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SPEAKER: I would like to start out moving from some of my impressions of living in the Indian community and accepting a great many things in the Indian community as a given and develop some of the experiences I had in moving out to a larger society and beginning to critically examine the value systems structure of knowledge and the ways that people do things.

And I think my experience is not untypical of other Indian people, that growing up in reservation communities, you're very much aware of the traditions, your tribes, but you're also very aware of that outside world that keeps you impinging on you. I think if only Indians audience look back, that our early childhood years are simply to accept whatever comes up. So it's entirely consistent to follow tribal beliefs but still think that Santa Claus is coming and all of the other great religious symbols of Western civilization.

And I knew growing up on Pine Ridge, we just kind of took it for granted that if information came in from the outside, there was probably something to it. It wasn't a real big deal. But there are really no inconsistencies. Whatever came in, whatever people seemed to be able to live with seem to be what made up the reality of the world.

Leaving that reservation situation and then coming into educational institutions in the other world was really the first experience I had in understanding that people of Western European background had all kinds of funny ideas about who Indians were. I'm not talking simply about the Bering Straits theory, but the tendency of non-Indians to look at Indian societies in a cultural, evolutionary sense and to say that with the proper amount of education that Indians could move into a much higher civilized social state.

In my first few years off the reservation dealing with non-Indian educational institutions, this seemed to be a rational thing to me because, after all, the White men had the technology. They were, at the time, had won World War 2 and were fighting other wars. All these things seemed to be part of reality. Until I began to very critically examine some of the things I was being taught in school.

I think the field of geology was the first area where I really began to criticize and look critically at the White man's tradition. Studying historical geology and having them tell all manner of tales about how the world came to be, in particularly explaining what fossils were, that the little animals would go across the Muddy Creek.

And after millions of years, the continent would subside, clay would come fill in these little footprints. Millions of years later, the continent would come back up again. Brush away the clay, and there would be preserved footprints of the little animals and the scientists would get down on their hands and knees and say, this is what the life was like.

Now, those of you who grew up in reservation settings went rabbit hunting know that tracks don't wait for continents to subside, that within two or three weeks, sometimes within two or three hours, those tracks are gone. And if you want to discover what the wildlife is on the reservation, you've got to be a pretty keen observer all the time. That was the first indication to me that the White man's scientific structure wasn't quite up to date.

That, I suppose, was counteracted by the fact that the train tracks always did stay there, so that was kind of a point on the White man's side. Other than that, though, I began to really get suspicious. And over the years, I think one of the saving graces of my life is I've always believed in things and then a voice in trying to find out if they're really real. I've always had to dig down to find out what's at the basis of them.

For example, I voted against Richard Nixon in 1960 because I believed him. I thought he really was that kind of person, and I didn't like that kind of person. Then I found out that he was a crook. I was pretty happy because that meant he was in the great tradition of American presidents and I thought I could live with that.

So in being naive, I've had to exercise a particularly critical view toward the world. In doing this, I see two distinct traditions, and I'd like to outline them as best I can with the hopes that you'll see the Indian tradition that a great many people in this audience come from.

And that is that as I see Indian people in their tradition on this continent, we're not talking about people that is particularly desirous of gaining control over the natural world, that we're talking about communities who live a long time in different places and become so in tune with those places that a special type of knowledge begins to accrue to them.

And as different types of very meaningful experiences occur, those experiences are passed down generation after generation. So that when we talk of the oral tradition, we're talking about the cumulative experiences of different communities at particular places. And the idea of chronological time is not particularly important.

And what's important is that people can look back on their history and give you an accurate recounting of those events that were qualitatively different that impressed themselves upon those communities that were so important for those communities that generation after generation remembered them.

That type of history and tradition then I think has a cumulative effect of telling you who you are in relation to a particular place. And as the centuries pass, the knowledge of the various events knits people together. And so you have then a common heritage and outlook on the world.

I mentioned that at the start because I think the Western European tradition is pretty much the opposite of that, that from a series of experiences and incidents, Western Europeans seem to want to pull some additional abstract principle out of their experiences and use it to explain the world.

