A Case of Premature Celebration

Well the left is an oozy puddle of happy goo on the floor this morning as their fantasy of somehow making Hillary Clinton the president gets a shot in the gelatinous appendage with the indictment of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. CNN and the NY Times are fairly quivering with excitement. I expect to hear plenty of premature high-fiving from my Democrat friends this morning. Given how impossible it was to dislodge a corrupt Democrat regime the past 8 years, I expect it will be every bit as hard to dislodge Trump, given that he learned the art of dirty politics from Democrats.

It may be that Trump's a sleazeball, but he's our sleazeball. At least that will be how the Trumpbots spin it all. Me? I didn't vote for him for precisely this reason. BUT, as long as he keeps doing conservative things like bringing down Obamacare (which is even more expensive every year), shrinking the government, cutting taxes and appointing conservative judges, I'm willing to allow that perhaps the presidency is teaching him something.

In the ever-sleazier world of politics, you play the hand you were dealt. The Democrat left is trying to overturn the table because they don't like the cards they got during this last deal. If somebody doesn't impeach Donald Trump soon, the left is going to declare jihad. They may already have with the big Antifa protest scheduled for November 4.

Wouldn't it be lovely if they gave a riot and nobody watched. I think news agencies should to only talking head reports that day and show no pictures. If Antifa doesn't get on TV it will make them very very double-ungood sad. It's like serial killers and terrorists. If they don't get their names on television and all the media, it spoils their whole day. We could call them "unsubs" and talk a lot about how evil it is to do something bad to all the nice people they hurt. 

As to Manafort and Gates, I say let 'em swing. If they did wrong, the Trump administration should condemn them heartily. I believe the president has already fired them both. Both the GOP and the DNC make a serious mistake when they defend the miscreants in their midst. They should take a page from churches, where our members who are sinners are invited to come forward, confess their sins and be forgiven. America is a forgiving place. Look at how quickly we forgave Bill Clinton for lying straight to our faces when he was president. All he had to do was look a little penitent and he was back up on his horse again.

It's going to be a miserable four years. Democrats are incapable of tolerating being out of power. They're like the kid that throws himself on the floor and screams if he doesn't get a candy bar in the Walmart checkout line. After working with leftist bureaucrats for a good deal of my 40 year career, I find I have become enured to the filth and degradation of the political system - rather the way, I suppose, that a coroner becomes enured to the blood and guts of an autopsy.

That's really kind of sad when I think about it.

© 2017 by Tom King

Was Mark Twain an Evil Man?

Mark Twain after the loss of his daughter Suzy

A Christian's Defense of Mark Twain

• ...a God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell--mouths mercy, and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him! - Mark Twain (The Mysterious Stranger)

Mark Twain is a favorite of mine as a source of great quotations. Lately a friend has been busting my chops for quoting him. He posted the above passage to prove I shouldn't quote Twain if I was a Christian. The passage itself is from Twain's "Mysterious Stranger", a story he wrote following a series of tragic losses in his life. The passage, as you can see asks some very hard questions of Christians and of God Himself. Sadly, Twain doesn't have any answers. In his day, Christian apologists were virtually uniform in their embrace of the loving God/eternal torturer portrait of the Almighty. That picture of God has driven sturdier souls than Sam Clemens away from the church and into outer darkness where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

So let me offer a defense of Twain. He is not the first man to question God's will. He won't be the last. First of all, Twain asked the question a lot of grieving people ask when they lose a loved one to death. They want to know what happens to them next. In Twain's day, churchmen almost universally offered but two possibilities. One was eternity as some vague floaty creature who gets issued a harp and is commanded to sing eternal praises. The other is a blistered miserable creature writhing in a vast pit of fire and unable to die.

Suzy Clemens who died of spinal
meningitis at age 24.

Remember, Mark Twain had just lost his beloved daughter and being a public figure and a writer all that got worked out on a public stage in a very public way. This was a man grieving and Twain was too smart to accept the easy religious pablum about disembodied spirits floating off to heaven. And the idea that his daughter might be consigned to hell was just too horrible to contemplate. 

