We could almost see this thread as an example of this saying. It does not really matter whether this is attributed to an old Cherokee man, a Buddhist monk, or a uneducated chimpanzee using a computer for the first time. What matter, to my way on thinking anyway, is the content. It's that we do have a choice, and that perhaps, some choices are better than others. The saying doesn't tell us what our choice should be, it shows us the alternatives.
We all have a tendency to think that it's the "others" who are evil, when really we all have skeletons in our cupboard. Mind you, skeletons in some cupboards are either bigger or more numerous. Look at the nazi's cupboard.
The problems with history books, is that the victors write them. They only generally tell you what the victors want you to hear, that the skeletons in the vanquished cupboards were so big that the victors had no alternative but to wipe them out.
I have sympathy for native people, be they from America, Canada, the Kalahari desert, or the true Gypsy. They tend to get persecuted, because they are different from the"norm" accused of all sorts of things to justify their persecution. And their culture inevitably suffer, gets watered down, disappears. Then, later, the victors start to attribute the good bits to themselves!
Native American culture belong to the Native Americans. The Bushman's culture belongs to the Bushmen. Perhaps what we need to do, is to look at what our own cultures were before the greed of industrialization and the money men took over and revive that.
Oh, and forgot that bit: Humanity belongs to all of us, as a right, but also as a duty.
Ok.....ramble over.....
