On Facism, Politics, and The Importance of Desert Bus

While I am beyond excited for Desert Bus, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the solemnity of this particular day. This might not all seem related but bear with me a (rather long) moment: 

Today marks two dark days in history. On this day in 2016, the United States woke up to a newly elected president who has proudly referred to himself as a nationalist, refused to condemn white supremacy, is explicitly racist, sexist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic, has mocked the disabled community and attacked the queer community, and whose very presence in office has led to a steep increase in hate crimes against marginalized groups. 

Going back eighty years, on this day in 1938. Kristallnacht, or The Night of Broken Glass, marked the beginning of the Holocaust. The product of a political trajectory that had been barreling rapidly towards fascism and genocide, Kristallnacht is widely considered to be the turning point, after which there could be no question that Jewish Germans were no longer safe. Between November 9-10, Sturmabteilung, along with German citizens, destroyed nearly 300 synagogues and over 7,000 Jewish businesses. Estimates on the number of Jews who were murdered during Kristallnacht vary, but the number is likely in the hundreds. 

This Tuesday, I voted. The results of this week's elections reveled a wave of firsts for women, people of color, religious minorities, and LGBT+ individuals. The first openly gay governor. The first two Native America women in Congress. 100 women in the House of Representatives. Several states elected their first African American congresswomen. More openly-queer people were elected Tuesday than in any other election. The nation's representatives now look increasingly like the people they represent, and marginalized voices are going to heard louder and more clearly than ever. 

Tonight, I am going to synagogue to hear a choral performance entitled From Shtetl to Shul, which celebrates the music of Eastern American Jews, kept alive through persecution, pogrom, and outright genocide. On the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, this is more important than ever. Today is a solemn day to be a Jew, and a solemn day to be an American (at least if your personal ideologies and values reflect my own). 

Yet, I am spending it watching an absurdly silly gaming marathon. There's a cognitive dissonance in this, and yet it makes absolute sense. 

I have never met a more welcoming online community than the community behind Loading Ready Run, the originators of Desert Bus for Hope. I have never met a warmer, kinder, and more compassionate community than their fans. Over the past 15 years, the core community behind Loading Ready Run has become increasingly more diverse, representative, and socially aware and active. These content creators have challenged themselves to grow as artists and as humans, and their content deliberately and explicitly dismantles harmful notions such as toxic masculinity, heterocentricity, and white nationalism. Their fanbase is supportive, wholesome, and unendingly compassionate. 

Over the next few days, Desert Bus for Hope will, as previously stated, raise absurd amounts of money for charity. (Again, probably around five million dollars.) This money will be raised by fans who give generously to a cause they believe wholeheartedly in. Many of these donations will be in the form of bids to receive incredible hand-crafted items from other members of the community, or to challenge the Desert Bus crew to do ridiculous things for our entertainment. But, at the heart of this entire event is a simple conceit: strangers coming together to support and lift each other up. People giving selflessly to support both their community and the children who will benefit from the donations DB4H raise. 

 I don't have solutions for fascism, or genocide, or xenophobia. I don't have anything other than rage and sorrow. What I have is this: We need big changes. We need to vote. We need to rebel. We need to fight back on every level and at every opportunity, against dangerous and repressive ideologies. But we need small changes, too. The changes that keep everything going. We need compassion. We need generosity. This is not a call for reaching across the aisles and embracing our enemies; the time for that has passed. This is a call for finding your friends and allies, supporting them, and lifting them up. 

 Okay. Gonna go watch some nerds play the worst video game.

NaNoWriMo

If you've noticed that Owl and I have been even more radio-silency than normal, that's because of those four small syllables up top.

NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is a marathon writing event that takes place every November. Participants are challenged to write 50,000 in 30 days. Traditionally these 50,000 will all be part of one original novel, but not everybody does this. Owl, for instance, is working on two separate projects for NaNo. I'm writing a fictional bestiary (based off of drawings for Inktober, a similar challenge where participants draw an ink drawing for each day in October), which, although it has an underlying subplot, isn't really a novel per se. Some people write fanfiction, biographies, or a series of essays. The important thing is that we are all writing.

