Claiming the Colonizer
Forgiveness is the weaponry of peacemaking.
Because both these words have stinking reputations and the word ‘colon’ embedded in them (and because I am far less intelligent than I pretend to be), I decided I should ask Google what the difference between ‘colonialism’ and ‘colonization’ actually is. It’s answer:
Colonialism is the practice of a foreign group exploiting a people and their resources, while colonization is the act of a group settling in a new area and establishing control over the Indigenous people.
Upon more probing, it continued:
Colonialism is the practice of a foreign power dominating another group of people politically, socially, economically, and culturally over a long period of time. Colonization has multiple definitions, including the act of taking control of a foreign area or people, and the spread of an organism in a new environment.
So, colonization is where you take over a group of people and what is theirs without consent, while colonialism is a disposition of domination that would support someone, or a group of individuals, in believing that colonization is totally cool.
I see it everywhere, don’t you?
Here’s my cheeky little definition of the two:
Colonization: the dangerously-hot hot potato that no one wants to hold or claim (though it inevitably always ends up burning the hands of the people that weren’t too interested in participating in the first place).
Colonialism: the impulse to play stupid, losing (albeit curiously enduring) games where many people lose in order to create a singular ‘winner’.
I watch what plays out on the world stage and mostly think we haven’t graduated beyond our most childish impulses and their alluring games. Some may look out and see a battle between Good and Evil, while others may see chaos expanding into more creative and confusing options. Many delusionally just see the good, while others delusionally just see the evil (and apparently nihilists just see shapes?). What I see, though, is something like the testing score of Consciousness posted on the bulletin board of our shared reality.
The results?
Not too bad for an exceptionally spirited and easily distractable five-year-old, though exemplifies behavioral issues that may suggest some underlying trauma. Is there trouble at home?
Tell me, is there trouble here at home?
There is an illusion of power in this game of domination that I think has more to do with luck than skill (perhaps an immature wit or merely self-importance, but certainly no real skill). This makes war not too different from a game of hot potato or musical chairs (minus, of course, the irreversibly damaging and incredibly corrupt repercussions of adults playing these games with deadly weapons. Just bear with me…)
War, beyond the definition made most popular by the interests of governments and the interventions of organized militia, does not require skill. Peace, however, requires a lot of skill. It may also require us to first aim to agree upon our role as participants in the implementation of justice. Personally, I think it may help to stop scheming on tactics for a moment to examine luck, as we are all recipients and victims of its erratic movement. Luck has no morality and, therefore, no preference for goodness, yet its interference with justice cannot be ignored.
The demoralizing matter-of-fact thing about luck is that it’s truly nothing to even boast about. Anyone that pays attention to the pattern of luck understands that one day you’re lucky, then the next day you may not be. You can self-affirm all you want, pray all you want, plan all you want, work all you want, yet there is always an element of luck that is never actually manuevered by your doing. This may burst the bubble of those still high off of a more recent manifestation culture, and honestly, I hope it does.
Do not let the other laws of nature fool you — there is a higher ruling law above them all, which if I wasn’t spiritual enough to lazily call it ‘God’, I’d definitely call it ‘Luck’ (and if I was perhaps more overtly Christian, I might call it ‘Divine Law’). Luck certainly seems to trump cause and effect, making our role as effective activists incredibly challenging when the main tool we grab for is our beloved causes. Luck cannot be stolen, owned or mastered, much like spirit. More simply put, we can own our causes but we cannot own their outcomes. You plan the leap, luck manifests the landing. Success is a target held by elusive hands, yet still we must be relentless in pursuing a world that is increasingly more aligned with the needs of all of life.
It’s not life that’s the bitch, it’s luck. You see, one moment you’ve won the Powerball, the next moment you’ve lost the winning ticket to the wind. One day you’ve married your heart’s match on your favorite turquoise-watered beach, the next day you’re in a coma from falling down a flight of stairs. One life you’re a white boy born to a supremely wealthy family in Maine, the next life you’re a brown boy born in Gaza beneath the rubble of those family members that were too young to become your ancestors.
We are all lucky and unlucky — perhaps not all at once, but eventually — because a flipped coin never only lands on ’heads’. Every moment of aliveness is a lucky or unlucky toss, despite our free will and its emergent choices. While it may seem frivolous or even dangerous to think of colonization as a game of lucky and unlucky players, I can assure you that if you let yourself look at the world from this distant and morally neutral view for a mere moment, you will see it. And yet, this doesn’t make colonization innocent, karmically balanced or even natural. Luck just becomes an aspect of the landscape we must get to know intimately — and with heaps of humility — while diligently planting and watering those necessary seeds of justice.
If you are not numb already by the injustices witnessed in our world, adopting this view for even a split second will certainly piss you off. I encourage you to get mad at luck (or God), perhaps more mad at it than you are at your fellow brothers and sisters. We are meant to wrestle with the mystery of life, and luck is certainly one hell of a mystery. Work yourself in relationship to this force and all its absurdity and moral indifference until you are exhausted and emptied, at which point you will inevitably get renewed in some way (luckily). Let the fight stoke your fire, draw your blood and encourage you to cultivate an endurance worthy of myth-making. When you are low on purpose, when you have forgotten the humanity of your enemy, do not hesitate to look into the eyes of this dragon. While you may not be able to steal good fortune, you can always cultivate more life force. We will need all that you can gather.
Can we be willing to accept that most of us probably have both the Indigenous and the conqueror swimming in our blood, creating mixed features on our faces? I know I, certainly, am far from ‘pure-bred’…
Down my ancestral line, a Seminole woman fell in love with a conquistador and had his child. When her lover and baby were sent to Spain without her, she killed herself in despair.
In the other direction, down my paternal line, we can visit Moorish Spain and find a time when a Muslim and a Christian endured interfaith challenges on behalf of an unlikely love, eventually giving birth to my distinguished and squishy Middle Eastern nose among predominantly Spanish features.
I think peace has already been made at the cellular level — love has been blurring the lines of friend and foe forever, making humans as products of peace treaties. But who here is willing to claim the colonizer?
I will, not because colonization is my complete story, but because it is a crucial part of it. You will not find me disowning any aspect of my bloodline, even when their hands (and my own, as an American in this era) are covered in the blood of the innocent. While I’m quite certain none of us have yet to know world peace, I do know that I have earned enough wisdom from their mistakes and my own dance with luck to comprehend that peace does not emerge until all parts of a system are brought into loving wholeness. Forgiveness is the weaponry of peacemaking. I will pick up what is mine to forgive, even when the weight of the burden is unbearably heavy.
Please know that I am so, so sorry.
I do not know how to disown
How to say “You are not my mother”
To the flesh that enfleshed me
Nor could I ever say “You are not my sister”
To the head of stubbornness
Whose wiry chocolate curls
Keep appearing inside my silk robe
Like a never-ending magic trick.
Is it really a true disappearing act
To tell the broken they no longer belong
Or is it just a ticking time bomb
For pain to reimagine itself
Into newer tendrils of purple rage?
Is it regal to recoil so far back
In the presence of inner infliction
That we trim the family tree back
Until all that’s left are buried roots?
I do not disown the damage
Or the damager
Or the damsel
Or the distress
Or the distance between love and hate —
I will never disown you.