02 Dec 2004
Brit-Am Now - 485
Contents:
1. Brit-Am Pictures
2. The Coming of the White Man to North America and Brit-Am Comment
1. Brit-Am Pictures
More Brit-Am (Ezekiel 37) Stick Pictures
http://britam.org/yairwithstick.jpg
http://britam.org/yairwithstick2.jpg
View from Brit-Am Kitchen Jerusalem Office Window
http://britam.org/viewfromwindow.jpg
2. The Coming of the White Man to North America and Brit-Am Comment
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/25/opinion/25mann.html?oref=login
NYTimes.com
Unnatural Abundance
By CHARLES C. MANN
Published: November 25, 2004
[Extracts Only]:
Few Americans over the age of 30 escaped from high school without
encountering Jennie Augusta Brownscombe's 1914 painting "The First
Thanksgiving" in their American history textbooks. Reproduced in
thousands
of lithographs, it depicts the post-harvest gathering of Europeans and
Indians in 1621 as a momentous transition, a kind of cultural passing
of the baton. Suffused in celestial light, a vigorous New Order serenely
takes over from the diminished indigenes.
But the changeover was even bigger in scale than Brownscombe knew. In
"The First Thanksgiving," as in other depictions of the first Thanksgiving
meal, natives and newcomers share their feast on a field of bluegrass,
dandelion and clover - three species that did not exist in the Americas before
colonization.
Until the arrival of the Mayflower, continental drift had kept apart
North America and Europe for hundreds of millions of years. Plymouth Colony
(and its less successful predecessor in Jamestown) reunited the continents.
Ecosystems that had evolved separately for millennia collided. The
ensuing biological tumult - plants exploding over the landscape, animal species
spiking in population or going extinct - had consequences as profound
as those from the cultural encounter at the center of Brownscombe's
painting.
In a phenomenon known as "ecological release," imported species can run
wild because their natural predators have not come along with them.
Clover and bluegrass, tame as accountants at home, transformed themselves
into
biological Attilas in the Americas, sweeping through vast areas so fast
that the first English colonists who pushed into Kentucky found both
species waiting for them. The peach proliferated in the Southeast with
such fervor that by the 18th century, the historian Alfred Crosby writes,
farmers feared that the Carolinas would become a wilderness of peach
trees.
In "The First Thanksgiving," the colonists appear to be eating turkey.
Historians, however, say the more likely main course was a pottage of
European wheat and Indian corn. The mix was emblematic of what Dr.
Crosby has called "the Columbian Exchange," the movement of species between
the Old and New Worlds. Wheat, following bluegrass and clover, occupied
huge swathes of the Midwestern savanna. Meanwhile, corn conquered Africa,
Asia and central Europe. Corn so thrived in 16th- and 17th-century Africa,
Dr. Crosby has argued, that it sustained a population explosion that let
Europeans take millions of Africans for slaves without emptying the
continent.
Brownscombe depicted 23 Europeans sharing the meal with five Indians.
According to the Pilgrims' own accounts, natives outnumbered newcomers
at the meal by almost two to one. But once again the artist unknowingly
got something right. Soon after Europeans arrived, European diseases killed
90 percent or more of the hemisphere's original inhabitants - at least 30
million people, and possibly 100 million, according to most recent
estimates.
Four years before the Pilgrims' arrival, shipwrecked French sailors
accidentally unleashed an epidemic, possibly viral hepatitis, on Cape
Cod, which then swept through New England. The Pilgrims moved into an Indian
village, Patuxet, that had been emptied by disease; they survived the
first winter only after digging up food caches in victims' houses and graves.
Some historians have speculated that holding the Thanksgiving meal was,
in part, an act of apology.
The epidemics were momentous historically, for they opened up the
continents to European assault. They were equally momentous
ecologically, for they changed the continents themselves. American Indians
were
ambitious, sophisticated landscape managers. In South America, they
drained vast areas of wetland; scattered networks of raised agricultural
fields
in Bolivia, Colombia and the Guianas; and converted much of Amazonia into
an "anthropogenic" forest - a mix of gardens, orchards and agricultural
forests. Visitors to the Andes still gawp at the Indian terraces that
carpet the highlands - more than 2,000 square miles of them in Peru
alone, according to the geographer William M. Denevan, most of them at more
than 9,000 feet.
Brit-Am Comment:
There may well have been Israelites amongst the native Amerindians as
many believebut most of them were not of Hebrew ancestry according to our
understanding.
The Israelites who came to North Amnerica had the way cleared before
them as much by
ecological factors and the unintentional spread of plagues (such as
the common cold)
for which most of the natives had no natural resistance.
A similar event appears to have occurred when the Israelites entered
the Land of Canaanite.
The Bible says that the Canaanites would be dribven out by the
sicknesses of Egypt and by the
"hornet". The word translated as 'hornet" in the Bible is "Tsirah"
and
some commentators (e.g. Iben Ezra)
says it is cognate with the word translated as "leprosy" ("Tsarat" from
the same root) and actually means a kind of sickness
or a sickness transmitted by some kind of mite or other insect.
The epidemics that cleared the way for Israelite settlement in North
America:
[Exodus 23:27] I WILL SEND MY FEAR BEFORE THEE, AND WILL DESTROY ALL
THE PEOPLE TO WHOM THOU SHALT COME, AND I WILL MAKE ALL THINE ENEMIES
TURN
THEIR BACKS UNTO THEE.