And number of people in modern thought: Alfred North Whitehead, Philip Slater, and Carl Jung, a substantial number of people have commented that this twists those experiences very distinctly. It produces a type of abstract knowledge and produces a set of concepts in which you can deal with the world.

But I think in presenting that abstract knowledge, it lifts you away from the context in which you live. And while we have the most sophisticated and technological society that this planet has apparently ever seen, we look at it in social and human terms and we find that slants is the thing that drives us forward and makes a substantial number of us extremely unhappy with ourselves and continuing to probe into who we are, into the meaning of life, and lead us in many instances to further questions of meaninglessness instead of to some type of synthesis.

Now, when the two traditions collide, as they have in American history, I think it's very important for the majority to understand what it is that the minority sees and what it is that their philosophy consists of. Let me give you a specific example.

At the present time, one of the major concerns that we have deals with the proper use of land and resources. This is a national problem. All groups are affected by it. If you stand within the Native American natural philosophical tradition, you're talking about the experiences of your community in a particular place over a long period of time, and you're talking about your concern for a particular river, a particular meadow, a particular grove of trees, a particular mountain. It's very difficult for you to abstract beyond that immediate environment that you're aware of.

The non-Indian world comes in and attempts to talk to you about your concern for things, and they use such phrases as Indians love nature. Most Indians look at them and they don't understand what that means. They're supposed to pet a chipmunk or embrace a tree, or what? What's nature?

Nature is a word that the non-Indian world uses to describe something out there, but they're never describing specific particular things out there. They're describing some type of materialistic existence. And Indians, in attempting to respond to this nature thing, I think we've been all confused. And how do you communicate to people that we don't lose trees? We love our trees, the ones that are right here. And we don't love animals, but we do love the wolf and the bear and the other animals that have a relationship with us.

And the problem of getting the communication of what we really mean over to the non-Indian world is an immense barrier. For a long time, I think we blamed ourselves at being inarticulate, that somehow we just can't express it. I think if we look at our own tradition and recognize that as a valid philosophical tradition, then that enables us to look into the other person's tradition and ask why those people look at the world in the manner that they do.

And we have to look not at our own history, but back at the non-Indian history and see what those people are talking about, where they came from, and how they got the strange ideas that they got. Robert Bellah and a number of other religious thinkers have started to identify the first 1,000 years, BC as a particularly critical time in the development of the non-Indian mind. Let me read a quote from his essay on religious evolution.

He says, "A very massive fact of human religious history is the emergence in the first Millennium BC all across the new world, the old world, at least in centers of high culture, of the phenomenon of religious rejection of the world characterized by an extremely negative valuation of man and society and the exaltation of another realm as alone, true, and infinitely valuable."

A number of other writers have remarked that what seems to occur early in prehistory is that the major urban centers begin to look beyond their immediate environment, and they all of a sudden saying reality is something up here, and the sensory world, the everyday world we have to deal with is unreliable, ephemeral, has no value, something to be distrusted and we must focus our attention to this other realm.

And that attitude then produces a degradation of nature, an elevation of patriarchal forms and degradation of women, the introduction of human slavery, the motivation for the large urban civilizations to go out on imperialistic militaristic ventures so that you have a series of imperialistic wars emerging out of the urban centers with the intent, as some of you might have seen, the rerun of Alexander the Great with Richard Burton on national television a few nights ago, that the political leadership begins to think one person should and could dominate the known world.

Now, Paul Radin in looking at what they call primitive people, and I would prefer to say Aboriginal people rather than primitive, looks at the major civilizations and makes basically the same analysis as Robert Bellah, but I think a much better one. And let me give you his analysis.

He says, "One of the fundamental traits of the major civilizations was their essential instability, the frequent socioeconomic crises through which they passed, and the amazing vitality of two somewhat contradictory fictions. The first was to the effect that there had never been any instability or change. The second that stability existed eternally. But in the afterworld, not in this.

