Wow. I don't think I've ever seen a mainstream media voice take this position on the air in prime time. That doesn't necessarily mean that it hasn't happened before, of course, just that I don't personally recall having personally seen it.
He alludes here to previously having covered the protests live. I wonder if that meant he actually was doing his show live from the area where the protests were taking place. That'd be pretty remarkable, too- especially this close to a Presidential election on a network that was going with the promotional tagline of "The Place for Politics" for while.
I'm glad this isn't being ignored as completely as I feared, although there is still remarkably little coverage of it relative to, say, when those conservative people took over that empty park building for a while.
One of the things that is difficult for me as a white American is that I know that our colonial fore-bearers and our own government have done these horrible things to Native Americans in the past that are unjustifiable, and yet of course I love some of the things my country stands for in theory like human rights, democracy, freedom of speech and so on and so forth, even though in a way we were built on only selectively applying those principles at best, and even today don't always live up to the highest of those ideals in certain respects. I'm glad we exist, but I'm not proud of what we did to get here in some respects, which of course sparks a degree of cognitive dissonance. I'd like to be proud of my country and the positive elements of it's history, and am to some degree, but I also know we can not ignore the past, lest we repeat the negative aspects of it. We need to grow and become a better people collectively.
Right now, what is going on here with this pipeline being built over the objections of Native Americans is an example of the past repeating itself. To me, that's a black and white issue. It's wrong and we need to be better than that in 2016. People's mixed feelings about the past, including my own, really should not prevent us from advocating doing the right thing today. What we do today is not some sort of commentary on what we did yesterday- it's in it's own bubble, and we can stop wronging these people without all hopping on boats and flooding Europe with a bunch of illegal white America immigrants or something.
You can't always correct the past, because sometimes the facts on the ground are too different for it to be just to the people living in the present. However, there should not be any question that we should strive to be better going forward.
In the sacrament of reconciliation (aka confession), Roman Catholics are supposed to have an intention to turn away from their sins and not repeat them. Sometimes something is done and can't be undone, or perhaps undoing it would make matters worse, but you have to go into the confessional with the the real intention of trying not to repeat the same mistakes for the sacrament to be valid, as I understand it.
I don't know why we can't give the Native American protesters this one. For one, they are right on the facts- this pipeline endangers their drinking water in the small reservations we drove them into. The pipeline path goes near ancient burial grounds. It's just not right to do this to them without their consent.
The other thing is that there is the question of why in the world we're building a huge oil pipeline in 2016 as global climate change keeps getting worse and worse and claiming more victims. So much of warming in the past follows the pattern of CO2 building being followed by global increases in temperature on a delay, also, so each day we're locking in more increases in more years to come even if the next day we stopped emitting CO2 entirely.
I am not an extremist on global climate change, but we certainly should not be starting new oil drilling sites or new coal plants and building pipelines and the like. Using what we have is a necessary evil as we transition. But we need to transition. Part of doing that could be, for example, saying that existing infrastructure (drilling sites, pipelines, etc.) can be maintained and continue to used, but all new sites and infrastructure that is starting fresh needs to be wind, solar, or water based. Force these companies to build clean energy sites because it's the only way to meet increased demand, and to put more and more money into making them more efficient. Tax carbon from big business. Give them economic incentive to do the right thing instead of letting them cause problems for free that will hurt the poorest among us the most in the long run, even though poor folks aren't the ones doing the damage or reaping the rewards now.
And if energy companies get snippy and refuse to do what we redesign market and regulatory forces to make them do, break them up or have the government start building clean energy plants and giving it to citizens at cost. We'll give private enterprise a chance, but they can't be allowed to build more and more oil drilling platforms and distribution pipelines- when they expand, it needs to be clean energy going forward.
