24 January, 2012

This land is your land, this land is mine



This historical amnesia is certainly nothing new, it just seems that our memory gets shorter and shorter. Certainly the complexities, hypocrisy, injustice and inequality that existed at the founding of this country is at the heart of this amnesia. We had to "forget" in order to deny the natives we rhetorically turned into savages in order to justify stealing their land, the blacks we kidnapped and enslaved, the poor we gave indentured servitude, and the women we subjugated to child-rearing and home-making - all denied the rights set forth at our founding. Full speed ahead on the liberty and justice for all.

I do have great fondness for the experiment laid out at the inception of this country and I have yet to come across a more brilliant government move than the First Amendment, but these aspirations are used over and over to obscure and deny this history. I guess I am just sad this is an image found on a college campus in the the United States in twenty-first century - pathetic!

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