By Jaime Vergara
For Variety

THE universe is 15 billion years old; the planet earth is 4.5 years old. Human civilization is 10 thousand years old. On a 24-hour scale, the history of humankind is but the last 30-seconds of the planetary journey. Humankind is a new born babe in the universal evolutionary trek. But the way we human beings huff, puff and tuff over our role in the general scheme of things, one would think we have predominantly presided over the awesome and mystery journey of life all along!
Neither a statement of applause or reproach, my school principal describes my general stance, personal and pedagogical, as always keeping the comprehensive view. Being a social studies teacher, it goes with the territory. Keeping the global perspective maintains one’s academic integrity. One of the images in the Ancient Civilization course of 6th graders, out of archaeology and anthropology, is the peopling of the planet from Africa to the rest of the world. The question of who owns the land is meaningless in this context. There are only issues of finite stewardship, not infinite ownership.
The U.S. Declaration of Independence, bred by a high regard for every person’s natural “unalienable rights,” specifically mentions “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The last in the triad was not primarily about one’s emotional gratification. “Pursuit of happiness” was about ownership of property, and one’s claim to the result of one’s labor, particularly in the fair compensation for one’s efforts. In its excess, pleased at the vast open land in the North American continent, the colonizers proceeded to systematically annihilate and disenfranchise the settlers of the land, the native Americans, of their homes and properties.
Imperial England even considered epidemics that decimated the native Americans as providential. One of the reasons the colonies declared independence from Britain was the 1760s restriction on their expanding west of Appalachia. The history of the colonists’ treatment of native Americans is literally clothed in lengthy veils of tears.
The 230-year socio-political experiment we call the United States refused to deal with the institution of slavery at its creation. A civil war will haunt it a hundred years later. The institution’s abolition would be replaced with legally sanctioned segregation in social life, and Dr. MLK, Jr.’s life would be snuffed in confronting the issue a hundred years later. Along the way, we specifically banned the Chinese, incarcerated the Japanese, spitted on the Mexican, reviled the Semite, and a bold Statue of Liberty inviting the “tired and weary” notwithstanding, we’ve treated all off-white immigrant to be only of 3/5 human value!
A resident in Canada and the continental United States in the 70s, the issue of land stewardship became a critical one to the Canucks in the prairies of Saskatchewan. Idle land, unless otherwise designated as a preserve, was not to be privately owned in perpetuity. The focus was land stewardship, not land ownership. In singing the Canadian song, “Something to Sing About,” and the American “This Land is Your Land,” it became evident that the issue was not who the land belonged to, rather, who have decided to belong to the land. And if one thinks that the latter song celebrated only the distance between New York and California, the song reverses the wording to “From California to the New York Islands.” With American injunction to its young to go west, the movement is from ecotopia coast westward around the globe to the New England States and across four time zones. One could not get more global than that!
Recent clamor to revisit Article XII of the CNMI Constitution is in order. Chamolinian and TT legal residents on these isles were provided “affirmative action” privileges, not perpetual rights. It is time to settle questionable claims and dubious distribution rights to land leases and rentals, but more importantly, it is well nigh high to ask how the land is going to benefit the most number of people who have decided to belong.
Who belongs to these islands? “All of the gifts of the earth and all decisions of history, and all the inventions of humanness, belong to each one through me,” sings my sixth graders on Earth Day. Indeed, the earth belongs to all!