As a corollary to the above, sometimes expressed clearly, at other times only implied there existed a third fiction to the effect that life on Earth was insignificant incident, replete with pain and suffering, something to be hurried through." In articulating that-- in articulating that analysis of the early urban societies, Radin then draws a parallel with what he calls primitive societies, what I would call the natural philosophical tradition.

He says those societies did not undergo socioeconomic crises. They did not undergo constant political upheavals. They were able to deal quite effectively with the world around them and guarantee an amazing amount of integration in their societies.

In his preface in asking himself a hypothetical question, what would he say are the three major characteristics of those primitive or Aboriginal societies, Radin says, "If one were asked to state briefly and succinctly, what are the outstanding positive features of Aboriginal civilizations? I, for one, would have no hesitation in answering that there are three: the respect for the individual irrespective of age or sex, the amazing degree of social and political integration achieved by them, and the existence there of a concept of personal security which transcends all governmental forms and all tribal group interests and conflicts."

So if we take our minds back to the first Millennium, I think there the seeds are sown for the division of human beings into basically two camps, a natural philosophical camp that looks at life experiences around it and simply develops a cumulative knowledge about the world.

The other tradition, then being an urban, more sophisticated tradition, which goes through frequent socioeconomic crises, which has political upheaval as distinct characteristics of its history and which integrates its society in patriarchal or masculine hierarchies and then adopts a very aggressive and militaristic view of the world.

If you look at the crises that currently face our society, you find that the goals that we're shooting for are the major characteristics of the Aboriginal peoples. The problems that we're suffering are the major phenomenon of those urban civilizations. What is it that distinguishes those two from 1,000 BC on? And how can we begin to heal that breach and at least give the natural philosophical tradition sufficient intellectual respect so that it can be useful to us?

And of the many roots in Western civilization that we can trace, I would like to trace just one because this lecture being on social ethics, I think we can move into that area. And that is, I think, in the religious tradition of the Hebrew and the philosophical tradition of the Greek, to begin to concentrate attention on the individual.

In the history of philosophy, many of you are aware that this comes down to the Occam's razor principle. You have to keep reducing till you get the simplest element. At some point in 1,000 BC and following, the Western people were convinced that the way to have knowledge about the world was to keep reducing all the information you got from it till you found that single thing which would tell you whatever it was.

Those of you acquainted with the history of Western philosophy know that it fluctuates back and forth between definitions of the world as ultimately mind, definitions of the world as ultimately matter. I think the problem lies in the belief that the human mind can reduce experiences to the point where you find that one single principle and then you turn around with that principle and you can explain all else.

If you look at the natural philosophical tradition, there is never any indication that you can do that. The demand to analyze your experiences is very rapidly truncated in those communities in favor of simply a retelling of the story, a teaching emphasis that this has been a very important thing in our lives. This is why we do certain things and this is why we commemorate certain things, or this is how we do things. But a determination within that tradition not to use the experiences to form some knowledge where we can gain control of the world.

As we come to American history, most of you, I think, are aware in the constitutional documents this great concern to establish a social contract in which all individuals are equal. If you look at the history of constitutional law, you find that white Anglo-Saxon males seem to always be a little more equal than any other group that we're talking about.

So there is always an unarticulated assumption within the American social contract that what we're talking about when we talk about the individual is really the well-educated, affluent, Anglo-Saxon male. That's the model for forming the social contract.

In almost every aspect of modern American intellectual life, I think that particular model has been recapitulated over and over again. Those of you who are lawyers here knows that when we approach tort law, we're not really talking about what one individual did to another, but we're balancing the activities of one individual against this abstraction called the reasonably prudent man who exists only in our minds.

And we judge people, not in their human capacity, but whether they were sufficiently prudent in approaching crossroads to know that seven or eight different cars are going to come through there presenting a legal problem in each car, and the reasonably prudent man is not going to get in the middle of it.

