Kent Nerburn

Many thoughts rise to the surface after a trip to D.C. But from them all, I’m going to pick only one: the experience of going to the new Museum of the American Indian and then to the Holocaust Museum.

Let me start with the Holocaust Museum. It is a brilliant, chilling, unrelenting narrative of the crimes of the German people during World War Two. I choose my words carefully when I say “German people” rather than “Nazi regime,” for this is an indictment not only of what was done in the name of racial purification, but of what was not done by those who stood by while it happened. There is no mercy here; no hint of understanding or sympathy for innocent bystanders caught up in the sweep of history — nor should there be. This is a documentary indictment, built with the cold clarity of a legal case. It is filled with a frozen anger that is not only warranted, but appropriate. “Let the dead speak and tell their stories, and the rest of you just shut up and listen” is the way I would describe it in the vernacular. From the moment you climb into the heavy steel elevators that will take you to the exhibit, and listen to the cold clunk of the closing elevator doors, you are forced to follow out a story that you may not wish to learn, but from which you will be allowed no relief.

You ride to the fourth floor, are let out of the elevator, and begin a directed walk through a darkened exhibition hallway that is alive with photographs, text, artifacts, and videos. The entire experience is dark and directed. There are no brightly lit seating areas; the layout of the exhibition allows for no casual meanderings from place to place. It is directed; you are directed; you are owned and claimed. If you don’t read, you still can’t escape, because you are forced to hear and see.

It starts with the rise of the Nazis and their claim on the long tradition of anti-semitism, continues to the actual crimes and brutalities of the wartime German policies, and finishes with a revelation of what was found when the camps were liberated, and what was done after the fact by the allies.

The entire journey, done with even the slightest degree of diligence, takes over three hours. The museum is stark, industrial — made of brick and girders — and devoid of light except in the passages where you go between the sections, in the main entry area, and in the brilliantly stark yet peaceful memorial room that ends the exhibition.

It is one of the most powerful museum experiences you can ever have, because it evokes as well as describes, and it builds its case with an icy efficiency and outrage that is made all the more powerful because it is so cold and lethal.

I think back on the strangely named Documentation Center in Nuremberg, which is a comparable and very similar museum, and equally as worthy of a visit. There, with the same architectural severity and unrelenting historical accuracy, the German people have created a museum that says, in effect, “See how this happened, and wonder what is was that allowed us be so blind and cruel.” But it has a question at its heart: How did this happen while we were standing by? And it shows the devastation wrought on Germany as the price exacted by those who put an end to the Nazi horrors. In other words, it allows the Germans room in which to doubt and question, as well as bear witness. Indeed, it wants to lead them to doubt and question. It is a museum of self-reflection as much as a documentation of crimes.

The Holocaust Museum is none of that. Though the two museums look much the same, have a common architecture and method of presentation, and contain much of the same imagery and cover much of the same material, the Holocause Museum is as uninterested in self-reflection as a murder victim’s parents are in examining their own inner responses when coming face to face with their child’s murderer. This is the Nuremberg trials made into a documentary and testimonial experience, and it is built up, piece by piece, until there is no possibility of escape. It is, without a doubt, the single most angry museum I have ever experienced, and the coldness of that anger is as chilling as the museum itself.

And then there is the Museum of the American Indian. Another architectural masterpiece, it is, to my mind, in all other ways, a great disappointment. It wants to reflect a philosophy in its design — the whole museum is circular in its flow and presentation — but it experiences a complete breakdown in its effort to communicate that philosophy.

Consider the problems: Do you call it the Museum of the Native American or the Museum of the American Indian? Do you organized it tribe by tribe, or do you run the danger of a pan-Indian philosophical distortion by trying to find a common theme? How do you deal with over 500 recognized tribes and 200 non-certified tribes that have effectively been decimated? What about the very notion of “tribe” itself — a grafted concept that became reified as the U.S. government tried to make distinctions and divisions. And the list goes on.