50,000 in 30 days sounds like a lot, but the reality is that this generally produces a fairly small novel. And few people really have a completed novel at the end of the month. However, as one of the prizes for winners (anybody who completes the challenge), the official NaNoWriMo organization offers a free print copy of your work, and several months to edit and format before submitting a copy for printing. I have a burning need to display a reference guide to fantastical monsters that I made up on my bookshelves with my name on it, so that's my goal for the month. 50,000 words. They don't have to be good. They don't even have to be spelled right. That's what editing is for. But they have to be there.

With that in mind, I am welcoming you all to challenge Owl and I. (Yes, Owl, I'm volunteering you for this as well.) It's a NaNo tradition for writers to challenge one another with dares, word wars, and other madness. A dare can be anything---write a whole paragraph without using the letter e, or an old NaNo favorite, write a scene that includes the "traveling shovel of death". A word war is basically a contest between two or more writers to see who can reach a certain word goal first. Crawls and sprints are among my favorite NaNo challenges. A sprint is pretty much what it sounds like. You write for a certain amount of time without interruptions---no Internet, no phone, no coffee breaks, no editing or second-guessing your word choice. You write constantly, and you write as much as you can, until you reach the finish line. Crawls are my personal favorite though. A word crawl walks you through a set of criteria, and presents you with a series of mini-challenges to be done in sequence. Take, for instance, the bookshelf world crawl Owl and I held at our apartment for a group of friends earlier this week. It began by asking participants to count the number of bookshelves in their home and multiplying it by 100. We have 8 bookshelves, so we wrote 800 words each. To make it more challenging, we made it a word war, so the first to 800 "won" (bragging rights), and we added a dare---a character must, in those 800 words, find a dusty box in an attic. (And, since I have bragging rights: I won! 800 words in 9.56 minutes. And I even spelled some words correctly.) The second leg of the crawl had us pick a shelf and count how many different book series we had on that shelf. Now, this challenge was made somewhat complicated due to the fact that Owl and I have begun to pack up our books for our eminent move, so we only had about 3 shelves worth of books left out, scattered around the 8 shelves. So we cheated a bit, and picked the shelf with all of my Terry Pratchett, which I couldn't bear to put away in boxes just yet, and counted each of his subseries (the City Watch books, the Witches books, etc). Eventually we decided on saying we had 7 distinct series, and according to the rules, multiplied that by 50. So we had a fairly easy stroll to 350 words, and moved on to the third leg, which included the option for one of my favorite challenges, the Fifty Headed Hydra. The Fifty Headed Hydra is a word sprint where the goal is to write 500 words in 5 minutes, so named by the famed creator of the Hydra. According to NaNo legend the first Hydra was successful, but of the 500 words, only three were spelled correctly: "fifty", "headed", and "hydra". (I want to read that novel.) The crawl continues in this fashion, and at the end of it I had doubled my total word count, though it took Owl and I three days to properly complete it. We next have our sights set on the Pokemon Gym Challenge, which we're hoping to start today, and which we are very excited for.

So, if you would like to challenge us to a dare, a sprint, a crawl, or whatever you want, please do! We could both use the help, and they're all a lot of fun.

You can find the forum dedicated to NaNo prompts, word wars, sprints, and crawls here, and some unofficial dares here, here, here, and here, or you can give us your own! (BP= bonus points, DBP= double bonus points, TBP= triple bonus points, etc. The points are Internet points and they can be redeemed for warm fuzzy feelings of pride.)

Now, I am behind on my word count, so I will leave this here. (And I'm only planning on counting this blog post towards my total word goal if I'm really desperate at the end of the month...) This will likely be the only blog post for November, so treasure it, or something. I'll be back in December to finish the harrowing (and now outdated) tale of my Mayo Clinic adventures.

Happy noveling, everybody. Give us challenges, and we will do our best to complete them!

Cheers,
Raven

The Mayo Adventure, part 1

As promised, I wrote about my trip to the Mayo Clinic at the beginning of September. It's a looong post, so it's getting broken up into several parts. 

The Trip to Rochester

Our Mayo Clinic adventure started out auspiciously. The trip from my apartment to Rochester, MN is, theoretically, a little over three hours. My mom set out early from Chicago to pick me up and we continued the journey, through Wisconsin countryside that always surprises me in its beauty. We crossed over the mighty Mississippi river and drove past the town where my father grew up, and it was a serene, interesting drive. Even stopping for lunch halfway through we made it to Rochester in good time, tired after the drive (her more than me, since she did all the driving!) but in good spirits. We navigated through Rochester with relative ease, until we came to a quaint house in a quiet subdivision---our castle for the next week.

