The Loveshade Family Blog

What's wrong with wanting to come to America? We should welcome everybody who wants to come here and work.

There's a side story to this. Over the centuries, more powerful countries took treasures and artifacts out of their countries of origin who were too powerless to stop this.
Now, these countries are demanding the return of what they consider to be THEIR property.
In Egypt, Dr. Zahi Hawass, Egypt's Head of Antiquities, makes no bones about it. He calls the foreigners who took antiquities out of Egypt "thieves".
But a good friend of mine pointed out that the artifacts may simply belong to whoever has them now because the original culture is long dead.
But in some cases, the original cultures are still there.
Italy is taking legal action against the Getty museum for recieving stolen artifacts.
Spain is claiming that the treasure from the mysterious Colonial Era shipwreck known only as the "Black Swan" belongs to it because Spain insists that the ship was a Spanish galleon. The ship's true identity is in fact a mystery.
But let's suppose it WAS a Spanish vessel loaded with gold and silver. Where did the treasure come from?
Simple. America.
And there are still living descendants of the original natives from whom the treasure was taken living in all the Americas.
So, what do we do?
The treasures that were looted have been placed in museums where they get expert care. What would happen if they were given back to the original owners?
Remember, the goatherd boy who found the Dead Sea Scrolls actually let some of them be used as fuel for fires.
And complicating all this is all all the forgery and fakery of antiquities that is a highly lucractive business. Right now, the huge controversy over the so-called "James Ossuary" has not yet been resolved.
That old adage "The winners write the history books" applies very much. The most powerful nations on earth have much of the treasures of the ancient world and because of this, our understanding for a long time of that world was what the winners told us.
It's time to hear the other side.
I would not say I am a revisionist who wants to totally change how history is percieved, but I do believe that everyone has a right to be heard.
Years ago, I read "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee." It WAS a revisionist book,making white men out as horrible villains (and some really were-Civil War hero General Philip Sheridan is the one who said "The only good Indian is dead") but it opened my eyes to seeing the other side of the story.
Before that, I had seen the movies "I Will Fight No More Forever" and "Cheyenne Autumn", both very intelligent movies. Then a couple of years ago I caught that miniseries "Into the West."
The expansion of America wasn't about wagon trains being attacked by Native Americans or Wild West frontier towns or shoot-em-cowboys and "soiled doves".
Or even Little Big Horn.
It was about cultures that viewed how to use the earth's resources in fundamentally different ways.
So, it's not just a matter of keeping control of our borders and keeping track of ethnic groups within them, it's also about making sure that OUR version of history is the one that the world knows about.
Too bad it's so complicated and the rest of the world seems to be refusing to listen to us now.

This is the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Maybe we should remember that. Jesus the Jew called the non-Jews, meaning most of America, dogs. But when a woman said the dogs eat the crumbs from the master's table, he accepted her. Jesus was against prejudice. Maybe we should be too. Peace out.

Using Jesus to support Breaking the Law? Jesus NEVER did that! He was saying that people who aren't Jews are accepted. We're branched in to the vine. Jesus was AGAINST Illegal Immigration! Read John 15: 22 and Luke 21: 6. Everything you believe in will be reduced to rubble!

If you're saying Jesus was against illegal immigration, then you didn't read what I first wrote. We WHITES are the ORIGINAL illegal immigrants to America. And maybe you've forgotten that some of those illegal immigrants were devout Christians. You know, the ones who came over on the "Mayflower".

And if you STILL want to use the Bible, then how many times did the Jews/Hebrews/Israelites DELIBERATELY cross someone else's borders and not only take over but often commit acts of genocide? And how many times did they justify it by saying Yahweh (Jehova) TOLD them to do it?

Jesus was against illegal immigration? Where is that? And those verses have nothing to do with it. Jesus accepted other people, even foreigners. We should do that too.

People bring Jesus in to make their point. It makes nothing. So does America belong to the whites who invaded or the blacks who were forced from their home and made to move here to work the plantations or the Chinese who were imported here to work the railroad or to the Spaniards who invaded or to the American Indians who were here before then?

Excellent, Heather! You bring up a point that I deliberately left out of my original argument.
I was born in the mid '60's and until around the time of the rise of the PC patrol of the late '80's-early '90's, the people we now call Native Americans we called Indians. Occasionally, we would call them by the names of their tribes, but mostly it was just Indians.
Then, we started calling them Native Americans but more than a decade ago, an old friend of mine pointed out that anyone born in America is a Native American, whether their ancestors arrived millenia or just centuries ago (or decades, years, months, etc.), whether they were European, African, Asian, it all comes down to the fact that now we are all Natives.
My own immediate ancestry is predominantly German with some Scottish, who arrived here in the late 19th century, but because I was born here, many decades after my ancestors came here, I am a Native American.
I have even more distant relatives who lived here during Colonial times. I even have a distant ancestor who fought in the American Revolution. This makes me eligible to join the Sons of the American Revolution (I think I would rather join the Communist Party than join the SAR.)
All this makes me a Native by the mere fact that I was born here.
The fact is, we are here and are very likely going to stay put for a very long time.
In fact, it's now beginning to look as if crossing the Bering Land Bridge 13-15,000 years ago was not the way the first Americans arrived. There was a recent discovery of human occupation of what we now call Virginia from about 4-5,000 years before then.
And, while there is still some mystery about the first people to occupy the American west, the stone tools left in the east have been positively identified. They were made by people who originally lived in France.
There is now a new theory that people from all over the world were coming to America for thousands of years. The Great American Melting Pot happened thousands of years before there ever was a United States of America.
How does that song go?
"This land is my land/this land is your land..."

