brother and me, each Sunday, to a Pentecostal church in Durango Colorado. Rain or shine, blizzards, herds of sheep, stray deer or elk in the road; we went to church each Sunday. My father stayed home, stuck in the quagmire of his bitter thinking.
The routine at my mother's church was predictable enough that without owning a watch one could tell what time it was. First, exactly at 930, the minister greeted the congregation and for four or five minutes he admonished his parishioners to get ready to relinquish any transgressions that they had incurred during the week or suffer the consequences. They sang a couple of hymns. My mother always sat close to the piano so she could watch it being played. It was one thing she really wanted to do; my mother would have given up anything to be able to play the piano.
After the children, including me, had been sent to another room to have a bible lesson, and within a few minutes of us leaving the minister would crank up the amps of guilt and threats of retribution. We could hear him in our study room. I could hear the congregation shouting hallelujahs, speaking in tongues, the thumps of some falling to the floor in the ecstasy of receiving the holy spirit.  I thought I could smell the scents wafting out of the gates of hell that had been opened to receive bad people. But for whatever reasons I could never hear the songs of angles waiting by the gates of heaven to greet good people. It always made our teacher nervous, so nervous that she didn't notice that I slipped out the back door about the time the shouting of hallelujahs from the main room shook the windows of the church. As an aside I put the puzzle back together several years later and determined that our teacher was with child and not married at the time.
I ran down the street to the Catholic Church getting there just in time to hear the priest chanting a mass in Latin. The church was dark lit by hundreds of candles around the walls. Pre-Vatican II Catholics were still wallowing in their own traditions. I loved hearing the clicking of rosary beads, the whispered prayers of old ladies wearing black mantillas. They rose and sat by rote seemingly not paying attention to the Latin chanting. They were in their own world, praying I assumed then, just in case they dropped dead during the service. I was in my world sitting in the back pew, thinking about my mothers god and how it seemed to be different from the Catholic god. But mostly I thought about Roberta, daughter of one of our farm neighbors, who had developed physically quite early. I sat in the back and lusted for her, daring the more forgiving Catholic god to zap me into a pile of cinders.
I want to go into the St Ignatius church, not to visit god, nor to lust after Roberta. I want to sit in a religious place and think about 9/11. Yesterday on my very long trip from Thompson Falls to Ravalli I stopped and sat on a huge rock at the edge of the Clark Fork river. While I watched an osprey fish I thought about 9/11.
When I go into the church on the reservation I want to compare feelings, to see if my thinking was different in a place I was more comfortable in yesterday to a place that represents the darkness of our world. (I don't suggest that Catholics have cornered the market on repression. I could have stopped in a mosque, a synagogue, a Pentecostal church and had the same feeling)
I have listened to a number of people on this trip. I have heard fear, uneasiness, racial tension, and some hope. Since 9/11 we seem to have become a more divided nation, a less tolerant nation, a nation where it is OK to practice overt "soft" racism, to practice religious intolerance. We have become a country of short-term memory. How many remember the balanced budget at the end of the last decade? (balanced does not mean we didn't owe money!) How many Americans, who believed the President when he said "If you're not with us you're against us," understand where those words have led us? Our own religious right is one hallelujah away from strapping dynamite to themselves. Would they seek out the "infidels" to kill? I doubt it. We would do as they (infidels) have done and seek to destroy those in our country who are different from us.
This blog entry has been depressing but I really do have hope. I think that the more rational people on both sides of the political fence will see that a coalition of rational thinking is needed to bring balance to a divided nation. It is these people in whom I think the hope for a brighter future lingers yet untapped. The tails of the curve of normal distribution (thanks to Fred for this metaphor) have been plundering hope and good will, tainting common sense with fear and innuendo, preying on our collective insecurities to spread rumor, hate and discontent. Are we satisfied to let them continue? I'm not. Think AJ think! How do we get the middle of the curve of normal distribution to take back their brains, form their own thoughts, rationally sit down and negotiate a new mainstream world? I know it's there. I just need to sit on a rock by a river and contemplate. I need to listen to more people. I need to smile a bit more.