You call it war. I call it massacre.

Even as I continue to read Jill Lepore's sweeping, single-volume, history of the United States, it is difficult to shut myself off from the shit that pours out of trump's mouth and tweets.  It is his mouth that is really a shithole!

The horrible human being in the Oval Office evoked the Wounded Knee massacre in a recent tweet, in order to mock Senator Elizabeth Warren.

In this post, I noted from Jill Lepore that between 1500 and 1800, as many as fifty million Native Americans died.  The hunting down of Indians continued on.  Many European settlers believed that “indigenous practices were by definition savage, superstitious and coercive.”  So, what did they do?

In part because of this belief, the U.S. government decided not to recognize Native Americans as citizens of sovereign governments in the 19th century, but as colonial subjects. In 1883, the Department of Interior enacted the first “Indian Religious Crimes Code” making the practice of Native American religions illegal. These codes remained in place until 1934.

Keep in mind that many European settlers were also the same people who fled religious persecution back in their old countries!

In response, Wenger writes, some Native American groups tried to convince government agents that their gatherings were places of “prayer and worship” similar to Christian churches. Others claimed that their gathering were “social,” not religious.
But this kind of masking of religious practices did not stop the U.S. government from using violence to suppress these Native American ceremonies.
In 1890, the U.S. military shot and killed hundreds of unarmed men, women and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in an effort to suppress a Native American religious ceremony called the “ghost dance.”

This is the Wounded Knee that trump uses to mock Warren!  Millions of Jesus-loving born-again Christians voted for this horrible human being?

Lepore writes about the religious revival in the colonies, which gives us an idea of the track record of most of the religious in this country.  But, there were exceptions.  Very, very few.  But, the  kind of exceptions that give us hope.  One of them was Benjamin Lay.  A widely traveled man, and well read, he was one of the first to speak up and loudly against slavery.

In 1718, Lay sailed to Barbados, where he saw people branded and tortured and beaten, starved and broken; he decided that everything about this arrangement was an offense against God, who "did not make others to be Slaves to us."

In contrast, his contemporary, George Washington "inherited his first human property at the age of ten."

After a few years in England, Lay and his wife left for Pennsylania--the Quaker State.

He traveled from town to town and from colony to colony, only ever on foot--he would not spur a horse--to denounce slavery before governors and ministers and merchants. ... His arguments fell on deaf ears.

What a commitment to the cause!

But, even he ran out of steam.  Benjamin Lay became a hermit.

Outside of Philadelphia, he carved a cave out of a hill. Inside, he stowed his library; two hundred books of theology. biography, poetry, and history. He'd decided to protest slavery by refusing to eat or drink or wear or use anything that had been made with forced labor.

Such principled activists are how we will make America great again!

He continued to press Benjamin Franklin about the slaves that he owned.  "Lay pressed him and pressed him: By what right?"

In 1758, "the Philadelphia Quaker meeting formally denounced slave trading; Quakers who bought and sold men were to be disowned.  When Lay heard the news, he said, "I can now die in peace," closed his eyes, and expired.

A hundred years later, the country fought a Civil War over slavery.  But, it took another 100 years to end separate but equal.  And 60 years after that, we have a President who talks about fine people on both sides!

But, at least there were a few people like Benjamin Lay.  May their tribe increase!