Our economists deal with an abstraction economic man, which briefly says that each one of us unleashed with the only motivation of pure individual greed. The conglomerate is going to work together for the betterment of all of us. Early economists assure us that we have no problem and we should not fear corporations because no person will ever work hard for a corporation-- any harder for corporation than he would for himself, forgetting, of course, that this is a nation of sheep and the easiest thing for a nation of sheep to do is quickly find a boss and work harder for that boss than they ever would for themselves.

In religion, we, I think, also posit an abstract person. In Protestant religion, this is often the person of Jesus who is attributed all of the good human characteristics and the bad human characteristics are shunted aside. We're called to live exemplary, ethical, and moral lives in the vacuum of living up to the imitation of Christ. All of these things, I think, stem back to that initial attitude that the world can be analyzed and understood if you concentrate solely on the individual person.

With the natural philosophical tradition, you cannot form general rules for dealing with the world because you're always dealing with specific entities. There may be guidelines. You understand what one species relationship may be to another, but it's not a knowledge that you can use to go out and manipulate the world. You must be constantly on guard to see that you are not violating, as the young people say today, the space or psychic energy of another species.

But you go through the world with the awareness that certain types of relationships may be available to you. Once you enter into those relationships, you have duties and responsibilities. And the old thing that the anthropologists used to call taboo and pretend the Indians were unusually superstitious and had to finish certain activities or a taboo would fall on them, those things, I think, in Indian context, are simply the requirement in a very mature understanding of Indian people.

And once having started a relationship with a species or people other than our own, then for the good of both species, we must continue that relationship until it is complete, that we injure the other life form if we truncate that relationship halfway through. So there's no possibility then of using other life forms in an objective sense.

And I think this is a very good insight on the relationship of our species to other species. A great many studies have shown that animals, like human beings, get stupider the more domesticated they are. And you don't need scientific studies for that. Look at Congress.

But that tradition then, I think you recognize that you are among the two-legged and you have relationships with these other species. So your concern is never to analyze the world in terms of individual or single answer solutions. But your responsibility then is to recognize you as a member of a tribe, a band, or a family, and all of you are responsible for the relationship of that group to all other groups.

If we transpose those worldviews then into social ethics, which are part of this lecture series, I think we can illustrate the impact of each approach. In the Western tradition, we begin to say we should love our neighbor as ourselves. You analyze that statement. What is the criteria for attributing worth to your neighbor? It's your own value system.

I love my neighbor like myself because in some senses he is like me. In no sense is he isn't like me, maybe I better educate him, beat it out of him, or get rid of him. I think that has been the approach of the Western mindset to people they don't understand. That is why the major inroads always in the Indian communities have been religion and education. Somehow we can make Indians worthy if we change them to be almost exactly as we are ourselves.

I think that ethic in the long run is extremely destructive. It infests all of our relationships in the United States today. It's particularly dangerous in the field of foreign policy where we keep insisting on interpreting events in Asia, in the Middle East, as if they were prototypes of Patrick Henry, John Adams, and some of the heroes of our own past.

In the Indian natural philosophical tradition, having established a sense of kinship with the person, then you seem to include them in your group and you accept them in a certain sense as part of your group. Numerous non-Indians over the years have moved into Indian communities and been accepted.

Indians have been cheated, defrauded, fooled, swindled, anything you can imagine by non-Indians that they took into their group because the Indian ethic of accepting people in was so uncritical that they would look at people who the average non-Indian would say, hey, stay away from those people. The Indian in their tribal hospitality, no, come on in. They haven't done anything wrong to us yet. And so let's bring them in. A great deal of what's happened to us, I submit, is our own fault for being so hospitable.

But how do you deal with the ethics once you're inside the group? And it seems to me, most Indian traditions, in failing to or refusing to adopt those generalized standards that Western civilization has would look at, and do look at, that ethic of loving someone as you would love yourself as the greatest of insanity.

They would look at individual people and they say, well, this is an older man, older than myself. So he occupies the role of either father or grandfather to me, so there's a specific relationship I have with him. I have certain responsibilities. He has certain responsibilities. I have certain duties, and he has certain duties.

