Tibetans And The Coharies

I've been watching a lot of videos the last couple of days. After I posted yesterday's blog entry I finished watching all 14 of 14 videos connected with the link I posted. When I finished those videos I watched five more by the same dude, but they were about how Tibet went down the drain and the Dalai Lama was forced into exile.

Sometime I'm ashamed of how I really feel about situations like Tibet and the Dalai Lama. If he possessed the spiritual power that's claimed for him, how could the Chinese gotten past his mojo? I sort of feel the same way about all the aboriginal tribal states that can't hang with how the world is now. They have to change their ways or accept what got their ancestors in trouble.

Working the construction trades taught me a lot about the local Indians. I didn't know there were so many of them that live right in the neighborhood here where my house is. They used to own the land my siblings and I own now, and more by an order of magnitude.

The trick to understanding how the Indians mind-set has to change and adapt is that before the Europeans immigrated here, the concept of private property didn't exist, But, after they got here and claimed the land as their own or had it given to them by grant of a foreign king, the local Indians were still able to acquire their own land by deed. The story of how that happened was news to me.

By hook or by crook I became friends with a local Indian man. The friendship took some time to develop, and I don't think it was intentional one way or the other. I liked him alright, but he was a drunk who I seemed forced to tell that he shouldn't come over to visit if he was drunk. I didn't see him for a while.

The next time I saw him he told me he had stopped drinking, and he wanted to know if it was alright if he came back to visit occasionally, and I agreed that as long as he wasn't drunk he was welcome. That must have been at least ten years ago and he's still sober, and much wealthier for it.

This guy's father committed suicide when he was fifteen years old. He tells me that I'm the only person he has ever talked to about how that made him feel. I think that may be true, at least with the proviso that I'm the only one he's ever talked to about it sober. Now, he's talked about it sober a lot. All I can do is listen. I don't actually understand how he feels. My father lived to be 88 years old. We both understand somehow that he has to say it out loud to let it take it's place in history.

There are a lotta ways I didn't become this man's confidant because I'm such a wonderful friend. I wanted to pick his brain about his culture. It was all around me as a boy, but hidden in ways I was taught to believe was the way it was supposed to be. I thought if I could understand what it meant to my friend for his father to have killed himself I might understand something insightful about the Indians I worked with everyday in the construction industry.

The industrial construction industry is composed of these huge construction companies like the well-known Haliburton and Brown & Root home-based in Texas that works the petroleum industry. Other companies build refineries and chemical plants and nuclear power plants. They're all sluts and road whores.

All these huge companies have separate divisions for union and non-union jobs. After I left the shipyard in Mississippi where I learned to weld pipe, I never belonged to a union again. I was fairly smug about it. I had the confidence that came from knowing the only thing my job hinged on was my skills, and my wit and grit for avoiding politics on the jobsite.

This non-union environment attracts a lot of Native Americans along with a lot of other types of people who enjoyed living a nomadic lifestyle. A lotta ex-cons. After a few years of being friends again with my local Indian friend and hearing his stories I became more and more conscious that many of the people I worked with were Indians, but from all over the country.

Indians are famous for doing iron work. They're the guys who put up the original red-iron steel that's used as the basic framework of most buildings and industrial sites. It's really dangerous work, and it's done by a bunch of individuals that know themselves really well in ways I didn't expect. The rewards and perils of living an adventurous lifestyle has been described for millennia, and although the technology has improved it still calls the same sorts of people, and most of them use the age-old excuses as their reason for being there.

It may seem strange, but those iron-workers and the dangerous lives they live remind me of shrimp boat captains. Another dangerous line of work I used to do just to find out about it for myself. Taking their own lives into their own hands seems to change people like shrimp boat captains and iron-workers, and cause them to behave differently than the more ordinary people around them.

In both cases, if the individual does something stupid it could cost him and other people their lives. Even after they are long gone and working some other job when the shoddy work they did falls apart. Even if they do conscientious work and are as careful as they can be, external factors not within their control can happen and kill people. Sometime I think these men take on these dangerous jobs because the old tribal rituals for turning boys into men are gone for the most part, and these men use these professions (and other's) their own way of proving their manhood in modern times.

I don't claim to know much more about what it's like to be a Native American Indian. I've listened. I don't think time is gonna reverse itself and the world go back to the way it was, but at least I know they exist and are fairly friendly if you are, and that's better than I was before.