We have met the enemy, and he/she/it is the GOP

May 23, 2023

By Mike Weland
Publisher

Just 247 years ago, the founders of our nation declared the severance of ties from the governments of the old world, particularly Great Britain, declaring proudly that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

In the same document, the authors accused the tyrant, King George III, of having ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, brought to our shores "foreign Mercenaries to compleat the Works of Death, Desolation, and Tyranny already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy of the Head of a civilized Nation."

He "endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions."

None but the first Europeans to land on these shores ever saw or knew the peoples and civilizations extant on this continent, and theirs was but the most brief glimpse. It wasn't they who tamed "the merciless Indian Savages."

By the merest chance, the diseases carried by the Europeans proved more virulent to the visited than the visitors, and it took the germs they carried far less time to "discover" and exploit this new world than it took the men who came to claim credit. By the time the first colony established on this continent 128 years after Columbus "discovered" it, diseases the white men carried here had raged like wildfire from sea to shining sea, wiping out an estimated 90-percent of the indigenous population of a great civilization on a vast continent.

Had it been otherwise, the ships of the "discoverers" would have carried back to Europe germs of death that would have made the Black Death of the mid 1300s seem innocuous.

"All men are created equal."

Our nation gained at last a toehold on this New World in 1607, Jamestown. But the "settlers" were attacked by a formidable enemy, the Paspahegh, who killed one and wounded 11. But later, when those who established Jamestown realized they'd established their enclave in a cesspool, they relied on "friendly" Indians to assure their survival.

Those at Jamestown met a strong and proud people. People who, in all respects, proved their equals, if not their betters. "Savages."

Peoples who, in a blink of time and with no idea why, came through a pandemic with no explanation and no cure, but an estimated nine out of every ten of their people dead.

There were no savages here, there were people beleaguered, in mourning, decimated. Facing new and strange people out to tame the merciless savages, to take from them, to finish the work of sicknesses common in the old world but never before existent in the new. Coughs and sneezes decimated new world civilization, not feats of arms or superiority of intelligence or race.

Without the benefits of "education," "science," "technology," the "ill-educated savages" of this continent held the white eyes at bay ... fighting and defeating their military might and technological superiority well into the 1890s.

In 1974, just 50 years ago, a small tribe in Boundary County declared war again, not to fight, but to demand confirmation of the precept that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

The Ktunaxa, the Kootenai people of Idaho, have every day since proven the truth of those words we claim to cherish, in a way far more convincingly than we, their un-invited neighbors, have ever elicited in word or deed.

In all cultures, there are those who insist they are superior, entitled to a small measure more by virtue of their own analysis. In all cultures, such people speak of "me." In all cultures, such a leader is a despot. In no culture has a despot served the public good. We may not have the same abilities, the same mores, the same aspirations, but we are all equal. Endowed with the same inalienable rights.

In all cultures, truth speaks best and most honestly to those who ask  "what is best for we?" Ask any MAGA Republican friends... "We have to get Trump back in office and own the libs!"