Blog 2027 – 04.13.2021

Meet Kit 1934, Chapter 4 & Looking Back to 1934

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tGYv3o2lY5xKLN8c9pt-uJkJPE4n5FBW/view?usp=drivesdk

Meet Kit 1934, Chapter 4 & Looking Back to 1934

Today concludes the last of the three American Girl books I chose to include in my David Reads Children’s Books project. I did include several books from the Native American or First People’s perspective and of the people that were brought here against their wills in chains to replace them as a cheap labor force to enrich the new and growing land owner class. It had been decided by the crown heads, religious, and political heads of Europe that the largely decimated indigenous population would be allowed the limited freedom and movement of custodial life on reservations usually to remote and hardly habitable lands unless they were found to have gold or other minerals of value at which point those lands were taken too and the people relocated further west or to the swamps of Florida.

Andrew Jackson before he became President was a infamous Indian fighter (killer). After invading the Spanish territory and defeating their army at Pensacola, where upon they ceded the territory to the U.S., Jackson was made Governor of the U.S. Territory of Florida.

In a blog of a few days ago I mistakenly wrote that the HBO Documentary, Exterminate The Brutes, had only two parts. I watched the third part yesterday and recorded part four. A quote from part three struck me, much of the content has, as so shockingly plausible, the author and narrator says, how very much we would like to relegate “genocide” a term coined a hundred years before Hitler to Hitler’s attempted genocide of the Jews when the there is a list of several pages of genocides and attempted genocides that took place before Hitler and after him. It is a fact that Hitler and his henchmen patterned their Final Solution of the Jewish Problem after the American treatment of indigenous and once slave populations here. Andrew Jackson was not the first nor the last American to believe he was doing a great service by ridding the world of those he believed to be his inferiors. The rich land owners and entrepreneurs of this New World, so called, had not only enriched themselves off the forced labor of subjugated people, but convinced the poorer people of their own backgrounds that they were also superior to these “brutes and beasts” who were not really people at all in their minds.

Even Thomas Jefferson who penned the words, “We hold these truths to be self evident that all mean are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” probably only thought those words were meant for white property owning males – the only ones who would be allowed to vote in the new nation he was proposing for many years. Some state legislatures would it appears like to limit voting again.

We think we have come a long way from that narrow minded thinking but have we really? If so why do we try so hard, those of us who even admit the attempted genocide of the Jews by the Nazis last century, to believe that it was the biggest or only sanctioned purging of people believed to be inferior. Why do so many of us fail to see the life in everyone and everything and honor it as we do our own. We seem to always be inventing enemies where none exist, only everyday people and they all only our brothers and sisters.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SmFdCz7FBsmPMcvte0eAFGVqQcCvW-GW/view?usp=drivesdk

Everyday People