They look at a woman of a particular age and say, she is in the approximate relationship of an aunt to me, so I have these responsibilities and she has other responsibilities, and I think Indians structure, all of the personal relationships, by recognizing the characteristics of age, sex, and approximate relationship that people have to each other, this, in many instances, has been looked at by social science as a primitive inability to deal with human relations.

I would submit it is the most sophisticated way to deal with human relations. The very difficult thing that we have to deal with when we begin to articulate this view is that the non-Indian world, in dealing with only the category age and sex, turns around and says, we should have all different kinds of liberation movements within our own community, which, in some instances, are going to level an already sophisticated social situation.

If you look at the Indian system in its totality, there is no chance for any outside two-legged being to move into that network and not know immediately who he or she is and what responsibilities they have towards society. If you move from the Indian context into the non-Indian context and begin to judge your neighbor according to your own values, then it seems to me you end up with, one, an identity crisis, two, with the psychic necessity to chase every fad that comes along because this might be the thing that finally gives you some stability.

So I think the ultimate manifestation of the two viewpoints is in the field of social ethics and is in the field of interpersonal relationships. And why can't we communicate the types of things we see and experience in the Indian community to the non-Indian majority and begin to get them to see things?

And I would submit to you, the difficulty is that the non-Indian community has become so fascinated with the fact that there are scientists, so fascinated with the fact that they are able to harness energies of nature and have, quote, "power." So fascinated with the identity quest that they're always on, that they begin to look at phenomenon through their mind only and they don't incorporate either the elements of their hearts and emotions, they don't begin to incorporate a realistic knowledge of what they see when they look at the world.

So ultimately, when we deal with a non-Indian majority, many times we're dealing with people who look right at situations and see something that no one else sees. I first made this accusation with respect to anthropologists, but I'm willing at this point to extend it to a great many other professions.

Well, let me give you two instances, both of them taken out of Indian political history, where a non-Indian comes, looks at an Indian community, gets to know the people, and then makes a statement that is wholly unrealistic with respect to Indians and testifies only to the fact that he has been so well-trained in his own culture that he's now unable to look at the world in any sense and make any respect.

And the person I like to quote is Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, who introduced the Dawes Allotment Act 1887. Senator Dawes, in 1885 went down to visit the Five Civilized tribes of Oklahoma. He wanted to check the Indian economic, social, and political conditions to see if the Indians of the Five Civilized tribes should be allotted in their lands. So those lands left over after allotment should then be sold to white settlers.

After visiting the Creeks, he came back and told the Lake Mohonk Conference this. He says, "The head chief told us there was not a family in that whole nation that had not a home of its own. There was not a pauper in that nation and the nation did not owe a dollar. It built its own capital and it built its own schools and its hospitals. Yet the defect of the system was apparent.

They have got as far as they can go because they own their land in common. It is Henry George's system. And under that, there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors. There is no selfishness which is at the bottom of civilization. Till this people will consent to give up their lands and divide them among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much more progress."

Now, what does Henry Dawes do? He goes down and sees a society able to manage its people and resources so that it has no social problems and no economic problems, which, according to any political theory, is the result you expect to produce after many millennia of following the sophistications of your own mind. And he says, obviously these people have simply reached the bottom, that they can't go any further because they have not divided their lands up and they do not have selfishness.

I did not know until I ran across that quote that a balanced budget was a sign of a primitive society. You might point that out to Ronald Reagan when he comes by to campaign next year.

The other citation that I would like to quote comes out of the lone wolf versus or ex parte Crow Dog case. Some of you may know the facts of the case, but I will go through them briefly. The Sioux signed a treaty in 1868, which guarantees that civil and criminal jurisdiction over crimes committed between Sioux Indians will remain the province of the Sioux Nation.

In 1882, Crow Dog, a medicine man at Rosebud, kills Spotted Tail, a chief who has been very favorably inclined toward the United States since the early 1860s. Crow Dog's relatives go to Spotted Tail's relatives and they make compensation in the form of presents, horses, and a feed. And the feud is put to rest between the two families.

