WEBVTT

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This is something
which had come to me.

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I didn't know where and then
I finally figured out where.

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It goes like this.

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"One does not sell the Earth
upon which the people walk.

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A people's dream died there.

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There is no center any longer,
and the sacred tree is dead."

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And I've been trying to
figure out what in my own life

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was wrong with things.

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And I finally figured
out what is the matter.

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And what is the matter is
that, we, in this country

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don't know about relationships.

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And relationships don't
always involve human beings.

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Involved man's relationship to
animals and his relationship

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to the cosmos, man's
relationships to all things.

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And that there is a balance,
and its cosmologically set.

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When the balance
is out of whack,

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all kinds of
possibilities take place.

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And that, we, as Americans,
had an extraordinary history,

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primarily because there were
certain kinds of imbalances

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which went to the
very core of things.

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And I had been operating
on these premises,

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but I hadn't really thought
about them for a long time.

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And I wrote a poem called
"Debridement," which I'm not

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going to read, except
for the one section which

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I'd like to read to you.

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But the poem is a
very ambitious poem

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because it places
a tremendous burden

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on the reader, in that he
or she must know something

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about American history.

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And the assumption is
that he or she does know.

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And this poem is about a man
who won a Congressional Medal

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of Honor in Detroit.

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He came back to this
country from Vietnam

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and couldn't get a job.

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He was very confused
about a lot of things.

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And after being out of jail
for about a year or more,

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he's got a call from
the Defense Department.

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They asked him, had he
gotten in any trouble?

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That's what he'd been doing.

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He said he hadn't
gotten in any trouble.

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A man called, the colonel
called about 15 minutes later

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and said, you've been
selected as an awardee

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of the Congressional
Medal of Honor.

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Of course right after
that he got a job

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from Ford Motor Company, and was
given a Thunderbird to drive.

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He was given the task of
recruiting young black men

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in the ghetto for
military service.

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I'm going to read
you two things.

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One is a psychiatric
kind of report

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which always begins "subject."

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And the other is something
called "Mama's Report."

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By the way, debridement
means that cutting away

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of torn or gangrenous
flesh from a wound.

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