Unlike the Holocaust Museum, which isolates a time, the Museum of the American Indian needs to show a continuum that goes up to the present. So freezing a moment in the past is impossible. Yet the second you try to show the vibrancy of individual cultures, you come up against sheer numbers, and the danger of becoming archaeological and anthropological. And if you show objects apart from their sacred purposes, you reduce the spiritual to the aesthetic.

As a result, you have a museum by committee — museological democracy run amok. There is an attempt to organize around themes, but that, to me, commits the very crime against which Indian people have been railing since their cultures were first collected: objectification. You go to one wall — here are ceremonial objects like pipes, to another, here are dolls. Yes, you can see beauty and diversity, but you also end up seeing categories. It is comparative anthropology, punctuated by a few very limited attempts to present several tribes in more depth. (I was told that tribes get featured status on a rotating basis).

In the end, this is the absolute antithesis of the Holocaust museum. It describes, it does not evoke. It has no narrative drive. And it does not engage the heart.

Personally, I would have done it as a narrative museum, with a precontact section, just as the Holocaust Museum had a pre-Nazi section, followed by a narrative of the unrelenting march of European culture across the continent, from the east, the north, the west, and the south. I would have featured salient moments — and, yes, these would have been dark moments — and then I would have ended with a celebration of the strength of the remnant. In this way people could have experienced what is in the native heart.

It could have been done with multi-media using streaming images and overlays, combined with stills and significant objects. Instead, we get a tepid celebration of what exists today, almost as if the past did not take place.

I did not follow the controversy of the museum’s creation, but I surely would have come down on a different side than the one that won the struggle.

I can think of no greater missed opportunity than to create a museum of peoples of the spirit that has no spirit. And that’s what they have done. One can only hope that since this is a fledgling museum, the curatorial team will figure out a way to give the museum some heart. In a desire to celebrate, they have, to my mind, failed to communicate. Five minutes on the Bear’s Paw battlefield is more powerful than five days in this museum. How to bridge that gap is the challenge that the museum faces. I hope they find a way to meet it.

Thanks, everybody, for writing in with your thoughts on the title of the new book. Here is the general drift of what I’ve been receiving:

By and large, more people prefer Sacred Moments than prefer Illuminations. Those who don’t like Sacred Moments are about evenly divided by those who think it is too precious — sounding like a line of figurines — and those who think it smacks too much of traditional religion.

Those who don’t like Illuminations see it as a somewhat empty phrase. One person said it sounded like “a lighting store.”

On the other hand, those who like Sacred Moments say it articulates exactly what they hope the book is about, and what they expect from me in this type of writing. Those who like Illuminations say it sounds literate and intelligent, which is what they feel sets my writing apart from most “inspirational” writing.

An interesting idea suggested by several readers is to junk the alliterative two-word title (Simple Truths, Small Graces, Sacred Moments)altogether, and simply go with the proposed subtitle as the title: The Hidden Beauty of Ordinary Days.

The publisher is meeting with the distribution group tomorrow (they contract distribution through a major national company) to get their feelings on which title they think will be most well-received by readers. I will be very curious to see what opinions are expressed in that meeting. I have passed along many of your thoughts and emails to the publisher, so your voices will definitely be heard.

Thanks so much to all of you who have written. And if any of you has a brilliant title that encapsulates the experience of finding deeper, more spiritual meanings in the ordinary events of life, send it along. If it begins with an “S” and has two words, all the better. But it is the power to evoke, not describe, that we are looking for.

One way or another, a decision is coming soon.

I’m off to Washington D.C. for several days. Then it’s up to the far North Shore of Lake Superior here in Minnesota to be the guest author at a conference on nature writing. Both trips should be absolutely inspiring — the yin and yang of the American experience: culture and politics followed by nature and solitude. I feel lucky, indeed.

