Chris

Living in America: a Guide for the Perplexed Chapter 19

It's an old story but it still has a lot of meaning. Columbus, clearly a lousy mathmatician, thinks he can sail around the world and get a sea passage to India. So he starts sailing, runs into the other half of the dry world, and thinks, hey, it's India. There's some Indians. Well, they figure it out soon enough, but the name sticks. Indians, as we still call them, used to own all this property, if squatters rights mean anything, which at the time they did. They say they came across on land a long time ago. They had quite the little thing going. Mostly they are gone, killed primarily, in America's first bloody genocide.

The Indians, who didn't call themselves Indians because, unlike Columbus, they knew where they were, didn't think they owned anything. They had this crazy idea that it is senseless for some little ant to claim ownership to that which brought it forth and sustained it and eventually took it back into itself and abided far beyond its tiny little ant existence. They actually had a lot of similarly crazy ideas most of which are now lost forever. There is a moral of some sort here but I find it too depressing to relate.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.