if you’re looking for something beautiful to listen to in this oft-depressing world, check out yesterday’s edition of Democracy Now. Amy Goodman interviews Dave Isay about his incredible oral hystory project, StoryCorps. If you’re too lazy to go over to their site, you can listen to it here:
that’s all i ask for, a moment. On this most important of USA is #1 holidays, a persistant question enters my mind: what would life be like if we had lost the revolutionary war? That question itself is rather loaded, for it assumes race. Who is ‘we’? Well, the British claimed that all slaves would be freed if the revolution were to fail (providing the slaves with incentive to revolt against the colonists). So it would appear that the slaves were, in fact, losers in the American Revolution.
And had the colonists lost, we could assume that the war of genocide against first nations people would at least have slowed down, since immigration and expansionism would have also slowed significantly. So are first nations people also losers?
We can assume that the Mexican-American war would not have been fought, meaning what is now the southwest US would still belong to Mexico. I guess we can chalk up Mexico as a loser, too.
While Britain would have remained an imperialist power, the US would have remained a colony. Which not only means that we would not have moved on to de facto colonization of the Philipines, the Caribbean, and Latin America, but it also means that we quite possibly may have gained a since of solidarity with other colonized nations around the world. I’m not so sure that’s likely considering the individualist protestant work ethic that defined the colonists, but its something to think about. How would things be different if we gained our independence during the 20th century move towards decolonization rather than in the 18th century?
And had the slaves been freed and the first nations people allowed to exist, race would have a completely different meaning today than it currently does. What that definition would look like, i’m not sure, but perhaps some folks in appalachia could clue us in.
That’s what i’ve been thinking about on this “Independence Day”. Independence for whom? Unlike many other independence days throughout the world, the US does not celebrate the independence from colonizers, it celebrates the independence of colonists. And because of that fact, i can’t help but wonder if things would be better off if our fate had been different in 1783.
