Word: jeffersons
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Looking back, the Sioux had it right. Jefferson had told Lewis to inform "those through whose country you will pass" that "henceforth we become their fathers and friends, and that we shall endeavor that they shall have no cause to lament the change." But whites brought diseases that killed as many as 90% of some tribes' members. Most of the tribes Lewis and Clark encountered were forced off the rivers that sustained their commerce and culture and herded onto reservations with poor soil. Today a third of Native Americans live below the poverty line, and half are unemployed...
Lewis and Clark gave the Jefferson Peace Medal to Indian chiefs they met as a symbol of friendship from their new "chief" in Washington
...Land Is Your Land sounding like a booster from Houston with a pump jack for a metronome. But the Depression was then. This is now. Political correctness is addicted to committing the sin of anachronism--imposing the current sense of racial and environmental decorum upon earlier times. Consider Thomas Jefferson's descent from Enlightenment philosopher and naturalist to slave master and debaucher of Sally Hemings--a fair enough revisionist correction, if kept in disciplined perspective. Of course, one age's evil is another's routine. Meriwether Lewis, as specimen-collecting naturalist, blasted away at a condor--a barbarous breach...
...broke into an anthem that might have been written by the National Association of Manufacturers: "Roll on, Columbia, roll on/Roll on, Columbia, roll on/Your power is turning our darkness to dawn/So roll on, Columbia, roll on." Guthrie ardently wired up the dawn of Manifest Destiny to hydroelectric power: "Tom Jefferson's vision would not let him rest/An empire he saw in the Pacific Northwest/Sent Lewis and Clark and they did the rest/So roll on, Columbia, roll on." The beautiful, wild river made Guthrie see factories and dams and mines that would put people to work to feed and clothe hungry...
...word bicentennial, it brings to mind the year 1976, when Americans were painting everything red, white and blue. But there is an event just over the horizon that will bring fresh meaning to the word, a commemoration of a three-year saga that began in January 1803, when President Jefferson sent Congress a secret plan for exploring the "Western Ocean" and asked for $2,500 to finance the trip. The ensuing adventure of Lewis and Clark and their multicultural Corps of Discovery is such a defining American saga that we wanted to be second to none in bringing...