A Few Words About My Perspective

As Isabella Bird said in 1873, "The Americans excel at braggadocio and putting things over on each other, and nothing else." The old history of the West was written by the Christian conquerors from Europe. In modern times, that is slowly being balanced as Native American oral histories are being transcribed and translated. From most of what I've seen, though, the European invaders were still far more barbaric than most of the "savages" they found here.

Years ago I lived in Amherst, MA, named for Lord Jeffery Amherst of Great Britain. One of the things that helped Lord Jeff carve out his American empire was his "donation" of smallpox-ridden blankets to help keep the local Native Americans warm during a very cold winter. Come spring, that particular "problem" was almost completely solved, and a lot of western Massachusetts was then "safe" for more English settlers to move in. And what we have never been told during all our years of American History in the public schools of this country is that His Majesty's Government sent more than 50,000 English convicts to the New World (before 1776) to serve out their sentences. Many of these were Lord Jeff's "new settlers." As the English government expected that at least half these new settlers would die before their sentences were over, their American masters were allowed (and perhaps encouraged) to treat them as less than slaves (a slave, at least, is property that is invested in (has some value) and would probably be taken better care of). After 1783, prominent American business people were "purchasing" these convicts from the English government (many of them from pauper's prisons) and bringing them to America as "indentured servants." The "term" of an indentured servant (the amount of time a servant was identured before being set free) was twenty years, the same amount of time that the vast majority of transported convicts had been sentenced to.

(In the Spanish world at that time, slavery was legal but a slave had to be freed after twenty years of service. While enslaved, an individual was not recognized as a human with a soul by church, government or society but on attaining freedom after the twenty years of servitude, they were suddenly, somehow, reborn as humans with souls and were supposedly recognized as such by all. However, there's still that individual psychological "hangover" that is part and parcel of having lived as a slave. (See Los Hermanos Penitente) I don't think the situation among the English was as defined as this but I suspect the living conditions and level of self-esteem were pretty similar.)

These days, I live close to an area known as "Sand Creek." Sand Creek is famous as the site of the Colorado Militia's (under the command of Col. John Chivington, Union officer and Civil War hero) massacre of unarmed women, children and elderly men who had earlier that day been guaranteed their safety by other representatives of the Colorado and Federal governments.

I've lived all over this country and it's hard to find a place in America where Christian Europeans (and/or their descendants) haven't desecrated the land and its' indigenous populations. For that matter, it was the early Spaniards who introduced "scalping" to the Native Americans: they paid a bounty to their native allies for the scalps of their enemies (one scalp supposedly equaled one dead enemy Indian). Think about it the next time you see that famous tee-shirt saying "Fighting Terrorists Since 1492."

In the course of my public school education I was taught that one of the indicators of a civilized society was how they treated their dead, and that only uncivilized barbarians desecrate the dead (have you not seen any good autopsies on prime time TV lately?). I'm reminded of how many American soldiers (a lot of them good friends) came back from Vietnam with their collections of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong hats, insignias and human ears. One friend of mine told me that his graduation from Ranger School required that he cross the DMZ and return with all three of these items: his rank at graduation was to be determined by the rank of the enemy officer he removed them from...

Another thing to think about: as I mentioned above, His Majesty's Government sent more than 50,000 convicted criminals to the New World between 1620 and 1775 to serve out their sentences here (after we got uppity in 1776, the British started sending most of their convicts to Australia). Official accounts state that more than 50% of these people were expected to die before their sentences were up. But quite a few of the convicts survived, and they made their additions to the American gene pool (and the social, political and religious miasms) that spawned our Founding Fathers. Imagine the living conditions that shaped their lives, their thoughts and their deeds. Imagine how they treated their children... I'm still trying to understand why this particular statistic (the number and volume of imported convicted criminals) was left out of every American History course I had to suffer through in school, it would have helped to better explain a lot of the "history" they did try to spoon-feed me. Of course, I realize that honesty and history have little in common in our modern global society, history always being written by the "winners"... ah, wait a minute... there's the explanation: straight out of George Orwell's "1984" (but wasn't he writing about the evils of communism?)

So for any questions as to where I'm coming from: a chunk of my own genetic heritage arrived in the New World shortly after the Mayflower (Cotton Mather - the prosecuting attorney at the Salem witch trials - was part of that line). Another genetic line arrived with the influx of coal miners to Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia (all north European men and no women, this is where the Micmac genes in me come from). As most of the "family" I've known comes out of the north Maine woods (German, English, French, Penobscot) and the Canadian Maritimes, I, too, am your basic polyglot, Heinz 57, American. So much of my own heritage is still hidden and denied by living relatives that I have to suspect that quite a few of my own forebears were not fine, upstanding, law-abiding citizens. Unless I look at things from the perspective of a resident in a mass penal colony (re: using the "legal system" to persecute, torture and murder ordinary women for not going to my church?) Is there another, more sane explanation? ...please...

Anyway, whatever it took to survive is what determined the depth and experience of my ancestors' and my own humanity. And that is the crux of the problem... something that I have questioned all my life: my ancestors' and my own humanity.

And isn't it amazing how closely George Orwell's "Animal Farm" and "1984" parallel the political realities of American life in this 21st century? The ancient Romans took 1500 years to rise and fall to the point where we are now after less than 300 years (we're already outsourcing our military, already fighting the "barbarians" who are already inside our walls and our military). Is this really what "advanced" society and technology have done for us? Or is it just alcohol-and-drug-decayed genetics, coupled with the precepts of Big Government, Big Business, Big Labor and Big Religion, ~1,600 years down the road from the final collapse of Rome. I'm sorry, I remember once having hope for the future but my experiences with public schooling and general life in America destroyed that, even before I was eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam... and we're doing it again in Iraq... The in-born, unstoppable drive to think and reason and decipher truth and reality for myself, that's one helluva birth defect to suffer with these days. At a very early age I had an innate understanding of the Buddhist truth: Life is suffering... and then you die. But modern medicine will do its' best to make sure you live out your sentence on this world to its' fullest, and then they'll desecrate your body performing an autopsy to find out how you got away from them... and to find out if there is some excuse by which they can get out of paying on your life insurance policy...

Another truth I understood early on: any society that does not invest in the future of all its children is doomed. America, these days, spends far more money on prisons than on education. And imagine if our military, excuse me, "defense" budget were to be spent on our children and their education... and why is it that our "defense" budget is so huge anyway... have we, as Americans, done something so wrong, so dis-honorable, so incredibly loathsome, that we must dedicate huge amounts of our Gross Domestic Product to "defending" ourselves from the rest of Planet Earth? And these days, even from ourselves and our neighbors (yeah, the "Homeland Security" oxymoron)? Or has our government (doing the bidding of Big Business, Big Religion, Big Labor...) done something to the rest of Planet Earth in our name(s) and they expect us (and our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren) to pay the bill: out of our pockets and with our lives? Has anyone understood yet that what is happening in America right now is what happened in Germany between 1920 and 1939?

At the end of 2008, I'm asking myself: If we Americans enjoy such a superior way of life, a superior system of government, a better and fairer judiciary, total equality between the sexes, races, and religions, fair and equitable distribution of resources, a bigger and better God: more wise, more kind, more compassionate, more forgiving, more generous... then why doesn't anyone else on Earth see it... even when we're literally holding a (nuclear) gun to their heads?

In the end, it's really up to you, but I'd like to suggest that you think about it... "Life is most real when lived in the heart of the paradox."