Do unto others….

"I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way.

      I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house,

            we had an enormous feast,

                  and then I killed them and took their land."

Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz "Jon Stewart" (b. 1962)

You know who he is....

Yeah, it's the dark side of the Pilgrims' saga…..

Stewart says in a sort of funny way what many of us never knew or maybe just don't think about too much….

In fact, most of the First Peoples on the Atlantic coast in the 17^th century weren't killed by Europeans in battle…..rather, they were struck down by the diseases the new arrivals brought to America.

Within a generation or two after first contact with Europeans, 90% of the mis-named "Indians" were dead.

That's one of the reasons why successive waves of new colonists thought North America was "an empty  paradise"—most of the people who had already lived there weren't there any more.

P.S. For another take by the eminent Progressive historian, Charles A. Beard, click here

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2013/07/trash-talk-to-king-george.html

http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/2011/11/book-review-1491-by-charles-c-mann.html