So we're all immigrants but you're a native? My family's lived here for generations too. That doesn't make me an Indian!

Let's get rid of ALL the illegal immigrants. That would get rid of about 299,900,000 and leave America with about 100,000 people, right?

Just some random thoughts, so if it seems like I'm rambling and going off in tangents, it's because I am.
I just saw an article about immigration (I think it was on CNN's website) and of course, online newpapers have reader commentary sections.
In this particular article, one reader expressed extreme hostility to foreigners, but she never identified which ones.

But she called them "primative" (sic) and "irrisponsible" (sic).

Expressing such outrageous accusations and then mis-spelling rather simple words doesn't exactly make HER look civilized and responsible.

But if you look at the near-and middle-east, what do you think you would find?
Well, for starters, the remains of the first civilzations, Sumer and Egypt.

We know Egypt, but Sumer is not mentioned much. However, it has been identified as the world's first civilization.

The Greeks called the area where Sumer was "mesopotamia", meaning "between two rivers."

By the time of the Greeks, the original Sumerians were long gone, replaced by the Akkadians, the second Sumer, the first Babylon, some others who I can't recall, then the second Babylon.
This is the Babylon of the Bible and was the nation occupying mesopotamia when the Greeks came to power.

But it was the Sumerians who, around 5-6000 years ago, developed the first written langauge. With that, we had history.

More than 10,000 years ago, people were ending their nomadic hunter-gatherer ways and settling down in areas that we now call Turkey, Egypt, Iran, India, and Israel.

Catal Huyuk (chatal hoyuk) is in Turkey and is over 10,000 years old and housed about 10,000 people.

Hisarlik, also in Turkey, was settled 9,000 years ago and was repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt until the 16th century C.E. when it was finally abandoned for good.
It was re-discovered in the 1870's by German businessman Heinrich Schliemann and was found to have been at one time ancient Troy.

9,000 years ago-long before there were Philistines and Israelites-a stone age people living in what we now call Israel built a huge stone wall around their city-possibly the first true fortification in history-to keep troublemakers out.

Unfotunately for this city's residents, 6,000 years later, this dude named Joshua carried out the commands of his God, Yahweh, and sacked Jericho.

But Sumer, ahhhhh, Sumer...

I would so desperately love to visit your ancient ruins, but you are now called Iraq.
Mesopotamia referred to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that still run partway through Iraq and right past Baghdad.

To call the people of that region primitive is to forget that the Egyptians built the pyramids with crude tools for measuring, and COPPER chisels for carving the limestone blocks for the pyramids.

The blocks were moved without the wheel.

The biggest one, the pyramid of Pharoah Khufu (better known by his Greek pronounciation as Cheops [kee-ops]) was built with a precision that staggers the mind even today.
A 'footprint' of 13 acres, the four sides are almost exactly the same size, off by just inches.
It is aligned to the true compass points, especially true north.
And it sits squarely at the center of mass of the earth.

We modern people are just now getting to the point where we can get close to at least some of that precision.

This pyramid and its two companions are arranged in a pattern on the ground that matches the pattern of stars in Orion's Belt, a constellation very important to the Egyptians.

And these structures were built in the EARLY dynasties of Egypt.

Later Pharoahs tried to duplicate the feat and failed while others opted for entirely new ideas.

The Greeks and then the Romans advanced science, mathematics, technology, engineering, and medicine.

But after the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity, much of that knowledge was nearly or even completely lost.

The Christians are not entirely responsible for that, but they did not hesitate to go out of their way many times to destroy anything that they believed was not approved of by their faith.

Yet much of the Greco-Roman knowledge was saved.

By whom?

Muslims.

Thanks to Allah and Mohammed, we actually know what Cleopatra really looked like.
She wasn't Egyptian, but Greek and was actually Cleopatra VII.

The muslims preserved a stone bust of the queen that was clearly carved in a Greek style and she had a clearly Greek look.

And, despite her amorous ways with powerful Roman men, she was actually rather homely.

And we have Islam to thank for that.

Muslims diligintly studied and transcribed and copied the Greek and Roman manuscripts and developed new ideas, sometimes by combining things that they already knew with the European information, and other times, entirely on their own.

The Muslims also got a lot of ideas from the far east, especially China and India.