The House

The house was one we rented through AirBnB, and it was gorgeous. We couldn’t have asked for a nicer place to come back to, and as our stay drew on, we became ever more grateful for the peaceful space to decompress. One of the co-owners met us as we drove up to his property. An overwhelmingly polite Midwestern man, he told us that he had been a pilot for most of his life, doing emergency flights to and from the Mayo Clinic. After one too many winters flying to Fargo in the middle of the night during a blizzard, he decided he’d had enough of the airborne life, and took a job at Mayo in their aerospace division, where he helped facilitate health screenings and care for pilots. He told us that his partner and co-owner was a pilot as well, laughing slightly as he did so, presumably at the improbability of two pilots settling down in a quiet town in Minnesota and opening a(n Air)BnB together. He gave us a thorough tour of the house, which offered more than enough space for the two of us. The kitchen was well-equipped for basic (and not-so-basic) cooking, the unit came with a fancy “smart” washer and dryer, and the ground floor bedroom had, across from it, a small room with a TV and a recliner. He told us that many people who stayed with him were in town for the same reason we were, and many of them were older, often with mobility issues, and the recliner provided an option for those who couldn’t sleep supine. For me, the room was a perfect “insomnia room”---insomniacs are often advised not to spend any more time than necessary in their bedroom. If they’re not sleeping, they should be elsewhere, so that the only association with their bedroom was sleep. The room across the hall presented itself as an ideal haven for my sleepless nights, though I was hoping (optimistically as it turned out) that I wouldn’t have much trouble in that regard.

The house had a cozy living room, with a Smart TV that offered more features than I really felt was necessary in a TV, but that I naturally explored right away. The living room was stocked with basic board games and a variety of delightfully nerdy BlueRay discs, including the entire series of The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Indiana Jones, earning the owners my instant approval. The house was decorated beautifully, complimenting earthy tones with splashes of color, and giving many of the rooms individual themes---aviation, for my bedroom, Parisian art for my mother’s, and for the insomnia room, retro-style comic book art, done by a friend of the owners. They even provided a welcome gift bag for us, full of instant oatmeal, fruit snacks, crackers, and water bottles, all of which proved highly useful during the long days at Mayo. We settled in, and made a grocery run, driving by the clinic so we would know exactly where it was we were going the next day, for our 7:30am appointment. Tired, we went to sleep early, but neither of us slept well---in what would turn out to be the theme of the week.

The Clinic

The Mayo Clinic itself is an immense facility, spread over several buildings, the largest of which is 21 stories tall with rounded sides extending up its 93 meters. It towers over an idyllic courtyard, across from which is an open air mall/restaurant strip that leads into the University of Minnesota-Rochester shopping area. The two major buildings, Gonda and Mayo, are connected to one another in an awkward fusion that facilitates moving between different departments in different buildings, but has the effect of making it look from the outside like the taller, sleeker Gonda is eating the shorter, squarer Mayo.

The inside of the Gonda and Mayo buildings, where we spent all of our time, was clearly designed with serenity and tranquility in mind. The main level has a long, marble and glass passageway, populated by the coffee and gift shop, the cafeteria, rows of comfortable couches and end tables, and a grand piano that was nearly always in use, occasionally with choral accompaniment. Each wing of the Gonda/Mayo amalgamation was home to one or two individual departments. We spent most of our time traveling between GI (Mayo 12), Neurology (Mayo 8) and the Sleep Clinic (Gonda 17), which meant we learned the layout of the buildings pretty quickly. The departments were equipped with large, often quite full, waiting areas, and we soon learned why. As it turns out it was not at all unusual for patients to spend six hours a day in the waiting room of a particular department, their names on a list to get an appointment should another patient not show up for theirs. We had our own share of waiting, but more on that later. The waiting rooms in the Gonda building were more impressive than those in Mayo. The huge glass walls presented a stunning panoramic view of Rochester and the hills and valleys in the distance. The room itself was full of plush couches, convenient end tables, walls full of pamphlets for patients to read (How To Cope with Chronic Pain; Caring for a Loved One with Chronic Illness; Tips for Managing Stress…and so on) and a row of computers where patients could log onto their Mayo Clinic patient profile to check their appointment schedules and message their doctors. The Sleep Clinic was equipped with a number of jigsaw puzzles, several half-complemented, and magazines in towering stacks, well-loved by the hundreds of patients who came through the Sleep Clinic each month.  We got to know the Sleep Clinic well, and the view from the 17^th floor of the Gonda building, looking out over the city and to the wilds beyond, was one of the highlights of the trip.

