Yet Another Trail of Tears

I’ve often wondered if the author of Ecclesiastes was  a “candidate for Prozac.”  Was he a depressed pessimist?  You can’t help but wonder about that from some of the things he wrote.  Life was apparently meaningless for him:  “And I declared that the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive.”  It is in Ecclesiastes that we find the oft quoted saying, “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun (KJV).” 

The Trail of Tears is the name given to a series of forced relocations of Native American peoples from their ancestral homes in the Southeast U.S. to areas that had been designated as Indian Territory in the far west.  These forced relocations were carried out by the United States government (after the Indian Removal Act of 1830). The forced removal included members of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Ponca nations.  These people (Native Americans) suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation en route, thus leaving behind a “Trail of Tears.”

History records many “Trails” that have produced many “Tears.”  Our national history has a good many such trails in its story, not only with Native Americans, but with immigrants who have come to these shores (like all the rest of us) and African-Americans brought here in bondage.   Life (your life and mine) has its own Trail of Tears.  Why do we see it as necessary to make new Trails of Tears for others, particularly for those we see as being different? 

Mr. Trump, just yesterday, said, “We have people coming into the country—or trying to come in, we’re stopping a lot of them—but we’re taking people out of the country, you wouldn’t believe how bad these people are.  These aren’t people.  These are animals.”  Mr. Trump has been suggesting this repeatedly from the very beginning of his presidential campaign, calling Mexicans “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists” as though anyone who commits a crime, or makes a mistake, or is imprisoned is somehow less human than the rest of us.   Even now, the Trump Administration is seeking to separate immigrant children (who are not children from his perspective) from their immigrant parents (who are not fathers and mothers,  but “animals” from Mr. Trump’s perspective). I’m not saying this—MR. TRUMP SAID THIS—JUST YESTERDAY!  CHRISTIANS, JEWS, MUSLIMS, ATHEISTS, HUMANITARIANS, SCHOLARS:  WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?

There were ten million Native Americans on this continent when the first non-Indians (immigrants) arrived.  Over the next 300 years, 90% of all Native American population was either wiped out by disease, famine, or warfare imported by the white immigrants.  These Native Americans were seen not as people, but as Indians (savages, animals).  With the writer of Ecclesiastes I’m wondering if “there is no new thing under the sun.”

Even nature cries tears these days!