Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams.
There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs.
Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do was to escape from their old-country religious persecution, they carried the kingdoms of their own supposed superiority with them to the Americas. Even as they found themselves here, in the Americas, surrounded by brown and black and tan people from everywhere else in the world, they fingered the prayer beads of racism, right in the middle of the mixing mass of people from everywhere.
The clannish and religious notions of male superiority soaked deeply into our families. It was still men who pioneered, who provided, who protected, who thought deeply and sensibly. Women were for making babies and for digging potatoes.
I do not know how we did it--or they did it--but our forebears managed to insist that we would not be another Protestant or Catholic or Muslim nation with God for a King and a man on a throne. And we would not be just another overgrown clan of Italians or Englishmen or Germans or Spaniards. We would be a nation founded on human ideals: they are in the Constitution.
The religious self-righteousness did not go away, of course. It is still everywhere. The stupid and ignorant notions of skin color did not go away. They are everywhere, too. And all the while, on this rich agricultural continent,
with deep dark soil and cheap labor, the whole world began to shift toward a civilization more focussed on industry: coal, and oil, and steam, and diesel, and now atomic and wind and solar energy. What had been secure jobs drifted off, and some of the lucky kids got jobs in the steel mills, and at General Motors and John Deere, and Intel and Microsoft. Without knowing how it happened, the unlucky guys watched the market for harnesses go away, and the steel mills go away, and the cost of tuition and health care shoot for the sky.
Roll all of that into an indigestible, frustrated, angry, angry blob; a really big, madder-than-hell blob scared about growing old, and their kids's chances, and inventing madder-then-hatter conspiracy theories about what America should have been all about, or should be all about, again, and the whole half of the human world saying that life, and families, and the economy, and just about everything else was a sexist hell.
Send those people to elect a president! Let them draw voting boundaries to protect themselves! Pretend that we still live on a little island off the coast of England, or in a cozy little country surrounded by mountains. Pretend that we are really a nation of tall, blue-eyed Swedes, just as God had intended us to be from the beginning of time! Pretend that real Americans believe in a Semitic god who has splendid plans for tall, white, male, macho households.
It is like having a tumor that won't go away.
America isn't heaven on earth. It isn't Christian, or Anglo-Saxon. It is a place, and a chance, to live together in a better way than before. Our best ice skaters aren't all from Norway. Our best chefs aren't French or Oaxacan. Our kids look like the kids from China and Africa and the Sandwich Islands.
"New occasions teach new duties.
Time makes ancient good uncouth.
They must upward still, and onward,
who would keep abreast of truth."
We will figure it out.
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