New Year, Fresh Start

Hello readers,

L'Shana Tova to all readers who, like Owl and I, are celebrating the High Holidays. This time marks the new year for the Jewish people, the beginning of the year 5776.

For my part, I am resolving on the new year to be more mindful of my promise to this blog. It's been a month and a day since the last post here. It has been a busy month for us both---Owl went back home to visit family, I had a long-awaited trip to the Mayo Clinic, we said goodbye to one of our best friends as she moved across the country, and we celebrated the New Year with my family and my childhood synagogue. It was a good, busy month to end a good, busy summer, but now we are back, and hopefully back to stay. I will not promise daily updates, at least not right away, as I think both Owl and I found that a challenge that we were not quite prepared to face just yet, but we will update as often as we can, and hopefully you will continue to find what we have to say worth reading!

5775 was a good year, but it was also a trying year. Since last Rosh Hashanah I lost two jobs due to illness. I spent far too much time in the UW ER in the middle of the night. I saw many doctors and did not get many answers. Two of my dearest friends left the city, and while they are beginning their own adventures off in the great unknown (outside the Midwest) I miss them quite a bit. I hope that 5776 will have all of the sweetness of 5775 but less of the stress. I hope this not just for me, but for all of you as well. I always thought I was lucky, having the opportunity to celebrate a new year twice annually. It was confusing, yes, from a calendrical perspective, but the time for reflection and resolution is always a welcome one.

So: I hope in the new year this blog will be getting the upkeep it deserves. I hope all the best for myself and for all of you, and I hope you all have a sweet new year. May we all be inscribed for blessings in the book of life.

Shanah Tova.

P.S. In my next post, I will talk more about my experiences at the Mayo Clinic. (Ooh! Fun!) If you have anything you want to ask me about the process, or about Mystery Illness in general, leave it in the comments, and I will do my best to answer, within reason.

Religions of Wisconsin

This week, I have so far seen:

-Four Buddhist monks (bhikkhu) in kasaya standing around the jewelry counter in Sears, looking at diamond necklaces. I think, judging by the color of the robes, they were Tibetan. I don't know if that makes this any more or less unlikely, but I thought you'd like all the details I could offer.

-Two different bhikkhu, three days later, chatting in a McDonald's. McDonald's, in case you were wondering, is not known for offering vegetarian options, especially in the US, (though I do talk about their surprisingly helpful nutrition labeling here); granted this is not necessarily a requirement of all bhikkhu, but there was a certain juxtaposition in the image.

-A woman who, upon me holding the door of the aforementioned McDonald's open for her and the small child she was carrying, told her child to say "thank you" because that's what you say when somebody performs a mitzvah. (I'm all for teaching cultural literacy early, but if your kid can't say "hello" yet there's a good chance "mitzvah" is beyond them. I admire your dedication, though, Polite McDonald's Stranger.)

-A group of Mennonites at the zoo, which while not odd in and of itself, is somewhat odder considering that Owl and I have seen at least one group of Mennonties every time we've been to said zoo. Which is a lot of times. It is, in fact, more times than we have seen the zoo's tiger, who spends much of his time sleeping, with no concern for my burning desire to be best friends with it.

-A Hasidic boy and his father buying Sprite from a mall vending machine. The boy had a kippah with the Acme Road Runner embroidered on the back. I saw them later, sitting on the ground outside the mall waiting as a minivan driven by a woman in a tichel picked them up. 

Briefly, a disclaimer: I do not claim to be an expert in anything at all, especially religion, and especially at least two of the three religions mentioned above. This is why I give you links. Sometimes the links are to Wikipedia. They may or may not have been written by experts. Sometime the links are to forums. Probably not experts, but they know more than me. Sometimes they are to actual academic discussions or legitimate articles. Those are probably by experts. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet, even if you read it here!

