As a boy growing up in the 1940s, all I wanted was a holster with plastic six-guns with paper caps, so I could join the other lads in “Cowboys and Indians” and finish off the “savages,” those un-Christian others whose atrocities in the Indian wars, even then, were still fresh in mind.
The frontier had closed two generations earlier, but settlers, “brave pioneers,” were still flowing in to grab those parts of Indigenous territory that had value for making a living.
As the country and I matured, we gradually began to gain some valuable hindsight and slowly began to understand our role in those atrocities. We finally began to take responsibility for them.
Monster ships at sea, and human understanding, change course very slowly. But surely the explicit example of our own history in dealing with the same set of events that have been unfolding for decades in the Middle East should serve as a powerful stimulus in speeding up this understanding.
Frederick P. Jagels
Cabot