I imagine that other versions of the "what happens when we die" doctrine might have made Twain think more kindly of Christians, but Twain was only acquainted with the hell fire immortal soul doctrine as generally preached to him as a boy.  There actually are other interpretations of Scripture on that point. I, for instance, am a Seventh-day Adventist. We do not believe the soul is immortal, or that anyone burns in hell forever. For us death is sleep and the resurrection happens at the Second Coming. Hell is a quick and merciful end for those who insist on being evil.

Perhaps if Twain had seen another portrait of an actually merciful God, it might have helped him in his grief. Sadly, for Twain there was no other picture of God available to him. As he rightly points out, the God of the Golden Rule and the God of eternal torment being the same person doesn't make sense. Remember, that Christianity as Twain knew it was chock-a-block with hypocrisy and its adherents preached a cruel God who burned babies alive for an eternity, consigning even relatively minor sinners to writhe in the flames for ages without end. Twain had a really hard time with the doctrine of hell and he greatly feared for his daughter's soul. It was easier for him to believe in no God at all than in the sadistic God of Christianity as preached in most churches of the day.

One can hardly blame him for his negative reaction to the picture of God that the Christians of his day presented. I suspect God would prefer that Twain ask the question and demand answers than for him to have accepted the smooth and horrific lies told about Him by the great hell fire and damnation preachers of Twain's day. It's not an accident that the first book of the Bible written (chronologically) was Job and that book is all about demanding answers from God with regard to death and suffering. And in that book God seems to approve of honest questions over self-serving assumptions.

Twain loved his family deeply.

Myself, I have found Twain a gentle soul and an extraordinarily honest observer of the human condition, often bruised by the cruelty of life on Earth. I suspect he was searching for the very God I met when I was seventeen years old. I also suspect God will be merciful to Twain and other grieving fathers and mothers in the end who in their despair were simply searching for the God who is the Comforter. That what they got from their pastors was God the Punisher is not their fault. I suspect many will be saved who were driven from the fold by lies about the nature of God. "Other sheep have I who are not of this fold," said Jesus - Jesus, who by the way, came to show us what a merciful God really looks like.

Had I not discovered the truth about God, I'd have asked the same questions Twain did and made the same accusations. Remember, it was God, Himself, who approved of Job's impertinent demands for answers over his friends' smooth "explanations" of God's behavior. It was to Job that God gave the responsibility of presenting offerings for Eliphaz, Bildad, and the rest, who were chastised for accusing God of cursing Job.

A lot of good souls are driven from the church over the very issues that Mark Twain presents in the passage you quoted. There is no sin in asking questions and demanding answers from God. Twain pointed out the hypocrisy of smug ideas about what God is like as presented by preachers who preached the big lie of an ever-burning hell. It's all through Twain's writings at this time of bitter loss and grief.

How about a little mercy for the man, guys? Nobody from our bunch ever introduced Sam Clemens to the real and merciful God with whom he could have trusted his lost precious daughter. Twain did the best he knew how. It is we Christians who failed him in his hour of need.

There's been an anti-Twain sentiment in the evangelical and apostate Protestant community of late and of course there has. Twain, with brutal accuracy, pointed out the logical impossibility of a loving God who would consign souls to eternal torment. He's messing with the "Christian" leadership's favorite terrorist tool for scaring sinners into the pews. They must, therefore, frighten their sheep away from Twain lest they too ask uncomfortable questions for which there are no easy answers.

As a Seventh Day Adventist, I agree with Twain. A God like the one many Christians preach is not one I could worship either. Were I Jesus, I'd meet Sam Clemens at the Second Coming and tell him not to worry about hell. Those preachers were wrong. There's no eternal torment and anyone who really wants eternal life and an end to evil will have it and then, I think, Jesus will place his nail-scarred hands on the shoulders of that poor broken man and lead him to where his lost daughter has risen and is alive again.

That's the merciful God I know and I do believe that if Twain had ever been properly introduced to Him, he'd have written a much different book. It's a trap of the devil that turns well-meaning Christians against someone like Twain who asks the question that should be asked of every preacher, priest and missionary who confidently preaches hell fire and damnation and eternal torment and then tries to tell his terrified audience that God is love. How can we defend those people?