Religious diversity is a wonderful thing. So is cultural literacy, which, when it pertains to religion, is a) super important and b) so often woefully lacking. As an example, in the area I grew up, it was entirely reasonable to, if you were the class's Token Jew like me, expect a) to be asked if Jews believe in God, b) to be told Jews don't believe in God, c) to be told Jews killed Jesus, d) to be told that I, personally, was responsible, as a Jew, for killing Jesis, e) to ask me if I "spoke Jewish" and f) to face outrage if I asked, in turn, if they "spoke Christian". Not to generalize, but most of the people asking me these questions were Christian, because most of the people I grew up around were Christian. Religious diversity: important, but hard. And I, myself, have some glaring blind spots when it comes to other religions, and sometimes even my own. Furthermore, as an atheist, or if you prefer, Secular Jew, I have found that it's not always enough to respect religion. If you don't practice it yourself, some people just won't recognize your opinions. And sometimes other atheists will scorn you for trying to be respectful. Sometimes, it turns out, people aren't very nice, and that comes out, more often than ever, when you challenge their core beliefs.

But religion, or lack thereof, is just another fascinating aspect of all of our collective and individual identities. We are these amazing, complex, deeply intuitive creatures, with a capacity for introspection and awe that should be cherished. The fact that we have developed so many vastly intricate and immensely captivating religions and denominations and sects is a thing of beauty. The assumption that not having a religion makes you devoid of a moral code, compromises your humanity, or makes you arrogant is absurd, but so too is the assumption that having a religion makes you complacent or unintelligent. Non-religion does not make you blind to beauty, and religion does not make you blind to reason. If we accept that, if we learn to see the humor in a kippah with the Road Runner on it without judging the wearer for being too pious, or not pious enough, or not pious in the right way, we will all be much better for it. 

P.S. Since this was a very link-heavy post, because I like letting others explain things for me, and because we rely on outside links a lot in this blog, I set up a poll, where you can tell me what you think about clicking on a dozen links when you read our pretty, pretty words. You can find it here------->*

*(may be slightly lower or higher on the page but I trust you to find it yourself from here. I believe in you!)

First World 21st Century Problems

No citizenship post today, but I will get back to the question I left you with - one you probably already knew the answer to - or at least held opinions about. 

The Puritans, who settled all over what is now Massachusetts, were interested in religious freedom... for themselves. They were very strict Protestants who, in Europe, wanted to rid the church of any vestiges of Catholicism. They were very pious, strict Protestants who did not have a voice in the English, and later Dutch, Church as they wanted. They wanted to live in a place where they were free to practice their religion and live where laws reflect their religion. You can probably see where this is heading, right?

When the Puritans started their new colonies they made laws that Puritans would support. They did not allow the practice of other religions within Puritan colonies and they had a specific hatred for the Quakers. In 1660 they executed one, a woman by the name of Mary Dyer for the severe crime of living in the colony while practicing Quakerism. This peeved King Charles II of England somewhat (in the way water displeases cats somewhat). In 1661, as a response to Mary Dyer's hanging, King Charles forbade the further execution of Quakers in the Massachusetts colonies. When that didn't work he revoked the charter for the colony and sent his own governor to enforce some actual religious tolerance in the New World. 

For those who wonder where we, especially in New England, got our history of religious tolerance and diversity you need look no further than England. In fact, it would be best if you stopped there. The Puritans had very little (basically) nothing to do with bringing religious tolerance to the American ethos.

Fun Fact: The Massachusetts Bay Colony executed 4 Quakers between 1659 and 1661, they are referred to as the Boston Martyrs in the Quaker tradition. The first execution was on October 27th of 1659. Today, October 27th is International Religious Freedom Day. The irony, at least to me, is palpable.

On to the thrust of today's post. I wanted to share a book with you all: The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson (I highly recommend the book!!) It is a book I read with voracious appetite over the course of a long weekend as I traveled home for an old friend's wedding this month. The book is a work of historical non-fiction, but told as one part mystery novel and one part hero's journey. The action, as it were, centers around the 1854 London cholera outbreak that killed more than 600 people. The outbreak struck the Soho neighborhood around Broad Street and within a three day period more than 100 people in the small neighborhood were dead. It didn't take long for the rest to flee or fall ill themselves. 

