My sister Lauren graciously gave Tara and I tickets to William Fitzsimmons last night for Christmas and we discovered the wonderful, moving protest songs of Laura Burnhenn. She played Buffalo Flower for us last night and I don’t think any song in my life — any hymn, any protest song, anything I’ve written only for myself — has made me cry as much as this song when she first said the word “king.”

In her words:

We’re in Manhattan tonight, which was called Manna-hatta by the Lenape people – the Native Americans who lived here before the Dutch stole it from them, killed them off, and the Europeans that followed exiled them to small reservations all across the midwest. The same thing happened to the Lakota people in Dakota who are protesting against an oil company to save what was their G** d*** land in the first place.

Then she played this song:

Buffalo Flower Laura Burnhenn

In solidarity, and in proximity to the misnomered “Thanksgiving,” it seems perfectly appropriate to quote Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions:

It was as though the country were saying to its citizens, “In nonsense is strength.”

A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness… but some of the nonsense was evil. For example, teachers of children in The United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again and asked children to memorize it with pride and joy:

1492

The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, human beings had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.