Because this is a short week – preparing, traveling, celebrating Thanksgiving takes most of it – I thought I should take a break from the blog. But an idea kept creeping up in my brain that was too tempting to let go.
Thanksgiving is a story about the early experience of a bunch of people who had left their ancestral homes and sought a better future to somebody else’s land. All human migrations are played out the same way. Almost always, some people move into a place already inhabited by others. Sometimes, the newcomers and the indigenous people find a way to live peacefully together. Most often, the newcomers use aggression to takeover and subjugate the natives. Many years later, the descendants of those newcomers declare the land their own since time immemorial. They become the new natives that feel they have to defend “their” land from new newcomers.
Since the time information started to travel ahead and faster than people, the “natives” everywhere have some idea who the would-be newcomers are and where they come from. Thus, the natives make judgments about the character and cultural makeup of the newcomers. The Europeans know a lot about the Syrians, Iraqi, Afghani, and African refugees who cross the Mediterranean. They know their religion, their culture, the kind of countries they come from. So, if, for example, they happen to be Christian, they may be more welcoming of them than if they are Muslim. And so on.
On this side of the Atlantic, we also know where the refugees and migrants come from and who they are. Since the founding of America, we have judged that we prefer to let in more of the immigrants that come from Europe. Further north and west in Europe, even better. Not so good if you come from south of our border or the Middle East or Africa.
Now let’s think of those native Americans who saw the Mayflower sail into Plymouth, Mass. They knew nothing of the people that disembarked. Nothing about their culture or the countries they had come from. All they saw was that these newcomers looked like them, walked like them, and communicated with some medium that sounded like a language. In short, the natives saw the Pilgrims as fellow Homo Sapiens – not that those natives or anyone else knew at the time which human species we are.
What if the natives knew the Pilgrims had sailed from war-torn Europe? What if the natives knew the newcomers came from a continent that was in the middle of all-out religious wars; a continent whose people were willing to kill in the name of God? What if the natives knew the newcomers carried deadlier weapons and diseases? Would the native Americans be as welcoming as they were? Would they have helped the Pilgrims survive their first winter, had they known the aggressive nature of the newcomers?
So, I wonder whether America as we know it might have been the result of ignorance?
Let's Reason 