What We Have Done to Ourselves

Tweet

While on my way to nowhere in particular yesterday I found myself in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. I saw a sign marking the road as part of the Trail of Tears. Hopkinsville is one of the original stops on the infamous trail. It was one of the few “Indian-friendly” towns along the way as the Cherokee made their way from their ancestral home in Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee to their “new home” in Oklahoma, so decreed by the United States government and that lowlife Andrew Jackson. Yeah, I’m part American Indian. But even if I weren’t I wouldn’t stand up and applaud the hideous thing “we,” as in our representative government, did to our fellow citizens. It’s one of the biggest black eyes in American history: the “land grab” forced on the Cherokee (a harbinger of things to come). They were force marched, in the dead of winter, through a number of states so Andy and crew could have the land. Needless to say, the mortality rate was very high. In Hopkinsville a number of churches met the migrants and gave them food, clothes, and other things to try to soften the blow. Two of the Cherokee leaders, Whitepath and Fly Smith, died while in Hopkinsville. A citizen donated property for their burial places, due to the fact that law prohibited the two chiefs from being buried in a white OR a black cemetery. And just over 100 years later we were fighting a guy who did the exact same thing to another ethnicity. The Trail of Tears Park is part of a National Trail that, like the Civil War, reminds us what we have done to ourselves in the past. Are we listening.