What I know about how we got here

Two particular quirks in my character have always stood me in exceptionally good stead:

• I was born with a deep love of relationships, rather than of family, clan or tribe.
• I was blessed, by both nature & profession, a historian.

My friends & pleasant acquaintances are familiar with the first quirk.  It was at the heart of being the The Cupcake Lady of the Bryn Athyn Bounty Farm Market for 3+ years, spending hours every week baking cupcakes & whoopie pies, assembling all manner of sugary embellishments, blending my trademark designer frostings.  

 

Over the years, it was a complete financial dud.  On a rip roaring Saturday, I made a free & clear profit of $33 dollars. For 6+ hours of work.  Ah, but ask about the emotional profits.  Those were off the charts.  

For three blissful hours, I connected with children of all ages, to parents, to friends. To toddlers & teens who custom designed their cupcakes or bagged classic whoopies, to all the parents who smiled & cooed as their youngsters worked their magic, to all the people who walked passed & all the pooches who stopped by for a lap of water at the dish that was always filled to the brim by John for thirsty pups.  All of that, brought to me & my community(ies) by my first quirk, treasuring of relationship for its own sake.

And then there is the second quirk - being an historian.   My rapidly dwindling number of Facebook friends are familiar with that, evidenced in my "worthwhile read" postings & less frequent DEEV UNI "lessons" & the rarer still pithy observation.  

For 30+ years, I considered myself a steady Republican - not as deeply GOP as Mom but reliably straight ticket.  But even in those days, both of us - and the 3rd Lockhart Lady, my sister, Mim - were fiscally conservative but socially liberal.  

 

We loved Barry Goldwater, stood by Richard Nixon, admired the Midwest wholesomeness of Gerald Ford.  And both Mom & I adored George H. W. Bush;  I still do.  His son - W was another matter.  In Mom's opinion, George W. Bush was the opposite of his father, as ill-prepared for the presidency as his Poppy seemed groomed all his life to take the reins (and would have won a 2nd term if the GOP had ever forgiven him breaking his "No new taxes" promise).

She would be horrified by the rise of Donald Trump, but not all that surprised.  She saw the roots of the anti-intellectualism in W's election.  To a certain segment of the once intellectually strong GOP, the fact that he wasn't the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree burnished his every-man credentials.  

Mom was gone by the time I taught the history of this great continent to at-risk high schoolers.  Lessons started with throwing out theories on the arrival of the first people all the way to the Dred Scott Decision.  

What great discussions the two of us would have had, as my eyes opened WIDE.  

I taught a similar arc of history to BACS 7th Grade, back in 1980-81, but there were NO no similarities between the two courses.  My latter students high school, predominantly Hispanic & black, kids who were already bruised & bloodied (& bruised & bloodied in return) by society.  And I was no longer the starry-eyed teacher, although just as fervently patriotic to the country's ideals, if not to its realities.

That long preamble gets me to the reason for this posting - what I know about what got us to the fine mess that is the 2016 Presidential Election.

Let's see - we went from two terms of Ronald Reagan to one of George H.W. Bush (done in by his party & Ross Perot) to two of Bill Clinton, two of George W. Bush, two of Barack Obama.  

The rise of anti-intellectualism during Bush 43's administration was front & center in the 2008 run for the presidential roses, in the form of Sarah Palin, party-picked to balance the no-longer-mavericky John McCain.  It burst into spectacular blossom in 2010, with the rise of the Tea Party faction of the GOP - "America first," narrow focused & proud of it!

We had a financial melt-down that saw the 1% recover & do better than ever, while gutting & decimating the still sprawling middle class.

We were at war longer than ever before, fighting a foe we attacked without cause (even if we had found weapons of mass destruction, three guesses where they got them), using forms of "interrogation" that, as a civilized nation, we'd always stood squarely against.

We had eight years of a party refusing to work across the aisles, that primaried anyone who dared try.  Who gave the boot to Eric Cantor & drove out John Boehner because neither, and countless like them, weren't sufficiently conservative, weren't willilng to burn down the government if it didn't tread the increasingly narrow conservative path that groups like FreedomWorks & Americans for Prosperity set out as the road back to our true American ideals.

We had Fox News & conservative radio talk shows painting President Obama as every sort of horror, as the embedded OTHER who would bring down our very way of life.  And now that it has crumbled around us, point to him as the cause, rather than looking around their inner circle for the perpetrators of our country's massively self-inflicted wounds.

But that's not how we got to an election match up between the fabulously flawed Hillary Rodham Clinton (who got to where she is for reasons beyond my comprehension) & Donald J. Trump.  