The book focuses on two different men who followed the course of the cholera outbreak: Jon Snow, a  Soho resident, doctor and scientist; and Henry Whitehead, a clergyman who was stationed at a church in the Soho neighborhood. The initial investigation is carried out primarily by Jon Snow, who traces the deaths and comes the radical (at the time) conclusion that the disease is waterborne, not airborne. Overcoming a great deal of push-back from community members in Soho and in science Dr. Snow is able to get the water pump at Broad Street shut down, and so stop the outbreak in its tracks. Despite his brilliant research Dr. Snow did not receive credit in his lifetime for correctly marking the way in which cholera spreads (it is indeed waterborne, and the infection did indeed start at the Broad Street pump the doctor had shut down). 

Reading the book while on a plane traveling the length of half a country I marveled at the advances we have made in science, city planning, and social issues since 1854 (only 200 years ago). The scientific community now openly believes that just because something stinks doesn't mean it's going to kill you (that was the only acceptable belief in 1854). We know that disease spreads in many ways, but water is a big one and just because something tastes clean doesn't mean it isn't teeming with invisible bacteria. As a community we've moved past believing that a person's character determines their likelihood of illness (another widely held 1854 belief.) We don't use cesspools anymore to dispose of human waste. We also don't dump in into rivers, lakes, or harbors (at least not intentionally). We realize that out of sight doesn't really mean out of trouble and modern cities must be designed to reflect that knowledge. Human waste is corralled away from residential areas, clean water is piped in. This is true in every centrally designed and planned city in the industrialized world. Even poor areas of those cities. Modern day New York dwellers aren't likely to get cholera just because they don't live in the fashionable area of town, nor are they going to have trouble accessing clean water, or even electricity if they are able to pay for it.

The book made me appreciate how the little things in my life that I take for granted are really big things that I should be grateful for. I have access to clean running water, electricity, sanitary living conditions, personal space, and a relatively high degree of personal security. I don't live in fear the way every historical figure Johnson peoples his very street-level retelling of the outbreak do. They are realized they lived in close quarters with Death and that He could claim them, their family, and their neighborhood with relative ease and brevity. For all the things we have to be afraid of today in the United States, we don't have fear the way the inhabitants of 1854 had fear. There's no comparison. And for that I'm truly grateful and appreciative.

But, some people still live that way. After Haiti's 2010 earthquake there was a huge outbreak of cholera that claimed over 9,000 lives on the island. Africa also continues to suffer from cholera outbreaks, especially in central Sub-Saharan Africa in countries like; Kenya, the DRC, Cameroon, Nigeria, Sierra-Leone, and Guinea-Bissau. And the thing is, it's a treatable condition and a preventable problem. Both things can be fixed with clean, accessible water, and education.

Why isn't is being addressed? Because there is another facet of 1854 life that we still haven't managed to change. When the problem doesn't affect us directly it's easy to not care and look the other way. Cholera outbreaks are very isolated. It made it easy for the wealthy of London, who lived in droves just one street away from the 1854 outbreak, to ignore the problem or write it off as dirty living and the problem of the poor (brought on by themselves no doubt). In fact, it was the government itself that made the problem possible by encouraging the use of cesspools and dumping polluted water and waste into the Thames and then allowing Thames water to be distributed to the general public. Today, we can look the other way because it's not our country. Not our neighborhood. It's the problem of another government, one that's probably corrupt or lacking proper channels to address the issue. It's easy to make excuses and excuse ourselves from global responsibility, but the fact remains - we are all people with basic human dignity. We are invested in this world and though we may not suffer the poverty and fear directly, it affects us all. We have to watch. We have to pay attention. We have to engage. Because there is a solution and it is within our reach to bring it about.

Read about the issues that pertain to cholera and so many other things that come along with unsafe drinking water at Water.org. They're a great organization and even if you can't donate your money or your time (I know I can't at the moment), the best you can do is not look away. Stay informed and stay engaged.