Since Spotted Tail is a very prominent Indian chief, the newspapers learn that he's been killed by another Sioux and the other Sioux was not punished. A big outcry arises and Crow dog is indicted, taken to Deadwood, South Dakota, held in jail, and a federal jury convicts him of the murder of Spotted Tail. The case is appealed on the basis that the federal court does not have jurisdiction over Crow Dog and he is released from jail to go home to make his apologies to his relatives.

His execution date is set. And it's a race between whether the Supreme Court will hold the case or whether Spotted Tail will return, submit himself to the federal court and be executed. Spotted Tail show-- or Crow Dog shows up the day he said he would return to Deadwood and places himself under arrest again with the federal Marshal.

This act, then being reported by the newspapers, is such a spectacular demonstration of integrity that public sympathy begins to switch. The case goes to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court rules that the federal district court has no jurisdiction over Crow Dog, and he then is released to the Rosebud Reservation.

In the Supreme Court decision, the judges knowing this set of facts, then try and describe why the Sioux Indians should not be under the federal court system. It says the federal court system tries them not by their peers, nor by the customs of their people, nor by the law of their land, but by superiors of a different race, according to the law of a social state, of which they have an imperfect conception, which is opposed to the tradition of their history, to the habits of their lives, and to the strongest prejudices of their savage nature.

Need I point out to you that the Indian punishment for this murder is compensation. The White punishment is to hang him. You describe the Indian compensation as an appeal to the prejudice of a savage nature. You describe capital punishment because it is the White man's way as a demonstration of sophisticated and enlightened civilization.

And the Supreme Court never seems to recognize what they're saying in those words in characterizing the more lofty and humane conclusion as being savage and primitive, describing the barbarity of capital punishment as the enlightened state to which all people must move.

I think that this particular theme, moving back and forth between the natural philosophical tradition and the tradition of Western European peoples, is one that we can demonstrate in a number of areas. But I hope tonight I've given you sufficient. Illustrations to begin to at least raise the question, what are we talking about when we talk about different philosophical traditions?

And I think the thing that inhibits us at the present time from making real communication possible is that the present generation of non-Indians is really standing in the position of Senator Henry Dawes in the Supreme Court. They're looking at phenomenon in their own lives and in the lives of minorities in this country through a particular type of eyeglasses, which then tells them the conclusion of what they're going to see before they even look at the problem.

And so the majority looks out and they look only to verify the fact there's a world out there, but I think the decision is already made of what the answer is. I have observed that in almost every profession that I've dealt with, that, like Henry Dawes, many people can look at a perfectly functioning system and say, hey, there's all kinds of problems here, because they were not expecting to see problems and they're going to keep looking until they find problems.

And any behavior deviating from that norm of I must love my neighbor as myself and my neighbor had better look something like me and act something like me, any deviation from that, then I think becomes extremely suspect. I know there are great many of you in the audience tonight are active in civil liberties functions in Minnesota, which has a great tradition in civil liberties areas.

You can see this in the cases that are first introducer mentioned. The people establishing this lecture fighting for political rights of dissident peoples in the state of Minnesota. You can look in the '50s and almost all those cases dealing with symbolic protest, the Communist cases, the Japanese internment cases and others, all revolve about that principle.

The question then is, at what point are we able to reach a sufficient number of people in the non-Indian community, reach them in such a way that they begin to analyze that propensity of their own culture, to reduce everything insofar as possible to one single proposition, then to take that proposition and turn around and look at the world and set up some type of structure to operate the world?

If there's some way that we can move them away from the belief that reality is up there in what goes on down here doesn't count, move them on over into our tradition. If you look at the people sitting next to you and you look at them in the manner that you have always looked at them as a more or less faceless individual with an identical equal rights to yourself, maybe of a different political persuasion, but sufficiently like yourself so that at election time you can listen with pride to the slogan. It doesn't matter how you vote, just so you vote.

