I was reading again last night (this morning really), elsewhere, the tired plaint of what this country is becoming. It’s a well meaning plaint, facing pictures out of Iraq. But it is wrong.
Atrocity is nothing recent. It is nothing new. It’s just plain ol’ business as usual. And that’s the thing, that Americans have constantly deluded ourselves into believing it has been anything but.
I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. Because it bothers me, I mean really bothers me so much the angst over what we are becoming, when what America is flows with blithe and stupendous ease out of its past.
To quote myself quoting Emerson:
“The road to where we are now started a long time ago. Emerson writing of the American Indian Removal of 1838 said, it was a ‘crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country; for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our Government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more?’”
And of course we’ve quite a distinguished history down the same vein since then as well. Flagrancy.net has a nice timeline from the 1890s on and some marvelous quotes.
Such as:
“Lest this seem to be the bellicose pipedream of some dyspeptic desk soldier, let us remember that the military deal of our country has never been defensive warfare. Since the Revolution, only the United Kingdom has beaten our record for square miles of territory acquired by military conquest. Our exploits against the American Indian, against the Filipinos, the Mexicans, and against Spain are on a par with the campaigns of Genghis Khan, the Japanese in Manchuria and the African attack of Mussolini…”
Major General Smedley D. Butler, America’s Armed Forces: ‘In Time of Peace’, 1935.
As long as we don’t confront head on, without excuses (and there are always excuses), the genocide upon which this country was built, then it will always and ever be more of the same. I firmly believe this.
It is not a matter of what this country is becoming. It is a matter of what it has *ever* been. A supposed free and compassionate society built on the extermination and removal of hundreds of indigenous nations?
No. As Emerson said, it deprived us of country, quite literally.
H.o.p. is up looking through some history. He sees a cartoon of Mount Rushmore and asks me, “What’s that?” I ask him doesn’t he remember our trip out to South Dakota when he saw Mount Rushmore? He says no. But he did as recently as a year ago. No, he didn’t remember Mount Rushmore, but he remembered South Dakota. We didn’t go out to South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore. We went out to visit an individual at the Rosebud Reservation who labors for human rights, in particular Dakota-Lakota-Nakota rights. While visiting, we drove up into the Black Hills. We passed by Mount Rushmore.
The 4 presidential heads looming over the Black Hills don’t belong there. But they are. Now what? Who knows? But America’s history isn’t one that can be just shrugged off as, “Well, yeah, it was kind of bad, but it was for all the right reasons!”
We’ve an America full of people who weren’t alive during the when, who not only shrug off an inheritance of responsibility, but who are wide-eyed confused over it all because despite their belief in their liberal educations and compassion, in their heart of hearts their home, the America they recognize, is the golden myth of America on which they were raised. They don’t know just how much it didn’t exist, everything they were told. They don’t get it. I don’t know if they ever will get it. Not as long as people keep talking about what we are becoming.
Not an eloquent post. Not even a very good post. Not even a good post at all. It’s just another 2 plus 2 doesn’t equal 5 post. Today isn’t an aberration in American history. Doesn’t mean there aren’t good Americans. Doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of good Americans. But the myth has got to go. The “what are we becoming” has got to go. As long as we hear “what are we becoming” then that just means too many people don’t know where we’ve been.
The “what are we becoming” is helping to kill us all. It’s a matter of what have we been and how to fix it.
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