At the request of a number of people, I’m going to begin sending out a general notification each time I make a blog entry. I’ll probably just send a general alert, allowing you to go to the entry at your leisure if you so desire. I hope this meets with your approval.

No politics in this; just a heartfelt request for an honest opinion, especially from those of you who have a warm spot for Small Graces.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve turned my attention to another small book that will serve as the third in a series that includes Simple Truths and Small Graces. There is some discussion within the publishing house about what to use as a title.

Here, then, is the question:

Would you be more inclined to buy a book called, Sacred Moments — The Hidden Beauty of Ordinary Days, or Illuminations — The Hidden Beauty of Ordinary Days?

If you feel like providing reasons for your choice, please do so.

Keep in mind that this will be a book very much on the line of Small Graces. It will be made up of stories about everyday moments where the light of the spiritual shines through the ordinary.

I look forward to your responses and will share the outcome with all of you.

Not long ago, when I first made a comment about the Katrina disaster, I received an email from a reader who said,”I am emotionally moved by your writings,” and then went on to make some very kind comments about how I stated “the profoundest truths in the simplest ways.”

These were, of course, welcome sentiments — the sort all writers love to hear.

But then he finished his email with, “Stay out of politics. I love you.”

An odd sentiment, but very common. Witness the instructions to interviewees on the website of a woman who will be interviewing me shortly on her radio show:

“Please note that the theme of Donna’s show is ‘personal empowerment’. Donna does not choose to engage in political discussion or religion as topics.”

“Stay out of politics.” Personal empowerment does not include either the political or the religious.

We have come to an odd turning point in our culture. Not only do we make a distinction between religion and spirituality — a distinction that I think can be defended — but we have determined that personal empowerment should be something separate from politics or religion.

What we are seeing, I fear, is a terribly wrong-headed reduction of the Eastern path of self-realization to a kind of psychologized concern with self-improvement.

Self-realization, even in its most rudimentary stages, requires a rigorous spiritual self-examination and constant effort at clarification, purification, and control of many, many dimensions of one’s thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors. Self-improvement can mean anything that makes one’s life better. In contemporary society it usually reduces to “clear out your negative blocks, align your intentions with your dreams, and open yourself to possibility.”

It is, at heart, a self-obsessed philosophical position, and this can be either good or bad. It is good if the self-obsession is about clarifying your life to be better able to offer service to the world around you. It is bad if the self-obsession is about turning your back on the world to focus on surrounding yourself with more stuff.

My talk show host would likely not instruct her guests to say away from discussions about how people can increase their personal wealth by removing negative blocks in their thinking. You would likely not see her saying, “This show is not about how to have the life of your dreams.” These are fair areas of consideration in the world of self-empowerment and self-realization. Serving the poor, questioning the powerful, honoring the truths of specific religious traditions, are not.

But this is a false version of spiritual growth. It is the spiritual equivalent of living in a gated community — the mess and muck of the world outside should be kept out of sight and not allowed to intrude.

The hard truth is that if you choose not to involve yourself with things of this world — again, one of the highest and most noble spiritual paths — then you’d better be as indifferent to wealth as you are to poverty, as willing to give away everything you own as to seek to increase the things you possess.

“Pray and grow rich,” “Seven Spiritual Laws of Success,” and other paths of that sort may be good personal psychology, but they are not good spirituality.

Like it or not, Jesus went into the temple and knocked over the tables of the money changers. Like it or not, the buddhist path of worldly involvement requires the boddhisatva stance of not allowing yourself to enter into “heaven” until you have assisted all others in getting there.

By and large, I will stay out issues of religion, but not because I don’t believe; because I believe too much. I seek what is common to all, what is unique in each, and I bend my knee before the worthy path that each presents.

But I will not stay out of politics. I work to build the schools in my community, I fight against the forces of avarice that try to turn our cities into junkscapes, I struggle for the protection of the environment, and I speak out against policies, both local and national, that devolve into means of helping the rich get richer, while the poor are left sitting by the side of the road.