The picture of God, presented by theologians, that presents Him as a loving eternal torturer is so ludicrous, that it's long been the main reason people reject Christianity. I mean how can you love someone who does worse to people than Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and all the kings and emperors put together? Many of the great theologians of all denominations have also rejected the idea of eternal torment in hell for the lost, but they have had to keep quiet about it lest they be shouted down by those of their colleagues who wish to retain the doctrine of fiery hell as a terror tool. CS Lewis said that in Scripture, hell is always spoken of as an ending, not a change of state from human to eternally tormented soul. He didn't speak very loudly about it, though or he'd have been ridden out on a rail as a heretic.

The confusion about God's character began when we chose to believed the very first lie - "Thou shalt not surely die." Remember that he who said it is a liar. But the idea that we can't really die is seductive. It lets us be immortal gods and condemns the actual God of Heaven as a slave-master for threatening us with hell to win our obedience. Twain merely pointed out the absurdity of what Christians were saying about God themselves.

So how about we lay off Twain and answer the question he asks? Is God some kind of omnipotent psychopath or is He love incarnate?  The answer to that question is, I think, the most important question in the great controversy between good and evil.

© 2017 by Tom

Looking for the "Big Win" - Progressives vs. Conservatives

However beautiful the strategy,
you should occasionally look at
the result - Winston Churchill

TRIGGER WARNING

I posted the Churchill quote the other day and got an immediate response from a friend who like to debunk my quotations that offend some people on the left. I'm not sure whether he objected to it being Churchill who said it or that Winnie suggested that results might be a valid way to evaluate whether or not your "beautiful strategy" is working or not.

Anyway he shot back, "And the conservative agenda. The war on drugs: screaming success, right? Prohibition: big win, right? Trickle-down economics: now that was a real winner!"

My left-leaning buddies like to taunt us conservatives with our supposed failures like playground bullies in second grade with their thumbs in their ears and their fingers flapping, going "Nanny, nanny boo boo! As though shouting talking points at us is an actual argument. I've talked here before about the Satanic propaganda system. In the Garden the serpent started off with a lie assumed to be truth because he said it was so. "Thou shalt not surely die!" Because he said it with authority, Eve didn't question that part of the argument, setting her up for the second part, "Thou shalt be like gods!" She believed the second lie because she accepted that the first lie was general knowledge (everybody knows....) and assumed that it was therefore true. 

You know intellectually, of course, that saying something was a failure doesn't make it so and nanny boo-boo isn't proof that your premise is correct. Emotionally, however, your instinct to belong to the herd makes such statements, however false they might be. FEEL right. If you can get past the feeling right bit, you may discover that the truth is somewhat different than the herd believes. Remember the members of the herd believe that if they follow the running butt in front of them they'll be okay. They believe this right up until they run off the cliff hot on the heels of their fellow cattle.

So let's examine the assumptions about "the big win" we have failed to get.

The Failure of Prohibition:  

Pre-Prohibition family fun

Everybody, even Seventh day Adventists whose grandparents and great grandparents fought for and voted for Prohibition, now think that Prohibition failed because mobsters used it as a way to commit crimes and make money.  Well Prohibition may have been repealed, and criminals committed crimes, but that doesn't mean Prohibition failed. America's booze-soaked culture prior to prohibition had gotten to such a point that families with small children served whiskey at breakfast like we serve orange juice today. Most people don't remember this, but it was common for kids 8-10 years old to drink wine and beer in pre-Prohibition America. Early childhood alcohol consumption was considered normal. A little white lightnin' in a baby bottle was well-known as a way to quiet a fractious child.

There are disinformation sites on the Internet that say Prohibition increased alcohol consumption. These are pressing a propaganda message says that prohibiting a thing makes it more desirable. Has pornography become less attractive by making it more available? These heavily massaged statistics are a lot of baloney, propagated by people who wanted easy access to booze. But, at the same time, here are some stats about what was going on at the time of Prohibition.

• Wife beating and lack of family support decreased 82%
• Drunkenness decreased 55.3%
• Assault decreased 53.1%
• Vagrancy decreased 52.8%
• Disorderly conduct decreased 51.5%
• Delinquency decreased 50.0%
• Deaths due to cirrhosis decreased 50.0%
• The number of inmates in jails and prisons decreased 75%, and
  many correctional institutions were closed entirely
• General domestic complaints decreased by two-thirds
• County hospital death rates were historically low
• Alcohol became almost unavailable
• Prostitution decreased
• The national crime rate (excluding Chicago) declined 38%; in Chicago, the crime rate declined 25% (despite the best efforts of Al Capone, the O'Banions, the Genna Brothers and Bugs Moran)
• Savings accounts tripled
• Real estate values increased dramatically, due to home improvements
• Families became better clothed
• Attendence at churches and schools became more regular
• Factory job attendance and job performance greatly increased
• Demand for services at welfare missions decreased by half