[Exodus 23:28] AND I WILL SEND HORNETS BEFORE THEE, WHICH SHALL DRIVE
OUT THE HIVITE, THE CANAANITE, AND THE HITTITE, FROM BEFORE
THEE.
[Exodus 23:29] I WILL NOT DRIVE THEM OUT FROM BEFORE THEE IN ONE
YEAR; LEST THE LAND BECOME DESOLATE, AND THE BEAST OF THE FIELD MULTIPLY
AGAINST THEE.
[Exodus 23:30] BY LITTLE AND LITTLE I WILL DRIVE THEM OUT FROM BEFORE
THEE, UNTIL THOU BE INCREASED, AND INHERIT THE LAND.
[Deuteronomy 7:15] AND THE LORD WILL TAKE AWAY FROM THEE ALL SICKNESS,
AND WILL PUT NONE OF THE EVIL DISEASES OF EGYPT, WHICH THOU KNOWEST, UPON
THEE; BUT WILL LAY THEM UPON ALL THEM THAT HATE THEE.
[Deuteronomy 7:16] AND THOU SHALT CONSUME ALL THE PEOPLE WHICH THE LORD
THY GOD SHALL DELIVER THEE; THINE EYE SHALL HAVE NO PITY UPON THEM: NEITHER
SHALT THOU SERVE THEIR GODS; FOR THAT WILL BE A SNARE UNTO THEE.
[Deuteronomy 7:17] IF THOU SHALT SAY IN THINE HEART, THESE NATIONS
ARE MORE THAN I; HOW CAN I DISPOSSESS THEM?
[Deuteronomy 7:18] THOU SHALT NOT BE AFRAID OF THEM: BUT SHALT WELL
REMEMBER WHAT THE LORD THY GOD DID UNTO PHARAOH, AND UNTO ALL EGYPT;
[Deuteronomy 7:19] THE GREAT TEMPTATIONS WHICH THINE EYES SAW, AND THE
SIGNS, AND THE WONDERS, AND THE MIGHTY HAND, AND THE STRETCHED OUT ARM,
WHEREBY THE LORD THY GOD BROUGHT THEE OUT: SO SHALL THE LORD THY GOD DO
UNTO ALL THE PEOPLE OF WHOM THOU ART AFRAID.
[Deuteronomy 7:20] MOREOVER THE LORD THY GOD WILL SEND THE HORNET
AMONG THEM, UNTIL THEY THAT ARE LEFT, AND HIDE THEMSELVES FROM THEE, BE
DESTROYED.
[Deuteronomy 7:21] THOU SHALT NOT BE AFFRIGHTED AT THEM: FOR THE LORD
THY GOD IS AMONG YOU, A MIGHTY GOD AND TERRIBLE.
[Deuteronomy 7:22] AND THE LORD THY GOD WILL PUT OUT THOSE NATIONS
BEFORE THEE BY LITTLE AND LITTLE: THOU MAYEST NOT CONSUME THEM AT ONCE, LEST
THE BEASTS OF THE FIELD INCREASE UPON THEE.
[Deuteronomy 7:23] BUT THE LORD THY GOD SHALL DELIVER THEM UNTO THEE,
AND SHALL DESTROY THEM WITH A MIGHTY DESTRUCTION,
[Joshua 24:12] AND I SENT THE HORNET BEFORE YOU, WHICH DRAVE THEM OUT
FROM BEFORE YOU, EVEN THE TWO KINGS OF THE AMORITES; BUT NOT WITH THY SWORD,
NOR WITH THY BOW.
3. The Parachute
(Extracts Only: Authorship not known to us)
forwarded by Joan Griffith
The Parachute
Charles Plumb was a US Navy jet pilot in
Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a
surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands.
He was captured and spent 6 years in a communist Vietnamese prison. He
survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that
experience!
One day,
when Plumb and his wife were sitting in
a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, "You're Plumb!
You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk.
You were shot down!"
"How in
the world did you know that?" asked Plumb.
"I packed
your parachute," the man replied.
Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude The man pumped his hand and
said, "I guess it worked !" Plumb assured him, "It sure did. If your chute
hadn't worked, I wouldn't be here today."
Plumb
couldn't sleep that night, thinking about
that man. Plumb says, "I kept wondering what he had looked like in a
Navy uniform: a white hat; a bib in the back; and bell-bottom trousers.
I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said 'Good
morning, how are you?' or anything because, you see, I was a fighter
pilot and he was just a sailor." Plumb thought of the many hours the
sailor had spent at a long wooden table in the bowels of the ship,
carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the silks of each chute,
holding in his hands each time the fate of someone he didn't know.
Now, Plumb
asks his audience, "Who's packing
your parachute?"Everyone has someone who provides what they need to
make it through the day. He also points out that he needed many kinds of
parachutes when his plane was shot down over enemy territory -- he
needed his physical parachute, his mental parachute, his emotional
parachute, and his spiritual parachute. He called on all these supports
before reaching safety.
Sometimes
in the daily challenges that life
gives us, we miss what is really important. We may fail to say hello,
please, or thank you, congratulate someone on something wonderful that
has happened to them, give a compliment, or just do something nice for
no reason As you go through this week, this month, this year, recognize
people who pack your parachutes.
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