Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

  How much of our history and the people that have contributed to it do you really know? It would seem that if some of that history is not of some people’s liking the chance to learn may disappear as the books will be burned and it will be gone forever. Whenever there is conflict and it is written about afterwards the victors are the ones that get to tell the tale and they tell it the way that makes them look the best.

  The public face that is shown of those that are most known to us is not always the true image of the person. The stars of Hollywood oftentimes changed their names for various reasons, not manly enough, or sexy enough or someone else has a very similar name. Fame allows for a single name that identifies without doubt who you are talking about. 

  Other notable figures had names with nicknames attached to tell you a bit about the person’s appearance or tool of choice and things like that. Some of the characters were real and some fictional but all help to blend the history of our country.  Will there be a quiz, only if you make one.

  So let us take a person from our not so distant past, General Douglas MacAuther. Many people do not know that he had served 30 years in the US Army and retired and was hired by the President of Philippines to command his army before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour. When Roosevelt declared war on Japan he ordered MacAuther back to serve as the commander of the forces in the Pacific.

  When the General left the Philippines to return to the States that is where the famous comment “I Shall Return” came from. So now he is back and served the US until 1947 or 1948 and got Japan online as a Democratic nation before he and President Truman got into an argument about continuing the war and linking up with Patton in Europe via China and Russia.

  At this time in his life he was not a young man but he did return to the Philippines and he finally got married. He had not married before because no woman he had ever shown an interest in was good enough by his mothers standards so he had waited till she passed before he married. This man had seen war, been recalled after a full career, and then fired by another President and yet the one person that he would not go against was his mother.

  Many lives have twists and turns that are totally unexpected. Relationships occur where none would have been suspected. Watch a few episodes of Finding Your Roots, Who Do You Think You Are, just to name a couple. 

  We have no idea what our ancestors got up to or who they got up to it with. The puzzle of the missing from Roanoke may be found by DNA of some native people that just happened through there a long time ago. As has been said before it is amazing how those people over there, across the tracks, or wherever, are not the kind you would want to marry, but if you happen to get into a fight with them, kill the men and bring the women home to breed with. What the hell have you got now.? The Neandertal were supposed to be below HomoSapien and yet we still find the gene in the DNA . It proves that humans are if anything lustful and will breed with most anything under the right conditions. Hence the saying “They all look better at closing time”.

Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

A call to put the American People first from the viewpoint of where. Are you looking at the big picture or through your micro lens of value as you see it? Our nation and the people in it are diverse and they need to be accommodated as a diverse population not as a herd run by either a very liberal or very conservative leader. 

  Government has to span the river, not put up a dam and then choose which gate to open as to which group will butter your bread or kiss your ass best. Just as surely as the desire to have a comfortable place to live in is common to all, so is the desire to have a convenient way to get there. That means public access, not private roads. Public means all of us work to build and maintain these things, schools, hospitals, water systems, electric grids, sewer systems and all the other things that make our nation and every other civilized nation on earth run smoothly. 

  We, that means one group of people can not choose to make themselves exempt from paying their share of the costs of these utilities just because they have somehow managed to control more riches than someone else. Let the system be rated on a percentage so that everyone pays a share and no one feels like they have been raped to do so. When your time on this earth is done the wealth you have earned is staying here, and if you want to know what God thinks of money just look at who he has given it to and more importantly look at who he has allowed to run around telling everyone how well off they are.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

In 1937, Congress and President Franklin D. Roosevelt made Columbus Day, October 12, a national holiday. Originally conceived as a celebration of Italian American heritage largely because of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal and charitable organization. It was moved to the second Tuesday in October in 1971. For many Indigenous peoples, Columbus Day is a controversial holiday. This is because Columbus is viewed not as a discoverer, but rather as a colonizer. His arrival led to the forceful taking of land and set the stage for widespread death and loss of Indigenous ways of life.