America's alcohol-fueled culture was causing the dissolution of families, rampant alcoholism, economic ruin and misery. What prohibition actually accomplished was to reset the way the American culture looked at alcohol. Thanks to prohibition alcohol came to be viewed as a vice by American mainstream culture. Instead of tacit approval of drinking, Americans were reset to a standard disapproval of drinking, especially around kids. Instead of embracing alcohol, after prohibition, Americans merely tolerated it. AND the rates of alcoholism which dropped dramatically during prohibition, never have come back to pre-Prohibition levels. America as a nation, in effect spent a generation in rehab kicking the habit during Prohibition. So Prohibition was actually a BIG WIN. We are a far more productive and sober nation than we were before Prohibition.

The Failed Drug War:  

Now that the far left and right have banded together to use the so-called failure of Prohibition as an excuse to shut down the war on illegal drugs, now we get to see if the progressive's are right. Will making drugs legal and stopping the racist persecution of the poor, the potheads, the junkies and their suppliers, want to give up drugs. Will illegal hallucinogenic drugs will lose their fascination for teenagers. Will we make big tax dollars on the sale of legal drugs once the stigma is removed. I have looked at the early numbers and it looks like we're headed for a BIG LOSE.

The Failure of Trickle Down Economics:

Ronald Reagan's trickle down economics policy, though sabotaged at every turn by Democrat dominated Congresses, still managed to kick off the longest sustained economic uptick in history. Bill Clinton was smart enough to get out of the way of the Republican Congress during his administration long enough to allow the economy to blow through a slight recession during the Bush 40 administration. So how did government's attempted management of the economy under Obama and Democrats go? Well, we've just begun to emerge from the longest recession since the debacle of the Great Depression as extended and deepened under FDR. Even liberal economists are now admitting that FDR's New Deal government management only extended the nation' misery.

So yeah! They were all big winners.~  (sarcasm alert in case you missed it)

Progressivism's "Big Win":

Mussolini as "Atlas in front of Rockefeller Center.

Early progressive socialism - In the US our first big progressive president after Teddy Roosevelt dabbled in it, was Woodrow Wilson, Democrat. Wilson furthered the federal government's racism and put us in the middle of a bloody war he'd sworn he wouldn't get us into. Early progressive heroes of US progressives included the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini and Adolph Hitler (the artist carved what looked like Mussolini's head on the body of a sculpture of "Atlas" at Radio City Music Hall in 1937. US progressives paid tribute to the Italian fascist along with Stalin and even Hitler. FDR sent staff members to visit the facist nations during the 30s hoping to learn "how they recovered so quickly from the depression and their own economic miseries. FDR came away with the idea that direct government control of economies was how to stop the Depression. All he really succeeded in doing is prolonging the Depression until he had to go to war against his fascist role models in 1941.

Then there came the Middle Ages of progressive collectivism - 176 million deaths by execution, starvation and torture under Chairman Mao. Ukrainian Kulottes were deliberately starved in millions under "Uncle" Joe Stalin to eliminate the middle class and tens of millions more went to the Soviet gulags and Siberian work camps (the collectivist version of slavery). More recently, two million were murdered and untold numbers lost their lives fleeing in small boats from the North Vietnamese conquest of South Vietnam. Pol Pot slaughtered millions in the Cambodian killing fields. Socialists like Robert Mugabe and Idi Amin in Africa, Fidel Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela destroyed their countries economically and slaughtered their citizens in further millions in the name of the progressive Worker's Paradises that collectivism/socialism was supposed to create.

Even bastardized versions of the progressive gospel in which, for a time, capitalism supported socialism, proved inherently unstable and collapsed or are collapsing of their own weight. (see Denmark, Sweden, Greece and the rest of the EU) And yet people cling to the same old Marxist ideas, renaming it things like progressivism, communitarianism, or social democracy. Redefining old words and inventing new ones, they always hang on to the same failed idea that an elite bunch of self-proclaimed smart people (in N. Korea they call them "Dear Leaders") can save us all from ourselves.

