There
is no doubt that as a country we have a very dark history. Colonialism was
based in exploitation or escape from that very thing and those evils are our
ancestry. Our people either came with the goal of exploiting a new land,
escaping terrible persecutions with no place left to go, being forced here in
chains and irons, or having all of that terror come to the land of their birth.
All that heaviness increased as time went on. Resentment from slaves clashed
with already brewing resentment of colonists and natives driven by greed, fear,
or both. The idyllic Pilgrim Thanksgiving feast was probably nothing close to
the pageantry of a grade school reenactment.
All
of that seething darkness of humanity is still with us, but the glimmering
light of hope, redemption, and prosperity is also still with us. Out of the
darkness of oppression these fearless groups of people left their distant
shores to come live on what they saw as a vast wilderness only to believe they
somehow had individual rights to claim it as their own and to subdue it to
their own desires. Some held beliefs of religious liberty and purpose but they
completely overstepped their bounds by refusing to understand the new people
they encountered, labeling them as savage with all the heaviness of that word
merely because they were different. It was ignorance and stubborn indifference
to the great similarities that ALL human beings share. Not two hundred years
into all this greed and ignorance that Britain had staked claim to, the
colonists declared themselves free of the laws and taxes that Britain was
imposing on them, stating that “…all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” What beautiful words to declare, yet how ironic that the very men who penned and conceived them were, in fact, slave owners. From the inception of the discovery of these new continents by Europeans, human darkness and human hope have striven to create better things. I believe the light is overcoming the darkness.
The
problem is that we are still struggling. We are okay with things being off kilter
as long as we and those around us are safe. That’s where we fall short of our pledge
for liberty and justice for ALL. It would be wrong to say that we don’t want
and aspire to that goal, but it is also wrong to say that we really work for
it. Contentment has bred hypocrisy amongst us and we don’t help ourselves by
shaping our narrative in a way that ignores, even protects, the ugly darkness
that we all carry.
The
dark history of the United States is the dark history of the world. We must grapple
with that history and stop wallowing in individual contentment to achieve the
ideals that we have been aspiring to for over four hundred years. Only if we
really believe that black and brown lives matter can we begin to understand
that glib, content, sweeping-under-the-rug-all-our-dirt idea of all lives
mattering. We cannot abandon our history, but we must cling to the very hope
that has brought us here across stormy seas through a revolution and civil war
to this place we are now. I am proud of our ideals and I want to continue to
work to achieve them. It is out of these ashes that we will rise. I will not
give up on the American dream.
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