A Requiem for Truth

November 1, 2026

Ken Shirk  -  AFM International Secretary-Treasurer

As you read this, Americans are or will be voting, or have voted, in the 2026 midterms. As I write this, the Trump administration is now making moves to block the decisions of US voters where Trump thinks a Republican candidate could lose. He is actively intimidating voters in districts suspected of not favoring Trump and sending armed, masked, jack-booted ICE-coated thugs into the streets to scare any less-than-white-skinned citizen into hiding until the sun sets on Election Day.

As a baby boomer growing up before White America “lost its innocence,” educated in a responsibly-funded public education system (with, by the way, a music program in every school), and schooled in the time-honored tradition of a functional, democratic election process, where it was considered rude to ask who one voted for, I always accepted that every election outcome was fair, proper, and true. I trusted the integrity of our election officials, and trusted that even the politicians, who benefit or suffer the results of an election, honor and respect the results of an election.

I always accepted that sometimes the US votes right, sometimes to the left of right, and usually slightly to one side or the other of the center. Sometimes the nakedly racist, misogynistic, extractive, blindly nationalistic segment of our society prevails in elections, and sometimes the other segment that neatly disguises those attributes prevails. We accept the results and move on. Those who vote are the ones who are heard.

Brought up in the belief that we are a nation of laws that favor no one person over another, it was therefore a tremendous shock to my understanding of things when the 2000 presidential election was decided by the US Supreme Court, rather than the voters. But that event was mild in comparison to that which is on display today. What I see today are elected leaders not only denying reality, but actually labeling reality as treasonous. Elections are reality, and if our government views the outcome of any election as treasonous, Americans are in big trouble.

That Americans can countenance a billionaire South African immigrant single-handedly eviscerating their federal bureaucracy or running American defense policy by controlling access to his satellites in our sky, or an unhappy Australian media mogul hijacking our once relatively-balanced new media, or embracing political leaders who emulate and admire the cocaine-maddened policies of Adolf Hitler, or a profoundly morally bankrupt head of state who wraps himself in the cloak of religious fervor, is a collection of realities around which I cannot get my head.

And then I think about my First Nations friends. They have been confronting these kinds of incomprehensible behaviors for over 500 years. Some will say, get over it and get used to it. But just today I stumbled over a video clip of the late American Indian Movement activist Russell Means reciting words of an early American lawyer and painter named George Catlin, who spent a considerable part of his life amongst the original citizens of this continent.

Catlin penned what become known as “George Catlin’s Creed,” which sets forth a standard of human behavior, learned from the indigenous people with whom he spent much time, that we should all aspire to and which we should expect from those who represent us.

Catlin’s Creed goes something like this:

• I love a people that have always made me welcome to the very best that they had.
• I love a people who are honest without laws, who have no jails and no poorhouses.
• I love a people who keep the commandments without ever having read or heard them preached from the pulpit.
• I love a people who never swear or take the name of the Creator in vain.
• I love a people “who love their neighbors as they love themselves.”
• I love a people who worship the Creator without a book, for I believe that the Creator loves them also.
• I love a people whose religion is all the same, and who are free from religious animosities.
• I love a people who have never raised a hand against me, or stolen my property, when there was no law to punish either.
• I love and don’t fear mankind where the Creator has made and left them, for they are the Creator’s children.
• I love a people who have never fought a battle with anyone, except on their own ground.
• I love a people who live and keep what is their own without lock and keys.
• I love a people who do the best they can. And, oh, how I love a people who don’t live for the love of money.

How many of these boxes could your candidate tick?

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