You know where I think the mistake was made when the Europeans came here and

[madokie]

Connived, stole and killed their way into the territory so as to bring their new 'revised' way of doing things from living to governing here. We, or they should have paid more attention to the Native Americans and learned from them then it would have been a break from what they were running from, rather they brought what they were running from with them. What fucking idiots
jus' sayin'

[RainDog]

1. Native Americans have been saying this for centuries

but that euro-trash floating up to the shores of turtle island seemed (seems) to be a little morally deaf

[NightWatcher]

2. hell, just adopt one priniciple and we'd be better off. The Seventh Genera

the idea that decisions should be considered for their impact on the seventh generation to come

[madokie]

3. It would be a different world today if they'd adopted that

I know we're just a little part of the world but we being who we are are looked up to and have been for centuries now. Just think where we would be. Oh we'd still have a mode of transportation that wasn't on the back of a beast but that transportation wouldn't be that it was killing us a slow death. We'd still have a lot of the stuff we have to day but all done in a responsible way, from the extraction of the ores to the refining it, to the manufacturing, the using and also the discarding of that object.

[Igel]

4. No.

If the Europeans hadn't done it, somebody else would have.

And it's likely that if nobody had, not many would be looking up to "us" now. They'd be wondering exactly how it was that such a rich territory had managed to be so divided and so poor.

(That's the thing about Romantics--not only do they romanticize the past and remove all the bony, gristly bits, but how history would have unfolded could only make those they root for important, pure, wise, and virtuous. They overlook, in the case of Native Americans, the species that were driven to extinction, the wars, the obvious imperialism even by the Iroquois "Confederacy" and numerous genocides here and there; they overlook the dendriculture that was prevalent on the East Cost so that large tracts of forest weren't pristine but controlled to provide not only sustainable, but a low level of subsistence; they overlook that the consequence of exposure to Eurasian diseases would have been the same, with the same 80-90% death rate unless exposure happened after technology on Eurasia had reached the point of handy mass-produced inoculations; they overlook that the only innovations that let N. American tribes really prosper--even Cahokia -- were imported from elsewhere. And far from being long-term sustainable, when such civilizations arose in most places, they eventually overreached, caused environmental degradation, whether around Cahokia or Nazca. Give additional technology, and since human beings really do have the same basic drives you'd have fairly similar results.)