I don't see a single "big win" in all the long history of the "progressive" movement's search for a way to create a man-made paradise. The only "win" I can see is that they successfully placed black folk once again in thrall to their Democrat masters using Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty as cover. The condition of black people is apparently so bad that multi-millionaire NFL players are taking a knee in protest. If I were a Democrat, that's a result I wouldn't want to look at either.

As it turns out only God can create a paradise and before He can do that, He has to convince human beings that the whole sin thing inevitably ends up in death and misery. Thus He has allowed us to destroy ourselves trying to do build alternative paradises and, as Old Blue Eyes sang it, "We did it ouuuuuuuuur way!" Letting little Festus fall flat on his face is sometimes the only way a parent can teach a child and that a child can learn that he is not omnipotent and immortal. It's probably the only way God can convince the human race that we aren't God and that we cannot do what He can. God, like a long-suffering parent has to let us fall on our collective faces. He is allowing His errant children to learn by experience that we don't have the right stuff to create paradises on our own hook.

Learning the hard way, though, can be very very painful.  Much better to learn something and then not repeat your earlier mistakes. As someone wise, no one knows exactly who, once wrote, "To repeat the same thing over and over hoping for a different outcome is, by definition, insanity." Seems there's a lot of that going around these days.

© 2017 by Tom King

Stop Picking on Columbus!

Was Christopher Columbus Really Bad For America?

In the interest of full disclosure, many of my ancestors were Native American - Cherokee for some of them. My wife has Alabama-Coushatta ancestors. My ancestors were badly mistreated by some of my other ancestors. Some of my other ancestors mistreated by them. Plenty of naughty behavior on both sides. It's just one bunch of my ancestors were simply better at fighting than the other bunch. That's about all it was. But make no mistake. Both sides were responsible.

This from Aztec "Art".

So, this time of year it has become the thing to do for the progressive left to blame poor old Columbus and those who followed him for killing some 300 million or so Native Americans. Of course, there probably weren't that many Native North and South Americans who lived between the time Columbus came and now - at least not so long as the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas had their way. And if there is, it's pretty obvious white folks didn't manage to kill them all.

Did my European ancestors bring some diseases with them?  Yes. but that wasn't deliberate. The smallpox blanket story is balderdash. It supposedly happened before anyone actually knew about germs and how diseases spread.  Scalping? The French and English used that, but the gentle Native Americans took it up with a vengeance. Did the Spanish wage war on the Meso-American native civilizations. Well, that's true, but then, the Meso-Americans were waging war long before the Spaniards came. The Spaniards were just better at it.

What the folks spreading around the mythology of the "noble savage" and the sophisticated native civilizations don't tell you is that the Natives weren't all that noble or sophisticated. The civilizations of the Purépechas, the Toltecs, the Olmecs, the Teotihuacán, the Mayans, the Aztecs, and the Incans were really quite good at mass murder. Human sacrifice, for instance, has been described, even by those who try to justify their practices, as "integral" to their societies. By integral, they mean, these guys did a lot of sacrificing.

Human sacrifice was, for instance the way the Aztecs sought to repay their debt to the gods. Apologists for the Aztecs carry on about how Aztecs gladly participated in the sacrifices, parting with all their worldly goods and their lives. Given the seriously perverse rituals related to these sacrifices, I rather doubt they were that thrilled about it. The "stage" for human sacrifice was the massive temple-pyramids. The kept all their bestest art, treasure and the bones of their victims buried beneath it.

The Aztecs were not peaceful; the were quite warlike. Three tribes, the Aztecs, Tlaxcala, Huexotzingo and Cholula formed an alliance. Fifty years before Columbus, Central America had a series of droughts and famines. These guys decided that it was punishment by the gods because they weren't properly honored. Me? I think the priests were a bunch of perverts. They ginned up what they called the "Flower Wars". They used these wars to obtain captives for human sacrifice. This ritualized warfare was used as a way to train soldiers for close combat. Warriors were supposed to fight in close and injure enemies rather than kill them. Captives were saved for the altars.

Then came the fun parts. The person to be sacrificed would be held spread-eagled by four priests on a stone slab. A fifth priest would rip open his or her abdomen with a flint knife. Then they would extract the beating heart, put it in a bowl. Sometimes they would lop off the victim's arms and legs and then throw the body down the temple stairs. Torture and beating were often administered followed by decapitation. There was so much blood, they had to build channels in the stonework to carry off all the blood. Everybody down at the bottom would stab and pierce themselves while dancing, beating drums and blowing whistles.

