- This is the Day
- Posts
- May 6
May 6
Crazy Horse, Lucian Blaga, Henry David Thoreau, and the Chinese Exclusion act.
David Barnhart
May 06, 2025
Dolphin at San Carlos, Mexico, 2022. Own photo.
On this day in 1877, Crazy Horse and other Oglala leaders surrendered in order to save their people. He had received a prophecy in a vision quest decades earlier that he would not be harmed in battle. Instead, he would be killed by a soldier’s bayonet while in custody a few months after his surrender.
Today also marks the date, in 1882, that President Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, a white supremacist law that prefigured today’s anti-immigrant language. The act would not be struck down until China became an important ally of the USA during World War II.
Today marks the death, in 1961, of Lucian Blaga, a Romanian philosopher and poet. His description of his childhood mutism sounds very much like the experience of someone on the autism spectrum.
Today also marks the death, nearly a century earlier in 1862, of Henry David Thoreau (who, some point out, may also have been neurodivergent). Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson (who I mentioned on April 27) he launched American transcendentalism and nature conservation.
Reflection:
Lucian Blaga wrote:
…we witness the disgraceful and lumbering phenomenon that we call “racist messianism.” This phenomenon entails the glorification of the physical and spiritual values of a single race. Racist messianism is characterized by the belief that one specific human race possesses all the qualities that God intended to bestow upon humankind, and that all the other races share these qualities only partially or in a distorted or perverted manner.
Blaga’s words are important to me as I look at the rise of White Christian Nationalism in my own country, a blasphemous perversion of the faith whose foundational scriptures declare that all human beings are made in the imago Dei, the image of God.
Much has been made on social media of Thoreau’s laundry as a way of discrediting his “back to nature” romanticism, but his voice is important in my own hagiography of contemporary saints. Like many others who I’ve included in this devotional, he was an abolitionist and a lover of the environment, and one of the first to write on “Civil Disobedience.”
Henry David Thoreau wrote:
We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
One of Thoreau’s most important writings for our present time is Civil Disobedience:
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or back gammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.
Our political system makes us complacent. Political action is understood by the media and most people in this country to be a game we play every four years, passively casting our vote and then shrugging at the result. But politics done this way is just consumerism. The real work is calling your local city counselors, state legislators, and mayor and governors. We forge relationships, meet with stakeholders, and make it clear to politicians that they need to follow our agenda, not vice versa. It is this ground work that will change the world. And when our work at building relationships and making our demands heard does not work, it is our job to protest, disrupt, and confound the powerful.
This is also how we make it clear to politicians that they work for us. We do not passively accept their platforms; we give them our agenda and then hold them accountable for fulfilling it.
Prayer: Creator God, your creation reveals to us that all hierarchies are man-made. Immerse us in nature so that the liberation of all creatures becomes a political fact. Amen.