Highway Historical Markers

As we travel slowly across this country I am continually struck by how there was a three pronged attack, with the army, evangelical religions, and business.
And after the "early settlers" came, with their cows and their Christianity, the army moved in to quell the unrest of those whose land was being taken, by us. The church was used to rationalize the "conversion of the heathen", and once valuable grazing land or minerals were found the "strike it rich!" crowd of businessmen moved in. The Bible and the six shooter.

After all the theft of ancestral lands, murder and suffering of the people who were here when the Europeans arrived, the only info on the highway Historical Markers are the names and dates of individual European-Americans who were killed by the residents - and the retribution brought on them by the "law and order" crowd that finished off the humans that were here when we arrived. In one case I counted 17 bullet holes in the sign. I can certainly imagine who might be so inclined to fill that sucker full of lead, no doubt.

This place (Silver City, NM in this case) is beautiful, even with the roads, the trucks, the overhead electrical power lines, the dammed rivers, the mines, tailings, tailing ponds and their toxic runoff, etc. I keep trying to imagine how much more beautiful, quiet, and peaceful it would have been here before the mountain removal open pit copper mines (3 in the last day and a half of riding) - and the drinking and (historical, anyway) prostitutes. No wonder the people that lived here when whitey showed up eventually starting fighting back, even though they were massively out weaponed. You really can't blame them, at all.

Red-blooded Americans love movies like "Red Dawn" and "Independence Day", when some invading foreign horde comes to our country/world and tries to take over, to take our natural resources. "They're like grasshoppers!" bellows the fictional American President in "Independence Day". But, in all reality, WE are the grasshoppers, consuming all resources in our way, and then moving on to other shores, to other weaker nations where we (OUR corporations) can control the extraction of their resources, whether it is copper in Chile, bananas in Guatemala, or oil in Iraq. And we usually call those people "children", "heathen", "uncivilized" or some other such condescending words to help justify our very un-Jesus-like behavior.

And you can bet that we will phrase it all as some sort of Crusade, some sort "Freedom!" or "democracy" march - to help us rationalize it, to justify our actions - to ourselves anyway. Somehow I don't think "the natives" ever really buy our snake oil. But we sure do.

But let's call a spade a spade - we want what you have, and we're gonna take it. We've got better weapons, and more rationalizations and justifications (from God, even) than you can shake a stick at.