"End the Diffusion" - Commentary by Tony Seton

End the Diffusion

The Interior Department has a bunch of indians on the warpath. They issued a ruling in January that limited where tribes could locate their casinos. The new regulations came in the face of a massive expansion effort by the gaming tribes, of both their facilities and their sovereignty. Some tribes were seeking to build casinos up to 1500 miles from their reservations, crossing several state lines.

When the Secretary of the Interior announced the new limitations, their response was predictable. They accused the government of being paternalistic and racist. Pshaw. The whole casino business is a disgrace, enabled by white liberal guilt over how badly indians were treated by whites over the course of our history. The guilt was mitigated by allowing indians to declare their reservations sovereign nations within our one nation, and enabling them to operate their casinos pretty much the way they wanted.

Of course, this has created its own set of problems as the tribes "scalp" mostly stupid poor white people to the tune of over $25 billion a year. And as the national economy tanks, and more poor people grow poorer – and more desperate – the problems with the casinos will grow significantly.

But the core issue is the insane notion that there should be sovereign nations within the United States. There is no question that white settlers treated the indians atrociously, but allowing them to set up their gambling meccas ain’t the answer. This is akin to the demand by blacks for reparations because their forebears were brought to these shores as slaves, many even before we were a country. What will happen when hispanics, whose ancestors were pushed out of Texas and California, for example, demand their own nations within our borders?

And consider that less than a century ago, half of our population were deemed second-class citizens. What kind of recompense should we make to all of the women in the United States? What claims might also be made by their male off-spring?

The fact is that America has grown in our social consciousness, we’ve become aware of (some of) the errors of our previous ways, but we aren't going to be able to right every wrong that was committed by our forebears in earlier times.

It's time we got off this separatist jag that threatens to tear us into myriad contentious sects, each vying for a bigger piece of our one pie. It's time we paid brief homage to our past and then moved forward together. This is more than a feel-good social or even fiscal issue. We will never be a strong nation so long as we put our past in front of where we are going. Let’s start by doing away with the hyphenates – African-American, Hispanic-American, Native-America, et cetera – that persistently divide us and put American first.