The very woke Ben and Jerry of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream fame, voluntarily stepped into a quagmire this week. They declared that Americans are sitting on stolen land and that we need to start to rectify that by giving back Mt Rushmore. My guess is that they thought that they were going to score easy woke points by a) mouthing a popular campaign among the anti-American left and b) invoking the cause of Mt Rushmore because that would be of no cost to them personally. Yes, they really are that stupid. Today, a chief representing the tribe that formerly possessed the land their corporate headquarters sits on came to take up their offer. But before that, they endured three days of national acrimonious spite from all but their hard-core fans. Deserving hypocrites. I would, however, point out two things neglected by both conservatives and hard-edged progressives.
At face value, I agree with one core part of Ben & Jerry’s agitprop, Indian land was stolen. If that were the only factor at hand, Ben & Jerry would be 100% right. It’s impossible to adequately reduce the entire history of native American policy down to few sentences but I’ll try here. The non-indigenous settlers of what is now the United States (and most all the Americas) made many treaties with the indigenous peoples, (abbreviated henceforth as ‘Indians’). A treaty is a contract, a legal act with the force of law. Many lands were legally traded away under those contracts. Most of those contracts were broken. Some terms were broken by the Indians, and a great many were broken by the new governments that made them. Personally, I am an outlier among conservatives that believe that Indian treaty/contract affairs from the past 250 years SHOULD be reviewed and that if it is done in an honest way, there will be some legal actions taken that would return some lands to them. No pre-conditions here, just principle. This isn’t about woke vs. non-woke, left vs. right; this is about who here in the room believes in LAW. If anyone, it should be conservatives. I’m going to make an educated guess and say that such as review and restitution would affect blue states as much as red states and that blue state residents would be as much or more upset by the result. Just sayin.
The other fallacy that escapes Ben and Jerry is the moving map. Look them up on You Tube or elsewhere, videos showing a geo-political map of any developed continent on this planet fast forwarded. Here’s a 400 hundred year history lesson of the US reduced down to 2+ minutes. Continents with much longer geo-political histories are even more dynamic. The point is that ‘ownership’ constantly changes. Indians were not the first inhabitants of continental US and we are not the last ones. Ben & Jerry somehow have a static idea of what it means to own or steward to the land upon which we live. They apparently haven’t seen the moving maps. Other continents are just as relevant because virtually every modern society evolved over the past thousand years is the product of migration. Who are Ben and Jerry to declare that one people – that were in fact many nations that fought over each other’s lands – that they alone should possess a land for eternity as though they were some original pure and sinless Adam and Eve. They were not. Most were volatile, some were manifestly evil, but many were just like us, no better and no worse. Ben and Jerry were mouthing a progressive myth, a fantasy, calculated to rile the conservatives they hate and stroke the far left that are as ignorant as they are, cheap virtue signaling. They deserve their ire they received.
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