The Islamic world was the Old World's Melting Pot of ideas and if it hadn't been for the Moors in Spain and close contact with Muslims during the crusades, Western Europe's renaissance may have been much later.

If we talk about the Americas, let's look at the Incas. They built an empire that started on the west coast of Peru, covered the Andes and went into the Amazon.
But most of the empire was in the mountains.
Their only means of travel was by foot, although there were roads paved by stone.
These roads were for messengers who were raised from childhood for this service.
These runners could cover over 100 miles a day, even in the high altitudes.
And they did not carry the messages in their hands but in their heads.
They were trained to memorize every single word of a message down to the last punctation mark.
Why?

Because the Incas had NO written language.

Now tell me, how does a culture build an empire of 10 million people, living in massive stone cities and buildings whose huge stones were moved up mountains and are so precisely cut and fitted that paper can't go through the cracks and are almost entirely earthquake-proof, with massive fishing, farming, and hunting programs to feed everybody in a rugged, jungle-covered mountain range if they were so primitive that they had only footpaths and no written language?

And the Incas weren't the only Native American culture to thrive in this manner.

Living even higher in the Andes were a people that are only known by the name the Incas gave them: the Chachapoya.
High up in the Andes, these people built the biggest stone fortress in the Americas.

In Mexico, there is the famous city known by the name given them (I think) by the Mayas: Teotihuacan.

These people are a total mystery; again, no written langauge.
Yet, they built one of the largest stone pyramids in the Americas.

And then there's that famously(or infamously) incredibly precise Maya calendar.

I'm not exactly sure what direction all my rambling mumbo-jumbo is heading in; it's just pouring out of my head.

I guess people who see foreign cultures as they are NOW and all they see is poverty, violence, famine, disease, corruption, etc. ad nauseum, it would be easy to see how people could end up thinking that those cultures are "infirior".

But I was one of those one-in-a-million, rare, weird kids who actually paid attention in history class.

Just like pre-history, history is not fixed. New discoveries are being made all the time, which complicate the picture.

But if you want to look at cultures and compare them to us, well, let's see.

We've been a superpower for 62 years. That's about how long the Spanish Empire remained powerful.

Let's look at nations that had been turned into countries based on the Bible.
Rome converted in 315 C.E. It was sacked and destroyed less than two centuries later.

Israel conquered its way to power, then was repeatedly invaded and conquered. It even split into two kingdoms. Then the Romans obliterated Israel.

The biggest, longest-lasting western Christain Empire was probably the British Empire. It covered the entire globe for at least over two centuries.
That saying, "The sun never sets on th British Empire" was true for a long time. But eventually the sun did set.

It's true that things happen and change much faster than they did 200 years ago or even 100 years ago.
I mean, the Wright brothers first flew 103 1/2 years ago. 65 1/2 years later we were on the moon.
That seems like a long time but it's not.

So a nation remaining powerful and dominant in today's world will probably fall rather quickly eventually.

When Bill Gates publicly pleads for Americans to study math and science out of fear that we will fall behind other countries who rapidly catching up to us, that says something.

The longest-lasting Christain empire was not Catholic or Protestant, but Eastern or Greek Orthodox, the faith of the Byzantine Empire. It lasted roughly 1000 years.

Islam also was a powerhouse for about 800-1000 years.

China, even when you include the Mongol conquest of Chinggis Khan (yes, that is the correct spelling of his name) is at least 2200 years old.

And Egypt, again including occupation by the Hyksos and Nubians, lasted for about 3000 years.

Yes, even I agree that history classes are as dull as ditchwater and the textbooks are even worse.
That's why I was always in the libraries and bookstores, and am now using the web and the new generation of TV channels.

However, I found out that my history instructors did not seem to like the fact that I knew the subject better than they did.

Too bad. Screw 'em.

I know what I've learned and am learning and am not about to stop now.

But for those other students, history was even worse for them.
However, by not paying attention or doing the reading, they missed a lot of information that helps them to make complete jackasses out of themselves when they speak about other cultures.

So, please, before you open your mouth and stuff your foot into it about us vs. them, keep in mind that our history wasn't just about men like Daniel Boone, Jim Bridger, and Kit Carson.
It was also about John C. Fremont, conquerer of California in the late 1840's and Andrew Jackson, who invaded Florida in 1817 and took from the Spanish.

There are two sayings that come to mind when I see Americans get riled up about other cultures.

"People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw bricks."

My favorite, however, comes from one of the greatest minds in history, Confucius.

"Do not complain about the snow on your neighbor's roof if your own doorstep is unclean."

Good afternoon. A tactical retreat is not a bad response to a surprise assault, you know. First you survive. Then you choose your own ground. Then you counterattack.
I am from Grenada and know bad English, tell me right I wrote the following sentence: "Wallace is a main jam calendar in the barksdale piano's common district shots action, who is qualifying after a field of younger investigations in the position."

Thanks :-(. Disa.