NORMAN — Editor, The Transcript:
The conservative mind hates revision because it often exposes previously held beliefs to the bright light of truth where myth and story wither. In the case of our nation’s early history, an unbiased look tells of genocide and exploitation masked as manifest destiny.
Who founded this great country?
I would propose the vast majority were the ne’er-do-wells who could not make a run of it in Europe. They offered their services to the merchant and aristocracy classes in the purely commercial venture of indenture. For who would brave disease and discomfort of a monthlong sea voyage in a rickety worm-eaten hulk, with the high probability of death by drowning in a sinking?
It is he who has nothing, no land, no property to hold on to, no established wealth ... the ne’er-do-well. The church and the brothel arrived hand in hand to service those vagabonds.
Our first exports were demon rum, white sugar and the habituating vice, tobacco. All of these trades required vast quantities of human slaves, and we had destroyed the native populations with our diseases, several Caribbean races already extinct. We imported slaves, human property, actually something much less than human. Soon, there were many times more African slaves than white Christians in the population.
When the Mayflower finally put in to shore, earlier than anticipated and at an undesirable location, it was because they had run out of beer. The good Pilgrims and, later, the Puritans in Massachusetts, pillorying their daughters and wives at the stake as witches, established a state religion and drove out anyone with opposing beliefs.
William Roberts did not think the Puritan State should dictate a man’s beliefs and was forced out. That is how we got Rhode Island. Anne Hutchison and Thomas Hooker were similarly driven out, and they, too, formed new colonies — again ne’r do wells and outcasts, heretics outside the sheltering arms of Christianity.
The Catholics, hated by the Protestants and forbidden to enter any of the colonies, petitioned the King of England to create the colony Maryland to avoid the other Christians’ prosecutions.
In conclusion, the vast majorities of people in the colonies were mostly slaves, indentured servants, adventure seekers, expatriated British and French paupers, most here to make some money and exploit the riches of the wilderness. A few were heretics not considered Christian and were really just trying to avoid the Christians.
As for our Founding Fathers, they went out of their way to make this a secular, not Christian, nation. A simple read of the Constitution shows this truth. Everyone should be open to revision as facts reveal themselves. Science is that way. Conservatives, by definition, are not. “Liberal” derives from liberty, freedom from old thinking and worn-out ways and freedom to accept a new reality.
I got most of this information from an old fifth-grade U.S. history book. It is common knowledge and should come as no surprise.
CHRIS CALLAWAY
Norman
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