Donald Trump nabbed the GOP nod by appealing to a deeply rooted American psyche that we, as a nation, ignore - no, that we disinherit, in spite of the fact it most certainly never truly distanced itself from us.  And because we would not, could not acknowledge & say our mea culpas, it stayed just below our nation's veneer of civility, simmering bubbling waiting to come to full boil.  

It's our unacknowledged past that got us to this unimaginable moment.

Here's what I learned teaching a group of at-risk teenagers, from freshmen to seniors, about the history of this continent.  

We have been a mess since the first moment the Spaniards arrived in the Bahamas, since the English arrived well north.  The Spaniards conquered the civilizations they met & subjugated the people in the names of their heavenly King & their earthly monarchs.  

The English, later reconfigured as Americans, pushed westward the people they encountered, cheating & lying to them without apparently a shred of comprehension that what they were doing was wrong, certainly without a hint of remorse.

My wake-up call was teaching about the Walking Treaty (now more commonly known as the Walking Purchase - HA!) of 1737.  I was all excited about teaching this particular unit, because I'd been raised on the story of the Walking Purchase, which happened right in our own back yard.  What a terrific unit to teach!  Not so fast...

 

According to some sources, it was an agreement between the William Penn family (Penn had returned to England, leaving his son, Thomas, in charge of family interests, the proprietors of the colony (aka business interests) & the Lenape tribe.  One small glitch - the Lenapes had no knowledge of the agreement, but the English insisted a deal had been struck & giving their word was sacred to the Lenapi.  To the English - not so much.  From beginning to end, it was a flat out swindle.  

Modern sources are almost unanimous on that point.  First of all, there was no actual document, just an insistence that such a deal had been struck.  Second, the Lenapes had agree to a walk;  what unfolded was a marathon RUN with well-trained long distance runners.  Oh, and instead of heading EAST as the Lenape had expected (from a given point to the river), the runners mad a beeline due north, where the Delaware River takes a sharp bend to the left, bagging themselves considerably more land than even the purported agreement would have allowed. All perfectly legal, just highly unethical.  But, hey - business is business.

In preparing my lesson plan, I learned that Thomas Penn & his business manager considered it all on the up & up, because if the Lenape were that naive, so lousy at sharp business practices, they deserved what they got.

That exaggerating that last bit.  They scoffed at the way tribes put total faith in a person's word & handshake.  

Here's what I believe.  And I think that I am the only person who admits thinking this, although it's not possible that other New Church thinkers haven't come to similar conclusions.

My eyes opened WIDE studying the tribes of what is now Northeastern United States, particularly the Iroquois & the Iroquois Nation.  Was stunned to realize that I do not remember one teacher in elementary school, high school & college pointing out what seems to me the clear relationship between what my birth faith describes as the representative worship of the Ancient Church & the people who lived throughout the Eastern Seaboard .  How could they not SEE it, the similarities are so clear.  At least to me.

But the people inhabiting this virtually untouched land were beyond foreign to the newly arrived Europeans & English.  No written language?  No books?  No BIBLE?  These people deserved everthing they got, and get it they certainly did.

I am not going to go into the horrific treatment of the native tribes under the Europeans & English.  I'm going to let The West Wing do it for me, with a link that I dare you to check out.

For me, there’s no reason to go any farther than our treatment of the native tribes who inhabited these lands for thousands of years before my ancestors set foot on its soill, who considered themselves steward rather than masters, who could no more conceive of owning land than owning the waves.  To Thomas Penn & his business associates, they were rubes ripe for the taking.  To me, they were much more.

Look around.  That same mentality – business first  last always  - surrounds us.  And I’m pretty sure how we got here.  ool & college pointing out what seems to me the clear relationship between what my birth faith describes as the representative worship of the Ancient Church & the people who lived throughout the Eastern Seaboard .  How could they not SEE it, the similarities are so clear.  At least to me.



But the people inhabiting this virtually untouched land were beyond foreign to the newly arrived Europeans & English.  No written language?  No books?  No BIBLE?  The new arrivals determined these people deserved everything they got, and get it they certainly did.

I am not going to go into the horrific treatment of the native tribes under the colonialists & settlers.  Will let The West Wing do it for me, with a link that I dare you to check out.

 

For me, there’s no reason to go any farther than our treatment of the native tribes who inhabited these lands for thousands of years before my ancestors set foot on its soill, who considered themselves steward rather than masters, who could no more conceive of owning land than owning the waves.  To Thomas Penn & his business associates, they were rubes ripe for the taking.  To me, they were much more.

Look around.  That same mentality – business first  last always  - surrounds us.  And I’m pretty sure how we got here.