In a Thanksgiving Day message, President Obama reminded us that 400 years after the Mayflower landed, we still have Pilgrims wanting to come to America. He implied we should welcome the pilgrims from Syria the same way the natives (“Indians”) welcomed the ones from England.
Well, our president could use an American history lesson, from the viewpoint of the Indians. Here is part of a Will Rogers radio broadcast in 1935, “As a race there has never been any comparison between the Pilgrim and an Indian. Now I hope my Cherokee blood is not making me prejudiced. I want to be broad minded, but I am sure that it was only the extreme generosity of the Indians that allowed the Pilgrims to land. Suppose we reversed the case. Do you reckon the Pilgrims would have ever let the Indians land? Yeah, what a chance! What a chance! The Pilgrims wouldn’t even allow the Indians to live after the Indians went to the trouble of letting ’em land… One thing about a Pilgrim, he would pray. I bet you’ve never in your life seen a picture of one of the old Pilgrims praying when he didn’t have a gun right by the side of him. That was to see that he got what he was praying for.”
Protests are breaking out all over. And it’s not always clear what folks are protesting. College students in Missouri, at Yale, and other institutions of higher learning are marching for free tuition and a minimum wage of $15 an hour. Must be because the liberal arts majors figure the only jobs available to them will be minimum wage. They also want a guarantee that no one on campus will call them names or say anything that might upset the feelings of a ten year old.
In Paris, where the police are working day and night to round up radical Islamic killers, protesters arrived in force to divert their attention. They seem to be protesting the global climate change conference, but are they for it or against it? There’s plenty of Republicans who would like to protest it, and we know which side they are on. I heard that 160 countries have a plan to fight global warming and at least 150 expect us to pay the bill.
President Obama says the global warming conference is a powerful rebuke to the ISIS terrorists because the world stands as one to build a better future for our children. Since ISIS was not invited, I doubt they are giving it much thought, other than to figure that if the world spends a trillion dollars on climate change, that leaves a trillion fewer dollars to be spent trying to destroy ISIS.
We heard this week that our military destroyed about 500 tanker trucks hauling ISIS oil, after Russia and France showed us how to do it. We could have done it months ago, but President Obama was concerned that setting fire to the ISIS oil trucks, ships, and oil wells would make global warming worse. That’s not a joke, he really believed it. Here we thought the theme of this administration was “leading from behind.” But it’s really “trailing from behind.”