When I was a child back in the 1960s, cowboys and indians were a big thing in terms of movies and games. We all had cowboy suits. The cowboys were seen as the goodies and the Indians the baddies.
Of course, things have changed nowadays. We’ll all much more sympathetic to the native Americans. I was particularly sympathetic after watching Ken Burn’s The West. Yet it’s still silly to see one side as all good and the other as all bad. Real life is more complicated than that.
Anyway, to answer the prompt, when I was 18, for some months, I was quite a radical Marxist. I remembering ranting about the good people and bad people in work. Then, an elderly Union Branch Secretary smiled and said “Hang on Paul. You’re dividing people into Cowboys and Indians”. It’s something that stuck in my mind ever since. My Marxist phase didn’t last very long. And interestingly, when I Google the guy’s name, he comes up in all sorts of radical left-wing and historic Marxist sites. So, at the time, he might have being even more radical than I was.
Shortly after, I committed my life to Christ. I never forgot his advice, but I didn’t always apply it. Because religious views vary, even within Christendom and evangelicalism, it’s very easy to attach yourself to one movement or sub-culture and to see everything else as silly and sinister. You can even divide people into whom you like and dislike. But the older I get, the more I realize that it’s not as simple as that. I have fond memories of everyone, even people who were a little mean to me. And I realize now that some views I adopted, I adopted simply because I had a lot of respect for those who held them. I didn’t always take the time to analyze them. I haven’t changed my general outlook much, but I’m more prone to listen to others nowadays.
You do have Jesus, the Apostle Paul, and others dividing people into sheep and goats or whatever, yet they also remind us that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And in the life of Jesus and Paul, you have people on the “bad” side, be it Jews or Romans, doing good, or at least not being as hostile as other members of their tribe.
But I shouldn’t think that I have the insight of people like Jesus or Paul. Still, some people or ideas are better than others, but it’s not good to think in extremely simplistic terms. So, I can enjoy a podcast such as “Ask NT Wright” even if I don’t agree with everything that he says. And as for other people in general, I like to think of the parable of the Good Samaritan. When Jesus asked us to love our neighbor, someone asked Him, “Who is my neighbor”. Jews and Samaritans didn’t get on.
But the parable speaks of a Jewish man in difficulty who was ignored by his fellow Jews and helped by a Samaritan. So, you shouldn’t see every member of other tribes as enemies.
They might contain evil people, but not everyone in them is evil. And not every member of your tribe is good. As an Irishman, I wouldn’t like people to judge me by the actions of the IRA. I never sympathized with them or supported them. Neither did most Irish people. And I shouldn’t assume that people in Gaza support or sympathize with Hamas. I’m sure some do, but how can I know who does and who doesn’t? And sometimes people are so desperate that they’re forced to rely on such organizations. When I was younger, I’d always assume that if some nasty regime fell or was ousted, the “goodies” would step in to take their place. But often, the new regime is even worse or the country falls into complete chaos. So, things aren’t simple. We look to God and hope that those in control throughout the world become more loving and more wise.
So, as always, I’ll close with a couple of songs, a secular and Christian song about love.
And here’s a native American song and a cowboy song. One interesting lesson that I learned from the Ken Burn’s documentary was that some of the cowboys were actually Native Americans. And the real cowboys looked after cows. I hardly ever saw a cow in a cowboy movie .
Hibernia Gospel 