You may not agree with me, and that I can understand. But to think that politics is not part of spiritual growth is to abdicate our moral responsibility to our brothers and sisters and our mandate to serve as stewards of the earth.

One cannot live in a gated community of the heart.

There are two phrases, in rampant use in American society, that speak of lack of character and moral conviction.

1.) “Mistakes have been made.”

2.) “I just want to put it behind me and get on with my life.”

The first is a favorite of politicians; the second, of pro athletes.

The moral flaws of each are obvious. “Mistakes have been made” makes mistakes into the noun. No one made them, they simply happened. A person of character and conviction says “I made mistakes.” Its called owning up — taking responsibility.

“I just want to put it behind me” speaks to a refusal to claim responsibility for repercussions of one’s actions. When wrongs are done, wreckage is left behind. A person of character and conviction does not simply want to move beyond the past, he or she wants to repair the past.

As we begin to point fingers in the wake of Katrina’s awful aftermath, keep an eye to who says what.

When you hear a man or woman say, “I made mistakes,” you know you are listening to a person of sound moral fiber.

When you hear someone say the equivalent of, “I must make reparations for the damage my actions have caused,” you know you are listening to a person of character.

Now is when leadership will show. Stump thumping, chest beating, and crocodile tears are especially hollow at a time like this. Look for the persons who put this tragedy on their backs and try to move it toward safety. There you will find your real leaders.

It will be interesting to see who those real leaders turn out to be.

By boats, trucks, and buses, they are coming. From Maine, Idaho, and Texas, they are coming. Bringing food, water, blankets. Above all, they are bringing hope.

What our government was unable or unwilling to do (which it is, remains to be seen) our people are now doing on their own.

It is a sight to warm the heart.

As a people, we Americans are, and always have been, kind, generous, and open hearted. In times of need, we do not leave others standing by the side of the road, whether it is a stranger in need of assistance on the shoulder of a highway or a city succumbing to rising waters.

It seems we do best in times of crisis, when the creative energy of our individualism is turned voluntarily toward the service of the common good. In easy times, we seem to forget the needs of our brothers and sisters and turn our efforts, instead, to the self-referential pursuits of spending and acquiring.

Perhaps this crisis will remind us that government is not an impediment to personal freedom so much as a tool of the collective will. What we are trying to do as individuals and small collective cells, the government should have been doing instantly, and doing it in our name.

I remember the police mottos in various towns where I have lived: “To Protect and to Serve.” Our government, in its zeal to protect, has forgotten how to serve.

It is something we as voters, and our public officials as policy makers, need to remember if we ever want to have a government worthy of the goodheartedness and courage that our citizens are now showing in the wake this terrible national disaster.

Here, I’m afraid, is the hard truth, and it is not pretty.

We did not immediately go in to save the Katrina victims because the government was caught between a military action and a disaster relief action.

My father spent much of his life in disaster relief for the Red Cross, and I know whereof I speak.

A relief effort is essentially the establishing of order in a situation of fear and chaos. People are desperate; they will fight for food for their children, their parents, themselves. They do not line up in orderly fashion and say, “Oh, yes, we will happily go two more days without food, water, clean clothes, toilet paper, tampons, medicine, and the chance to contact our relatives, while others are served first.” They will not wait in line to find out about lost children; they will not be orderly when their infant is sick. They will be wild, chaotic, and, sometimes, even dangerous.

Once they believe that their needs will be met, their better impulses take over and the situation settles down. But until that time, a calming presence and voice of reason is needed to hold them at bay.

The problem with Katrina is that we could not immediately establish the feeding stations, clothing depots, medical facilities, and communications centers that would have calmed the people and given them hope. We needed to establish order so we could set up the temporary infrastructure. And that meant holding back the chaos and desperation until that infrastructure was in place.

Here is the rub. Establishing order might have meant using force, and we dared not use force on our own people.

