Back from Virginia

 Back from Virginia

By Bobby Neal Winters

I recently got back from a trip to Virginia.  We visited Jamestown, Yorktown, and Monticello. (And they pronounce it Mont-i-CHEL-lo.)  We just soaked in history for three days.  The details presented clarified some perspectives which I think we need to think about as a nation.

Jamestown provides a nice place to look because in those early years we have three big influences on what it means to be an American already present: The English Settlers, the Indigenous Peoples, and the Enslaved Africans.  Yes, while the original colonists Jamestown didn’t have slaves, they did enter into the picture very shortly after the colony was established. 

This has all been swimming through my head for days now.  I’ve been waiting for it to jell so that I could write about it.  Here goes.

There’s been some nasty complicated stuff that those of us who are of English heritage really need to ruminate on.  I would have to include myself in that because as far as I’ve been able to discern, I don’t have a single ancestor who came from anywhere but England.  At various times, I thought there was some Cherokee ancestry; at others, I thought there was some Irish.  But with every DNA test, with every internet ancestry search, it’s just English, English, English.

That is so boring.

The previous sentence would so confuse my colonist ancestors because it was very important to them that they were English.  This seems to have been one of the bones of contention leading up to the American Revolution.  They didn’t feel like they were being treated as Englishmen. Then the Revolution was like a bad divorce. They didn’t want anything to do with England anymore.  

If you look at surveys of ethnicity, you will see a big stripe of “American” there.  Likely as not, the bulk of those are of English ancestry.  They say “American” instead of “English” because it had been so important for their ancestors to be English, but then they felt betrayed.

We need to pay close attention to that because this could happen again.

Here I am getting into dangerous ground and some of you might be mad at me.  The English, the Indigenous people, and the Enslaved Africans all had descendents who are now American.  (Yes, there are others and we love you too.) It is very important to all of these people that they be American.

But there are problems.  The descendents of the Enslaved Africans have problems.  It came to be currently encoded in the phrase “Black Lives Matter.”  There are those who say “All lives matter” or “Blue lives matter,” and these are all true too.  (I am not responsible for this nomenclature, but there it is.)

I would like to characterize the situation a little differently.

Think of the descendents in America of the English, the Indigenous, the African, the Irish, the Italian, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, etc as all being organs in the body.  They are all part of one thing: America. (The Apostle Paul does a nice riff on something similar in one of his epistles.) 

So think of your body.  Suppose you get an x-ray and there is a spot on your liver.  Would you react by saying, “All organs matter” and ignore the spot on your liver?  I don’t think so.  I think that you’d see about getting your liver fixed.

Not only is it a vital part of your body, but the spot might very well spread.

This is an analogy and arguing by analogy is always dangerous. It depends upon everyone realizing that we are all part of the same body.  But I believe it is good because it catches the fact that I am actually helping myself when I help someone else because we are all Americans and America is healthy to the extent its “members” are. 

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )