We find ourselves in a very perilously place. The why is not a very pretty picture. What you do not acknowledge you can not change. The truth is that our real story is dramatically different from the truth. We were never great, we just experienced moments of greatness. We teach our children lies about our history because they represent good fiction.
It starts with the premise that the early settlers came to these shores seeking freedom from persecution. It sounds high minded and noble but it’s not really the truth. It was more about economics than anything else. They came here because North America represented an opportunity for a way of life that they could never expect to have in Europe. We talk about religious persecution because it makes for a better narrative.
When you look around this country you find a history of lies and misdirection. Starting with Christopher Columbus through Ronald Reagan it was a pack of lies that fit the narrative we wanted to create for ourselves.
There is no nexus between Christopher Columbus and North America. Columbus never set foot on North America. We celebrate him because his story of “discovery” meshes nicely with the American story of our own discovery. How do you discover something that was already occupied? The discovery narrative allows you to be ok with the exploitation of the Tiano people. It makes our own story of the exploitation of the indigenous people far more palatable and less horrific. In fact the only thing that Columbus had in common with North America was the exploitation and pillaging of the Native people in the Caribbean. Today even though we know the truth about the Columbus and the early settlers we still teach a false narrative that supports the vision of we say we are.
We arrived on these shores and immediately set about pushing the indigenous people off of their land. They did not go willingly. We’ve created a narrative that describes people as settlers while in reality they were thieves. We justify it by describing indigenous people as savages that didn’t know what to do with the land. We made almost 370 treaties between settlers and indigenous people between 1778 and 1871, few of them were honored. We made movies where the settlers were the heroes and the indigenous people were the villains.
We like fiction. The battle of the little Big Horn was fiction. The truth is that Custer attacked the indigenous population and then found himself hopelessly outnumbered. In history however the indigenous people are the villain.
We celebrate Abraham Lincoln as the great emancipator and somehow as the savior of black people in American. Great narrative but not the truth. Lincoln emancipated the slaves because it was politically expedient and furthered the economic interest of the North. He never supported equality between white and black people. In fact he wanted to send black people back to Africa because he believed it would be difficult for free blacks to live as free people in America. Lincoln wasn’t motivated by some sense of moral altruism but the real story is not convenient for the narrative.
We talk about the building of railroads that facilitated the expansion west but we leave out the part about how those railroads were built. Without Chinese labor building those railroads would have been a far more difficult task. We imported Chinese labor and later rewarded them with the Chinese Imigration law of 1882 which basically said that people of Chinese descent were no longer needed. We leave that out of the narrative.
We talk about Woodrow Wilson entering the first World War and his participation in the Treaty of Versailles but rarely deal with who Wilson really was. He was a racist who screened The Birth of A Nation in the Whitehouse and systematically removed black people from the US Civil Service system but that’s not part of the narrative.
Fast forward to the great Communicator Ronald Reagan beloved by the conservative right. Perhaps no President in American History is more responsible for suppressing the national organized labor movement. He is single handedly responsible for the beginning of the greatest wealth redistribution in the history of the nation. He reduced taxes for the rich and corporations while instituting taxation for Social Security.
There’s so much more to the story of who we really are but it doesn’t fit the narrative. We love fiction. That addiction to fiction allowed us to see a third rate grifter elected to the office of President. The story sold because the idea that a self made “billionaire” who wanted to return America to her glory days was irresistible to the Amwrican ego. We’ve never let the truth get in the way of a good lie. Now our addiction to the lie threatens to destroy this country as we know it. The big lie as become a growing cancer that we don’t seem to have the will to kill. The chickens always come home to roost.
Think!!
Eyes Wide 👀 Open!!!
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