Manifest Destiny

I was raised a lot like most of you probably were. Our textbooks were filled with a sanitized version of our history which put the most positive and least tainted spin on what really went on. Our slaughter of the Indians and seizing of the west was attractively labeled Manifest Destiny. I'm not a scholar and haven't studied the origins of the phrase, so my ignorance might well be showing.
But do you think that'll stop me? Nah! It's my blogparty, I'll pontificate if I want to.

Manifest Destiny strongly suggests to me that since we're just manifesting what is our destiny we don't have any say in the matter. We're just doing what God has willed us to. This is, involuntarily, what we must do. That of course removes responsibility from our actions, doesn't it?

Manifest Destiny just sounds pretty, plus makes a great looking heading for a chapter in a history book. But once you get past that title, it was still the seizing of land that wasn't ours from an indigenous people, and the killing of tens of thousands of their people.

And so here I sit in 2004 and our president pontificates that we're helping the Iraqis on their MARCH TO FREEDOM. The words Liberty and Freedom and Democracy have been thrown about as if they have the power to take the stink of what we're doing out of what we're doing. The really horrible thing is, those words seem to work. The president was (allegedly) just re-elected on the power of his record. I can't imagine someone with his 4-year report card of D's and F's getting re-elected, so my theory is a mass shared illusion. More than a hundred million Americans think he's a great guy who's doing the best he can, and that what he's doing needs doing.

We invaded a FAR less powerful country on false premise and have killed at least tens of thousands of their people. And our leaders have trotted out this century's pretty phrases to mask the fact that we're being an aggressive super power fighting an unnecessary war.

Lawd help us.