And if you look at them again and see, well, there is a difference. They are a different sex. They are a little older or a little younger. And I, as a person, have a particular relationship and responsibility to them. In one instance, I think we have very quickly pulled together a very good society. In the other instance, those people are always going to be at an arm's distance and only insofar as they closely resemble ourselves are we going to give them any respect or benefit.

We are, in a sense, producing our own emotional clones with the type of attitude that we have toward people. I think that it's time we moved a great many people in this society on over to that natural way of looking at things and recognize that we're all parts of a community, that we all have specific responsibilities toward each other, that the only thing we can hope to transmit from generation to generation are those very positive or very traumatic things that have shaped us and made us what we are.

I'd like to thank you people for coming in this terrible blizzard that it went down as low as 33 degrees in Tucson this year. So this is a blizzard to me outside. But the warmth of the reception, I deeply appreciate. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

I guess we're just a conference out there and they-- what, they found uranium out in the Black Hills? I don't know. I've been trying to figure out how I could get to South Dakota Statehood Act declared unconstitutional and get those guys back in territorial status so we could have martial law and some kind of law and order out there. So I am following that. I am following that situation.

It seems to me, in view of the events of the past week, that there's really difficulties with this whole situation. I don't know what to suggest. I'm glad it happened while a nuclear engineer was president so we could get it firsthand. But I lived in Denver for 14 years and then about two weeks ago discovered that it was the most radioactive place on the planet other than Bikini Atoll because it was a radium dump most of this century and they were breaking down that stuff.

I really don't know. Obviously, if we're not all scared to death about the radioactivity situation, it ain't going to be good for people in South Dakota or Minnesota once those winds start blowing. But I'm down there. Arizona that's you guys problem up here. You have a good Republican delegation now so you can handle that the American way.

Well, I hate to answer questions like that because when I'm realistic, then people say, oh my god, what a pessimistic view of things. I mean, let's look at who we are. We're Americans. And de Tocqueville years ago said, they're crazy, but he said it more politely. Well, we've known about all these problems that we're facing for 20 or 30 years and we don't have the collective will to do anything about them.

So obviously, we're going to destroy American society. There doesn't seem to be any question about that. If you really look into your own heart, are we going to stop consuming? No. Are we going to vote for intelligent leaders? No. We're so isolated at this point. It would take a major disaster, absolutely major, to shake any sense of reality into us. In that sense, of course, they're going to strip mine the West. They're going to do it. And most of us are going to acquiesce in the thing.

Maybe a few people outside the gates laid down in front of bulldozers, but hell, we lose that many in 4th of July weekend, the traffic accident. I mean, there's a two-fold ethic running amok in America. We cannot stop it or apparently don't have the common will to stop it. One is, if I don't do it, somebody else is going to. And don't bug me. I'm only doing my job. That's our attitude towards social problems, toward human beings, toward everything.

So they asked me, is strip mining uranium going to hurt? Sure. We're insane. We're going to kill ourselves. There's no question about it. And I think that's a realistic viewpoint. But every time I go to assemblies, people want me to say, no, no. There's some way out. Theoretically, there's some way out. Let's look around at us. We're Americans. There's no way out for us because of who we are, because we don't have the collective will. We don't have the guts to get up and make the changes.

We don't have the guts to say what kind of system is it when the corporations are making 26% profit when we're paying 13% interest on our homes and we all want to pretend. If we don't let the oil companies have the profits, they won't dig oil. What are the oil companies are going to do? They're going to make breakfast food or published books or what? They're going to make oil. We're all hiding today behind collective lies and we don't have the guts to get up and say it.

So that's a realistic analysis. We're doomed, unless we-- and not pessimistic at all. It's entirely predictable. I just wish they'd raise the speed limit to 80 and let us go out in a blaze of glory. Let's get it over faster so if there are any sane survivors of this mess, they can start automating, do better than we did.

But I'm not going to tell you any lies because you've been through it all your lives. You know what we are. You know who we are. Let's not kid ourselves. Now, the bad news. No, go ahead. Any other questions? No, I guess there are no more questions after that. OK. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]