The holiday was portrayed to school children throughout the 20^th Century as celebrating the ‘man’ that discovered America and proved that world wasn’t flat. ‘In 1492 Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue’ we all remember the story… October 12, 1492, is of enormous significance in Western history: It is the day when explorer Christopher Columbus completed his journey across the Atlantic Ocean and landed in the “New World.”  What Columbus actually reached on that October day was an island he named San Salvador that is now part of the Bahamas.

So, it seems that the history we were taught in elementary school was complete B.S.. It turns out that Columbus was in reality a terrible human being.

This is from Vox article.

1) Columbus kidnapped a Carib woman and gave her to a crew member to rape

Bergreen quotes Michele de Cuneo, who participated in Columbus’s second expedition to the Americas (page 143):

While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful woman, whom the Lord Admiral [Columbus] gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked — as was their custom. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought she had been brought up in a school for whores.

2) On Hispaniola, a member of Columbus’s crew publicly cut off an Indian’s ears to shock others into submission

Hispaniola, now divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. NASA/JPL/SRTM

After an attack by more than 2,000 Indians, Columbus had an underling, Alonso de Ojeda, bring him three Indian leaders, whom Columbus then ordered publicly beheaded. Ojeda also ordered his men to grab another Indian, bring him to the middle of his village, and “‘cut off his ears’ in retribution for the Indians’ failing to be helpful to the Spaniards when fording a stream.” (Bergreen, 170-171)

3) Columbus kidnapped and enslaved more than a thousand people on Hispaniola

According to Cuneo, Columbus ordered 1,500 men and women seized, letting 400 go and condemning 500 to be sent to Spain, and another 600 to be enslaved by Spanish men remaining on the island. About 200 of the 500 sent to Spain died on the voyage, and were thrown by the Spanish into the Atlantic. (Bergreen, 196-197)

4) Columbus forced Indians to collect gold for him or else die

Columbus ordered every Indian over 14 to give a large quantity of gold to the Spanish, on pain of death. Those in regions without much gold were allowed to give cotton instead. Participants in this system were given a “stamped copper or brass token to wear around their necks in what became a symbol of intolerable shame.” (Bergreen, 203)

5) About 50,000 Indians committed mass suicide rather than comply with the Spanish

Bergreen explains, page 204:

The Indians destroyed their stores of bread so that neither they nor the invaders would be able to eat it. They plunged off cliffs, they poisoned themselves with roots, and they starved themselves to death. Oppressed by the impossible requirement to deliver tributes of gold, the Indians were no longer able to tend their fields, or care for their sick, children, and elderly. They had given up and committed mass suicide to avoid being killed or captured by Christians, and to avoid sharing their land with them, their fields, groves, beaches, forests, and women: the future of their people.

6) 56 years after Columbus’s first voyage, only 500 out of 300,000 Indians remained on Hispaniola

Population figures from 500 years ago are necessarily imprecise, but Bergreen estimates that there were about 300,000 inhabitants of Hispaniola in 1492. Between 1494 and 1496, 100,000 died, half due to mass suicide. In 1508, the population was down to 60,000. By 1548, it was estimated to be only 500.

Understandably, some natives fled to the mountains to avoid the Spanish troops, only to have dogs set upon them by Columbus’s men. (Bergreen, 205)

7) Columbus was also horrible to the Spanish under his rule

Bartolomé de Las Casas, one of the primary chroniclers of Columbus’s crimes. Antonio Lara

While paling in comparison to his crimes against Caribs and Taino Indians, Columbus’s rule over Spanish settlers was also brutal. He ordered at least a dozen Spaniards “to be whipped in public, tied by the neck, and bound together by the feet” for trading gold for food to avoid starvation. He ordered a woman’s tongue cut out for having “spoken ill of the Admiral and his brothers.”

