Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 161
Looking at those events from my comfortable critic’s corner 200 years later, I find them
abhorrent and abusive. I certainly wouldn’t want some superior alien power to sell my
house and property without my consent, nor do I think anybody else would like that. Yet,
like with everything else as monumental as this task, 227 years later, we are still, in
good faith now, trying to correct some of those wrongs and make them more equitable.
It is my experience that modern American Indians who held to their ancestral religions
share with us the same tenet of “do onto others as you want done to yourself”, thus
partaking of our national moral backbone. It is time we live by what we preach.
From my armchair view three centuries later, the Europeans’ sense of morality vis-a-vis
treatment of the indigenous and slave populations was deviant, reprehensible and
embarrassing. At the time, it was generally acceptable. Given the ignorance and
isolation of the new arrivals, the English Crown Charters that brought pioneers to settle
the land, handed to them the unspoken but inevitable mandate to cut a path of blood
and theft as they ”opened” “new” territories. The colonialist noblemen, whose main
motive was the search for riches, just as their Spanish predecessors had done in
Central and South America, disregarded God and the Gospel in their vanquishing of the
indigenous people of North America. History showed once again that the pull of
immeasurable imagined riches could be more powerful than the virtues of love and
justice we learn at home and at church.
Just as in Central and South America a century before, the Europeans arriving in North
America did not hesitate to steal the native population’s land and resources. They did
this in direct contradiction to injunctions of the Old Testament and Jesus’ message of
love that they were so fond of preaching. The Iberians who colonized Central and South
America indentured the natives into serfdom while the Anglos who colonized North
America killed them. Neither hesitated to import hundreds of thousands of slaves. The
southern English colonies of North America became unprecedented in history, in that,
around the beginning of the republic, they had bred in captivity a larger population of
slaves that had been imported from Africa.
The two dichotomies that we inherited from Europe in our early national character
(Indians and slaves), as I have described repeatedly above, were addressed and are
still in the process of correction, at incalculable cost to our most recent forebears. As a
result of their wisdom and sacrifices, we have gone a long ways, more than any other
country in the world’s history, to purify our collective moral backbone and extend equal
protection of the law to all our citizens, regardless of race, origin, religion or other
characteristics. That transformation is the most gigantic improvement in morality the
world has ever known. It is an indispensable part of the American character and of the
American ethos. It is a tribute to the leaders who followed our Founding Fathers and,
applying their elders’ principles, steered the country to its present maturity. Their work is
America’s crown jewel, but some remaining fringe segments of society, such as people
with genetic same-sex orientation, must still be given equal protection of the law.
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