Citizenship 101: The Beginning (Not Really Though)

Welcome to Citizenship 101. Today we begin nowhere near the beginning. History doesn't have a clear beginning, middle, or end. And the history of countries is particularly difficult to pin down. In the United States the beginning comes well before European settlers set up the colonies. It started between 23,000 BCE and 9000 BCE when Asian nomads crossed a frozen land bridge to the continent we now call North America. From then until 1492, when the continent was "discovered" by Christopher Columbus, there was a ton of history and thousands of distinct civilizations, nations, and cultures. I could spend an entire blog just discussing that history, but I am not the archaeologist of the pair so I will leave that period to Raven's expertise.

So I am going to begin in the middle, instead of the beginning, with the "discovery", colonization, and settling of The New World.

Here are some basic facts you should know about the United States before it was the United States.

"Discovery"

- Columbus wasn't the only one who thought the world was round - everyone thought that! 1492 was the year they invented the globe - Columbus believed the circumference of the globe was smaller than it actually was, leading him to believe that he could circumnavigate his way to East Asian riches by sailing into the empty water we now know isn't empty at all.

- Columbus landed in the Bahamas on October 12th 1492, but that wasn't the first time Europeans hit New World soil. Leif Ericson landed in Newfoundland in 1002 or 1003, almost a half century earlier.

- Columbus was a stubborn ass who abused the natives, thought they were too stupid to know where they lived and went to his grave believing he'd found a new route to East Asia. Seriously, why do we celebrate this man?

Colonization

- Between 1565 and 1634 lots of European settlers from England, the Netherlands, France, and Spain began to colonize the Eastern coastline of the new continent.

- In 1590 Roanoke colony, founded by Queen Elizabeth I, mysteriously vanishes along with all its colonists. Modern archaeologist detectives believe the colonists split with some settling in Merry Hill in North Carolina and others assimilated with the Native Americans in the area.

- In 1607 the Virginia Company founded Jamestown in Virginia, which would struggle in its quest for gold, but later succeed hugely in planting something even more valuable (tobacco). 

- In 1620 the fun-loving Puritans joined the colonizing party, hoping to practice their stricter version of Christianity away from the loose and immoral Protestants of Europe.

- Most settlement happened for one of two reasons, religiously persecuted groups gained a monarch's permission to settle or a company gained the monarch's permission to settle and make money in the New World. In both cases the monarch gave permission because it would make the home country wealthier.

- There were 4 distinct areas of colonization: the tobacco colonies in Virginia, The New England Colonies, the Middle Colonies formed in Pennsylvania, and the Southern Colonies between Virginia and Florida.

- The tobacco colonies were settled by the Virginia Company and would eventually become fertile and wealthy farming land for tobacco. It was made up primarily of Virginia and Maryland, with Maryland becoming a haven for Catholics and Virginia for more traditional Protestants.

- The New England Colonies began with the Pilgrims in Plymouth and eventually split into several colonies: Massachusetts, the more religiously liberal Rhode Island, the more restrictive Connecticut, and the wild and untamed colony of New Hampshire.

- The Middle Colonies including New York, Pennsylvania, and Delaware were a mish-mash of all sorts of settlers fleeing religious persecution and became a very prosperous and comparatively egalitarian place for its time.

- The Southern Colonies, which began as only the Carolina Colony, were poorer, mainly agrarian colonies that eked by in pre-Revolutionary times.

Settlement

- By 1775 there were 12 settled colonies: Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Delaware, while often listed as one of the 13 colonies was never actually a colony. It became a state in 1776, after the Declaration.

- Settlers came to the New World in one of three ways: freely, indentured, or enslaved.

- Slavery was practiced all over the New World, but was especially prevalent in the South, especially in tobacco rich areas like Virginia and Maryland.

- The difference in the working conditions of indentured servants and slaves was largely hope - many indentured servants never worked their way out of debt, but they had the opportunity to do so. Slaves had no opportunity. Indentured servitude also petered out much faster than slavery.

- Indentured servants and slaves were both more common in the South than in the North, but both areas had them and without their free labor the 12 colonies would never have been as successful.

- Georgia was largely a buffer area between the more prosperous Carolina colonies and the more hostile Native American nations, poor farmers were granted land in the territory in order to basically serve as a human wall against a less than friendly neighbor.

Truth or Myth?

Starting all the way back with the Puritans, this country has been built on the deep belief in personal freedom and religious tolerance.

I'll give you my two cents next time.

Let me know if you have questions, comments, or more information you'd like to know in the comments!