Another woman was “stripped and placed on the back of a donkey … to be whipped” as punishment for falsely claiming to be pregnant. He “ordered Spaniards to be hanged for stealing bread” (Bergreen, 315-316). Bergreen continues:

He even ordered the ears and nose cut off one miscreant, who was also whipped, shackled, and banished from the island. He ordered a cabin boy’s hand nailed in public to the spot where he had pulled a trap from a river and caught a fish. Whippings for minor infractions occurred with alarming frequency. Columbus ordered one wrongdoer to receive a hundred lashes — which could be fatal — for stealing sheep, and another for lying about the incident. An unlucky fellow named Juan Moreno received a hundred lashes for failing to gather enough food for Columbus’s pantry.

8) Settlers under Columbus sold 9- and 10-year-old girls into sexual slavery

This one he admitted himself in a letter to Doña Juana de la Torre, a friend of the Spanish queen: “There are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand, and for all ages a good price must be paid.”

9) Indian slaves were beheaded when their Spanish captors couldn’t be bothered to untie them

Benjamin Keen, a historian of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, noted that multiple sources confirmed accounts of “exhausted Indian carriers, chained by the neck, whose heads the Spaniards severed from their bodies so they might not have to stop to untie them.”

I for one am happy that we have stopped celebrating this historical despot and hope that Indigenous Peoples are celebrated for the enumerable contributions they made to this nation and the genocide remembered for the brutal carnage that our forefathers set upon them.

Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

There is a saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. So if this be true, look back through the pictures of time and the events of the greatest kaos in history and picture the people most responsible for those events. Were they the quiet church mouse type.? Not at all, they were the ones that were not happy with lubricating the squeaky wheel with just grease; they wanted to do it with the fluid rendered from the bodies of their enemies.

  The Romans were cruel, the Arabs were cruel, the Huns were heartless, and as we move into more modern times we learn of the man who impaled his victims. Locked their victims in a hall and burned it down around them, feasting on the remains. Men who waged war on entire groups because of their faith, starved them, worked them to death, sent them in mass to the gas chamber and yet was reported to be afraid of ghosts.

  Picture these men and the ones that come to mind easiest are Hitler, Stalin, Musolini, Franco of Spain, Moa of China, The leader of North Viet Nam, Cambodia and the Philippines as well as North Korea. And we have had a man that promotes the same brand of hate and dissent in our own government and he has a following that makes no sense to me. This brand of leadership is what you expect from a mob boss, someone that has no respect for anyone and is willing and able to order the killing of someone just because they did something that upset him. We do not need such leadership.

  Not everyone is capable of being a leader, great or otherwise, they cannot see the situation for what it is or the persons they are dealing with for who they are. Decisions need to be made and sometimes in a limited amount of time and for some that is not possible.

  We have had some great people in leadership positions many of whom were military like Eisenhower, Patton, MacAuther, Stormin Normin, Powell, to name a few and there have been some remarkable people in the civilian area as well MLK, Edison, Bell, the head of Chrysler. 

Some of these people were driven to succeed and some it just came to them. Regardless of the way it arrived they were all able to do great things with what they were given.

  Leadership is not tyranny. It is not the act of taking whatever you see that you want and not caring about who it belonged to or where it came from. Our leaders do not sign decorations to further their own positions, or executive letters. In a democracy every citizen is an equally preshuse  individual. They are not lesser beings because of their faith, skin color, who they choose to love, how they choose to be identified as nor for any other reason. 

  Everyone of them started life as a cute baby, grew into a good looking adult, and will age into an extraordinarily interesting senior citizen.  Along the way from birth to final rest they will all have adventures, fortunes and misfortunes and experience life as they should. Life is complicated enough without adding a dick, dictator

  Today we are still caught in the arms of battles over religion, territory and resources. The resources are there for all to use, they all will it just means someone gets to claim the ownership first. The land is again a resource that will change hands and change again as time goes one because as with the resource beneath the surface ownership is important. As to religion this is the sorriest of reasons to fight someone. If there is a creator it is a good bet there is only one. Look around do you see what looks like the dysfunctional couple decorating the world? No, so only one, and he or she may not be very keen on individuals running around killing one another over ideologies. Ever notice the idiot in ideology?.