A Druid Nation

The well-known reality that generations of Americans have been taught in school is that 102 deeply religious Protestant men, women and children from England landed at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts on December 21, 1620. They were later to be referred to collectively as Pilgrims.

But instead of these Pilgrims, imagine the same number of Buddhist monks had arrived. Or perhaps a boatload of Druids came ashore on that cold, miserable day in December. Envision the last remaining members of that mysterious “pagan” priesthood, first mentioned in Julius Caesar's diaries in 55 B.C, standing on the beaches of North America.

Would the original inhabitants of North America, the Indians, have been treated better? Would there have been slavery? Would we have learned that we're merely one part of the natural world around us?Yeah, what if?

As we Americans tear ourselves apart in 2019, it becomes ever more plausible that seeing eye to eye or at least “getting along” with each other could become simply impossible. Yeah, but what if?

The arrival of Europeans or for that matter our imaginary Buddhist monks, probably meant the civilizations of North and South America were doomed from the start, almost from the moment the Spanish conquistadors clanked ashore in their suits of armor in the fifteenth century, more than 100 years before our pious Protestants arrived in North America.

It was, however, not because of European technology---or Christianity, that caused the massive destruction to the civilization of the first inhabitants of North and South America. The unstoppable enemy was disease, unwittingly (at least initially) brought by Europeans, of which the the indigenous population had no immunity.

Because of individuals like Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel), Charles Mann (1491), Nathaniel Philbrick (Mayflower) and many others, we know, among other things, that geography matters, a lot. Unlike the early inhabitants in the Western Hemisphere, Europeans had domesticated animals such as oxen, cows and pigs that did not exist in North and South America.

Europeans contracted diseases that jumped from animals to humans and over time they built up a degree of resistance to them. Columbus, Cortez and other Europeans traveled with the ultimate weapon—not gunpowder—but hideous viruses like smallpox, typhus, influenza, diphtheria and measles. It turned out to be an unimaginable “ethnic cleansing” of entire societies. It may have been the greatest pandemic in human history.

While population numbers of North and South America, just before the arrival of the Spanish in the late 15^th century have been estimated from a low of 8 million to a high of more than a 100 million people, this has been a subject of controversy and debate for some time. But there appears to be little doubt that millions could have been killed by Europeans through disease, slavery, wars and environmental destruction.

It's most likely that no society that existed in North and South America in 1490 imagined their world would come crashing down upon them. After all, they knew from their creation stories that generations of their ancestors had strolled along the same paths they now walked.

This has been the story of human history, one group of people supplanting another group or being absorbed into the new tribe.

Yet, there is something different possibly happening today. What if there are no humans from somewhere else to replace anyone. What if there are no more human sounds, here in the United States or anywhere else. Yeah, but what if?

White America's secret, part 1

We must delight in each other, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.

(“A Model of Christian Charity,” John Winthrop, leading figure in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1630)

No ancient empire has risen or mouldered away within these limits. Except the red man, of doubtful origin and melancholy fate, America has no “surviving memorials of the past.”

(History of New Hampshire, George Barstow, 1858)

It would soon become the greatest mass slaughter of warm-blooded animals in human history. In Kansas alone the bones of thirty-one million buffalo were sold for fertilizer between 1868 and 1881.

(from Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C.Gwynne)

A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect.

W.E.B. DuBois

Violence is as American as cherry pie.

Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin [H. Rap Brown], 1960s

All a man needed was a horse, a gun and the open land, and he could conquer the world.

(attributed to U.S. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, 2014)

Vacuum domicilium

My favorite time to visit Cape Cod, the section of Massachusetts that juts out into the ocean, had always been in the fall, when the tourists had long gone and the beaches were deserted. It was the emptiness that I liked, watching the Atlantic Ocean crash onto the shore. It was easier to imagine so much.

That same ocean crashed onto the beaches when my ancestors landed in November of 1620—cold, miserable, frightened yet believing fervently in their stern religion and that they were the chosen people of God, about to establish the New Jerusalem.

To these early Pilgrims and Puritans, this New Jerusalem was deserted! It was vacuum domicilium, meaning “vacant dwelling.” It didn't fit the traditional English characteristic.”Unimproved” lands without any clear title were simply available.

Right away the views of the Indians and the Europeans regarding “property” were ultimately irreconcilable. For the newcomers, title was available for the first occupant who would clear the land, build on it, garden, farm and permanently inhabit the property. Property for Europeans meant power and virtually no one in Europe had any in the seventeenth century. And there was so much land for the taking and so few white people to take it, arguably the most fertile region on the planet. We had to be the chosen people.

Back in 2005 I wrote an article entitled A Druid Nation. I asked the question whether or not it would have been different if someone other than the Puritans had established settlements in America.

A clear duality exists in this country. My Puritan relatives were not Libertarians, contrary to some of the more fanciful views of white conservatives today. In the beginning it was about shared responsibility and community norms. It was also about obeying God's laws … as interpreted by the leaders of the community. William Jenkyn the Puritan martyr, who died in Newgate Prison in London, said that, “As the wicked are hurt by the best things, so the godly are bettered by the worst.”

While the Puritan communitarian strain pretty much dominated the settling of the “new” world, the secular influence of the European Enlightenment dominated the founding of the United States.

On Thomas Jefferson's tomb nothing is written about being the third president of the United States. What we see is that he was the author of the Declaration of American Independence, the Father of the University of Virginia and, the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom. The state, in Jefferson's eyes, had no business in proselytizing religious views.

We white people have been mixing, matching, justifying and making stuff up from the very beginning.

Continued...