@drai
Some perspective on old thorns and a view on how we got here in North America:
Much more in the video, of course
Probably slightly paraphrased
From the video:
...
So nowadays for example, if you get one of these diseases, what doctors do is they try to take care of you and isolate you and give your body space to heal.
They didn't have that kind of space.
These diseases came all at once and because they were unaccustomed to them, they went like wildfire through these villages
heartbreakingly, you know, if everyone got sick in the winter, for example, people would be too sick to get fire to get wood, to build fires, and then they wouldn't be able to feed each other they wouldn't be able to get water and so what you see is by the time the pilgrims arrive the devastation for the indigenous communities because of these diseases is horrific.
Just absolutely horrific, and that does a number of things first of all that dramatically changes the reactions of indigenous Americans to the arrivals of Europeans, not only because they don't have the power that they need to fight those people off but also because of the extraordinary sort of chaos in their society.
That there has been such a shock to the indigenous society, they're really kind of in chaos you know.
Think about wiping out 2/3rds of people in your population who you know, what are you going to do to survive? How are you going to protect yourself? How are you going to feed yourself?
So that's one thing that happens due to the death rates that happened before the next wave of pilgrims came ...
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They had not seen anyone, aside from mostly graves
And one of the things it does is it gives to the pilgrims who arrive and later European settlers as well, a sense that God has cleared the land for them.
You know, remember that they are differently religious as are the Puritans who are going to come in 10 years and they look around them at this land that indigenous Americans actually took quite good care of. Cultivated it differently than the Europeans would
So all they think is that God has prepared this land for them, and it means that they are somehow really, really special coming from a land of economic straits, coming from a land where you know ordinary people couldn't have access to ownership of land.
You know all of a sudden they come to this place they find it just breathtakingly beautiful cultivated land and there's nobody on it
https://www.youtube.com/live/8cf9wgsNYvo