It only requires a modicum of imagination to envision what life was like in the Superdome and Convention Center. Imagine 90 degrees, no toilets, no ability to or willingness to move from the small space you’ve carved for yourself. Imagine night falling with no light, and people both desperate and deranged wandering in the darkened building, unable to be seen, unable to be controlled, stealing, raping, even killing. Imagine the crying and moaning, the people losing control — of their emotions, their bowels, their minds.

Who among us has not gotten caught in a crowd too dense for comfort and sensing a constriction in the chest that borders on panic, and found ourselves pushing as quickly as possible through the throng to an edge where we could breathe with comfort? Multiply that by a hundred, a thousand. Put it in a building reeking of the stench of human bodies and excrement and death. Put it in 90 degree heat. Put it in the absolute dark.

This was but one of a hundred thousand situations the relief people faced. Add in ghouls with rifles wandering the streets and sniping from rooftops, frantic people floating on air mattresses, people deranged with grief grabbing at you as you go by, willing to do anything in their power to get whatever relief you have, and a faint hint of the horrific picture begins to emerge.

To establish order, the government would have needed to turn on its own people to subdue them. This, it could not do. For whatever reason, we are not a “rubber bullet” society such as the British, who have a policy and method of dealing with crowd actions through the use of what is, in most circumstances, non-lethal force. We do not have this. We have guns and tear gas and pepper spray. Once you apply such force, you increase panic and rage.

And we did not have numbers. The New Orleans police force was too small, without communications, and at least partially corrupt. Our soldiers were unavailable because they are deployed in an equally as thankless task in Iraq. All we had were relief workers desperate to help, private citizens desperate to help, and a government immobilized by the fear that it would have to turn on its own citizens, and that the images, quite simply, would have been of uniformed men shooting or otherwise subduing black people.

Don’t for a minute think that we couldn’t have been in there almost instantly, offering aid and comfort. Don’t for a minute think that we couldn’t have been offering relief, saving the dying, evacuating the hospitals. And stories of individual heroism where just such acts were performed will surely begin to come out.

But on a policy level, we were immobilized by fear — fear of the use of force and fear of public perception.

We dropped into Iraq and began setting up relief efforts almost instantly. But it was because we could establish a modicum of order at the point of a gun. That it has not worked is a simple result of the fact that we are the ones who created the living hell from which our good soldiers are trying to extract these people.

But in New Orleans, we were not the enemy. Those people were us; it was our country, our people. The enemy was fear and panic, and that enemy could have been vanquished by the presence and voice of hope.

But we did not offer it. While our rescue workers waited to go in, our goverment tried to square the corners of a shapeless crisis and deal with it in terms of structural solutions. They had to game it out, plan it out, prepare for contingencies and exigencies. If it had been a house on fire, they would have had to wait for the architect to deliver floor plans before trying to put it out.

There is no other way to put it: this was a failure of imagination. We could not imagine a solution so we did not move forward.

I leave you with this: for what does the military give the Medal of Honor? For uncommon valor in the face of overwhelming odds.

Our nation did not earn a medal of honor in this disaster. It acted out of fear rather than courage, and in so doing it failed to do the single thing that would have defused the crisis: It failed to give its people hope.

We had many ordinary citizens who would willingly have risked their lives to save the lives of others. The Red Cross and Salvation Army, too, would have done what was necessary. But our government was too cowardly to let them. And the one voice, the one presence, that would have calmed the people and given them hope, was decidedly absent: AWOL in a time of need.

Sound familiar?

As I watch the unfolding of the horror of Katrina’s aftermath, the thought keeps growing, “Where is our country?”

I don’t mean this in any abstract philosophical sense; I mean it quite practically: Where are our leaders who are so badly needed at this moment?

It is no secret that I don’t like this administration — and I make no apologies for this to the readers who cover their literary ears when I begin to speak about politics — because I don’t like any entity where ideology is stronger than compassion. And that has proven to be the Achilles heel of this group of men and women in office.

