At the risk of sounding like I’m a suck-up, which I’m not, I did think of the Native Americans as the holiday approached, and wondered what they must think every Fourth of July. Carol does a good job explaining her honest feelings as an Ojibwe. We celebrate our independence from a government that taxed us without representation….but forget how we oppressed another peoples. This euro ancestry gal is thankful for this land and all those who love it enough to stick their necks out for it–including the Native Americans who watched us trash the place in a few hundred years.
Carol A. Hand
As “Independence Day” approaches, I am reminded of a discussion I had with students in an undergraduate social welfare policy course I was teaching in a prairie-state university. The topic for the day was the Social Security Act. As I thought about the class, I couldn’t tune out the context. The year was 2002. The U.S. was poised to invade Iraq with the flimsiest of excuses.
“In October 2002, the U.S. Congress passed a “Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq“.”
People’s lives and the futures hung in the balance.
Slide – C.A. Hand – American Social Welfare Policy PowerPoint – April 23, 2014
It’s clear that wars have always deflected the attention of the nation from the needs of people, providing an excuse to decimate the grudgingly created and almost always inadequate social safety net in…
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Eagle 