Nothing says "civilization" quite like
everyone sitting around naked
while eating your neighbors for lunch!

The body parts were disposed of and/or eaten by the priests and celebrants (yes cannabalism was quite popular in Meso-America). The warrior who captured the victim got all the meaty bits. The viscera was fed to animals in the Aztec zoological park. Heads were lopped off and stuck up on poles. Sometimes they wrapped victims up into a ball and kicked them around, playing some kind game with their bodies until they were dead. Aztec priests would often skin the victims while they were still breathing and dress themselves up in the skin of the victims (shades of Hannibal Lecter).

Sometimes when the Meso-Americans got bored cutting up naked people, they might shoot them with arrows till they looked like pincushions and slowly bled to death. Sometimes they played ball games and killed the losing team. They also burned victims alive, flayed them alive or drowned them. One inscription claims to have sacrificed 86,400 prisoners in just four days of carnage. Apologists for the Aztecs downplay that number to as low as 10,000, seemingly unaware of how appalling it would be to murder that many people deliberately in just four days.

And the Aztecs weren't alone in committing mass murder. The Mayans did it, using the same techniques. They were fond of disemboweling their living victims. There are huge sinkholes in the Yucatan Peninsula where they used to throw living victims to die slowly. The Incas in Peru liked to murder children. They would abandon them on mountains to die of the cold. Sometimes they just buried them alive. Great fun. It's been estimated that one in five children died every year on the sacrificial altars. That estimate comes from people who actually admire the Meso-American civilizations.

I can see why progressives would admire the Meso-American civilizations - an elite decadent ruling class and all those peons to slave away building pyramids and providing all that delightful serial killing for them. Apparently, I am told, I just don't understand them. After all their victims were dressed so nicely and they were told they'd go to heaven and be served by virgins and such.  Where have we heard that lately?

Historian Michael Harner estimated that some 250,000 Mexicas went to the altars annually. Apologists argue that 20,000 is more "plausible" as though somehow brutally murdering 20,000 people makes it all better. And this was going on centuries before Columbus ever got here.

Archaeologist are constantly digging up
Incan child sacrificial victims. The actual
toll of dead Inca kids may be worse than
anyone has previously thought.

People who blithely claim that white people beat that death toll really don't have a clue. I'm not excusing the Trail of Tears or the massacres by white vigilante groups. There's no excuse for what whites did, but the Indians were not without blame in the whole thing. Some of the tribes were little more than roving street gangs only they didn't have streets. They stole horses, children and women, wiped out whole villages and attacked farms and wagon trains.

There's plenty of blame to go around for everyone. Columbus may have been an arrogant European, but he was not solely to blame for the horrors that ensued. It could be argued that even Native Americans are rather better off than they were when Columbus arrived. They no longer live to the ripe old age of 29. They don't get swept up and brutally torture, dismembered and eaten by priestly perverts who enjoy that sort of thing.

The Aztec religion was the most blood thirsty in all pre-Columbian America. Others practiced human sacrifice but nobody was close to the Aztecs for cruelty and the efficiency of their mass murder. So when Cortez showed up, practically every neighboring tribe joined up with the Spaniards to put an end to the Aztec empire. If you think America would have been better off if Columbus had stayed away and left those bloodthirsty savages in charge to create a continent wide civilization, you have to be really indulging in an incredible level of wishful thinking and willful ignorance of how history works.

Anybody who looks at the impact of the "European Invasion" on the modern Americas, has to see that things are way better than they were under domination of the Meso-American civilizations and the tribal cultures of the hinterlands. The "civilizations" of the Americas where three or four millenia behind European civilization. Had Europeans stayed away altogether Americans would still be living possibly at an early Greco-Roman or even Persian level of civilization had they actually managed to advance at all. And given the level of ingrained bloodlust and perversion, I rather doubt there'd have been much of a chance of that.

All in all, Columbus may have done my native ancestors a favor. And native is probably a misnomer anyway given that they were immigrants themselves. So I think I will give a nod to old Christopher this Columbus Day. I encourage you to do the same.

© 2017 by Tom King