But another element is showing itself with Katrina — these are people driven by fear. They are strongest and most decisive when they have a real or perceived enemy. When the moral complexity of the world confronts them, or when something takes place that is morally neutral but dark in nature, such as a natural disaster, they don’t know how to lead, because they won’t put themselves or their ideology in harm’s way out of a belief in our common human responsibility as stewards for all our brothers and sisters.

Forget politics for a minute. Consider moral character instead. After 9-11, when no one knew what was coming next, mayor Giuliani walked out into the streets of New York and became a rallying point for his people. Mr. Bush went into a bunker. He issued statements in which he looked scared and confused, which was exactly what we did not need from a leader, because we, as those charged to follow him, were already scared and confused. Morally, he was missing in action until he could find an enemy to attack.

Once again, with Katrina, this character flaw is showing itself. He may be a very nice man personally, but he does not have the moral character of a true leader for a situation of confused crisis. People are literally dying, and he is missing in action.

The government may be working feverishly to do all it can logistically, but it is once again making its decision out of fear. “We don’t want to put our people in harm’s way,” they are saying regarding rescue and relief efforts.

We have no problem putting our young men and women in harm’s way in Iraq, but we will concern ourselves with this issue in our own country. That there are criminals and headcases and monsters roaming those streets with guns certainly should not be a deterrent. If the rules of engagement for the military in our own country are different from those in foreign countries, the government should say so. I’m afraid the hard truth is this: we do not have the military to go in there because too many of the national guard — consider the name: “NATIONAL GUARD” — are engaged in international conflicts rather than available to guard our nation, which is what they should be doing in this time of desperation.

If Mr. Bush were Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Guiliani, Mr. Mandela, Mr. Churchill, or even, I would venture, Mr. Reagan or Mr. Clinton, he would be down in New Orleans, airlifted in, serving as one of his father’s famous Points of Light for people who are living in some of the greatest darkness our nation has ever seen. He would be standing in the Superdome or at the New Orleans Convention Center, surrounded by such security as was needed to ensure his safety in a dangerous and desperate situation, telling the people that America is there for them and that help is on the way.

But he is once again missing in action. There is no enemy toward which to point. There is no way to galvanize a religious zealotry against a storm. Instead, what is needed is a courage driven by an outpouring of compassion. But he does not have that.

He should be telling his people, “We’re going in there with all the food and water and clothing and help and hope that we can muster.” Because it is hope that is needed as much as anything right now.

People will wait for help if they are given hope. But when leadership runs to the bunker rather than the front lines, confusion reigns, and when confusion reigns, dark times become darker.

Sometimes we lose our moorings when we become too concerned about concepts such as “infrastructure” and “logistics.” Those are for the people behind the scenes. This disaster is not about having an advance party setting up clean venues of maximum safety and efficacy. This is about wading into the waters and saving people.

I know this, because this is what my father did for the Red Cross. He would already have been in New Orleans if he were still alive and active. I grew up around disasters, and I saw the response.

There are people who, when disaster strikes — fires, auto accidents, floods, even personal injuries to a family member in a home — react without thinking and move quickly to provide aid. Then there are those who are frozen, overcome by the momentary enormity of something that seconds ago was unthinkable and unknowable. It is, to some extent, an aspect of character, and some people have it, other people don’t.

Mr. Bush does not. He may have other aspects of character that allow him to be a good leader in other situations. But in moments of crisis, he is, I am sorry to say, a coward. or, at least, a person paralyzed by confusion.

The drowning are on his hands; the dying are on his hands; all the hopelessness and fear is on his hands. That is what leadership is about. All he needs to do is be there. But, unfortunately, this is not a ship in the middle of the ocean where he can have a stage managed arrival to talk to a tidy group of like minded thinkers. This is the great, sprawling, contradictory country that he said he wanted to lead. And it is crying for his leadership.

Where is our president?