This is where politicians got their modus operandi. Maybe, at first, it was ignorance, only willful, but now it is deliberate. We say it’s so, and give no credit to the plain facts. We discovered this land. Never mind that people were already living here.
He strode under cathedral bowers as silently and powerfully as the noble but doomed buck that raised its rack to smell for danger. A chief of one of the lost tribes of Israel, living simply in a new Eden, he was used to fierce independence before settlers and waring nations burned the open land for farms and cities. Uncorrupted by church or school, free as rivers without dams, strong as the great cedars, he spoke directly to God, but, still, the noble savage knelt to serve his British general.
History is written by the winners and the winners say it couldn’t get any better. If you don’t like it, you may leave; otherwise, please suffer quietly.
Our forefathers built this perfect world to benefit us; therefore, by definition, everyone benefits and those who profit are intended to profit.
The Calvinist argument works here, too. Since God’s select people must be successful, successful people must be God’s select. Therefore, being here with these laws and privileges against all odds must mean they were given by divine intervention. Any change to them would be a sacrilege.
Not only is equality enshrined as a constitutional goal, but it is possible for anybody, however humble their origin, to achieve happiness here. Even if we believed this, we must nevertheless admit that there’s a difference between what’s possible and what’s likely, even with fidelity and hard work. Happiness can be elusive. In these times, it’s not likely associated with the ability to pull up stakes, move west, dig gold and kill Indians, or with a “Father Knows Best” suburban lifestyle.
Being full of it helped them. I say this as a Native American. The people from the east and their institutions were much less perfect than they should have been. The invaders didn’t stint to commit any crime against nature or humanity to achieve their short-sighted goals. If they were driven by an irresistible destiny, then that was to make it clear that their ignorance served their greed, and their destruction and cruelty were weapons that didn’t blunt even after they had discredited those who wielded them.
Wherever tribal allegiances are disguised as imperialism virtues the ideal of the nation is reduced to expediency of blindness and greed.
Believing other people are less than human results in behavior that is less than human. Racism is all lies. The idea of race is a social and political fabrication that persists as a means of subjugation.
What most people think of is what they fear, without understanding the alternative.
The book of myths