How the British Taught Us the Meaning of Gratitude
It's that time of year where the folks in the good old USA gather their families together and remember our arrival to the North American continent by a group of religious refugees fleeing persecution in Britain and other parts of northern Europe. These brave pioneers landed in Massachusetts and established one of the earliest British colonies that wasn't immediately destroyed by cannibalism, plague, famine or reclamation parties sent by the displaced incumbent residents which places like Roanoke Island and a couple of the other colonies were seemingly cursed with. Don't get me wrong, this colony was no strong success in the beginning either, as not a single one of this group of settlers decided to take any levels in farming before embarking on the grueling voyage across the northern Atlantic to finally be able to live in such a way that their little sect of Protestantism could at least die out of its own folly instead of at the hands of the Anglicans and Catholics that were thinning their numbers in the Old World.
The legend states that a noble and peaceful tribe of Natives showed this group of nearly invalid zealots compassion, taking the time to teach them how to work the alien soil of this New World. The famines that plagued the colony during the early years of the northern Massachusetts colony was finally getting reined in and the people weren't starving to death. The harvest time was looked on with a new found air of hope and accomplishment, leading to what we call the legendary "First Thanksgiving Feast." There was an air of cooperation between the Natives and the settlers for a short time afterwards, until the interlopers had grown beyond the capacity of their small settlement's limited resources. So they did what any burgeoning group of resource consuming invaders would do, they started stealing from the very tribe that only a short time before had shown them compassion and brought them from the brink of utter annihilation. Thus the centuries old conflict between Natives and Brits had started in the north.
What a wonderful way to thank the people who saved an entire colony from becoming Roanoke II, the Disappearingening. This was to become the model for standard operating procedure amongst successive colonies all over the eastern seaboard, though typically the make friends with the locals step was skipped in the future incarnations of colony establishment. The gun was mightier that the tomahawk, and so the gun took what it could, leaving pillaged forests and smoldering villages in the wake of colonial expansion. This isn't even the worst of the damage that was caused by white people, I have not addressed the biological terrorism that was unleashed upon the unsuspecting and extremely susceptible Natives. European diseases like smallpox, and others, devastated far more people in the Native populaces than all the other means of eradication (guns, swords, farm implements, arson, alcohol, etc). The Natives had never developed any antibodies the fend off these European borne pathogens because they were never exposed to them until large numbers of foreigners started appearing in their ancestral lands.
The gruesome treatment of these "savages" was rewarded in a similar manner to other dangerous wildlife at the time. Wolves, bears, mountain lions and Natives all had bounties placed upon them, so the colonies could maintain the semblance of safety that any frontier settlement deludes itself into believing exists around it. The colonist's were surely thankful to the to the major landholders for this false safety, thankful enough to accept the idea of killing another man to protect the resources they felt they were entitled to simply because they were there. Gratitude which would have been better placed in the first tribes that saved the oldest colonies from their own ineptitude, I'm sure.
If there had been any effort to actually attempt diplomatic measures of cooperation and understanding, who know what the early colonies would have been like. Instead, because people are plagued with this sense of exclusivism regarding differentiation throughout a populace, the colonists (or usses) and the Native (or thems) were inextricably drawn into a centuries long conflict that nearly extincted the northeastern tribes to make way for the exploding population of colonists from every English colony, leading through the long series of battles and even longer wars to establish dominance over the precious resources that came with the land which the victors claimed as spoils.
The colonists and soldiers became ever more grateful to the vacating Natives, that were diminished by illness and open combat, for giving up their ancestral homes so progress could be made in the name of civilizing the wilds so that way civilized men could erase the bounty of natural resources and replace them with livestock and low yielding crops. The continued on and on, and we all know that the American Revolution did nothing to decelerate the genocide of the Natives in the grand scheme of history...
That's how our ancestors gave thanks to the people who helped them survive the failings of their own ineptitude in a strange new environment. That's seriously 200+ years of gratitude that the interlopers expressed to the incumbents, almost wiping the Native tribes completely out in the expansionistic fervor that eventually became known as "Manifest Destiny," though the name was coined nearer the end of this period of thanking the Natives that helped us on occasion by taking everything away from them a swathe at a time, for nearly two and a half centuries.
Now, I was taught that gratitude was expressed in a congenial manner toward outside assistance given to help positively rectify an internal issue (like the British colonists starving for a couple years before the tribe of Natives intercede and the colony survives, or a person drops a small object and loses it until another person assists in locating and recovering said lost object). The gratitude should be a humble gesture that doesn't demean either the helper or the helped. That's what I've always thought the act of thanking someone should be. The early colonists apparently never received that small portion of grace that their god had bestowed upon the pinnacle of his Creation all those centuries before civilized cultures came to the west. Obviously that whole god and grace thing is a load of crap by any reckoning, but people still buy into the same crock today, in the age of explanations and evidence that point toward the absence of any deity that may resemble the one(s) described in any religious texts that humanity has found throughout the ages.
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| From the French and Indian War* |
In the same vein as the majority of this piece, I am thankful for:
1. Rich people not paying their fair share of taxes and buying politicians.
2. Our elected officials bickering over petty things while major decisions loom toward disaster.
3. Christians preventing equality in marriage and interfering with pro-choice establishments.
4. Corporations controlling the lion's share of legislators in every level of government.
5. US Government agencies monitoring private communiques of everyone, citizen or not.
6. Climate change and science deniers establishing science class curricula that include magic.
7. Hostilities all around the world to "protect"our interests abroad, namely opium and oil.
8. Having to pay ever higher tuition to get a decent education, and the lifelong debt that accrues from it.
DISCLAIMER!!! The gratitude expressed in this piece is purely sardonic and is not actually the position I hold on these topics. If there is any question on my position, just apply some old-fashioned logic and common sense to your confusion, and you'll see my true stance on these issues. If you still think I support any of the aforementioned list, then you probably need to dismiss your imaginary friend and think for yourself for a change. Thank you for taking the time out of your holiday to read this piece.
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It's the time that charity toward not yourself is slightly encouraged under the pretense of doing a good deed for some less fortunate individual through the hands of some religious organization that puts more into their employees' hands than into the total budget meant to help someone in need of it, all year long. I think of all the things that come with the holidays, the charitable demeanor that sweeps over the populace for that short, short time in December, should be an all the time sentiment, regardless of season.
