There was a time, before we became this place which we now occupy, when we were in our formative years. I'm using the term "we" here because "we" have accepted all the benefits of what we've done as a nation and yet many of us demand to be exempted from the negatives that being an American has come to mean today.
This hallowed ground began with the blood of slavery, oppression and murder-on-a-scale that no other nation in modern times has even come close to matching. We didn't count how many slaves we had, or how many were either worked to death, or tortured or just murdered. That war was hundreds of years long and is still very much alive today because it is no longer limited to people of color. The slaughter of the native population accounted for at least 59 million people. And that too continues to the present time.
It's been 224 years since the Constitution was signed, and as of June of 2004 we had invaded "other places," in our zeal to expand American Colonial power, over two-hundred different times. For those that demand "the facts" these are outlined fully and concisely in "Hope and Memory" the May/June issue of Adbusters magazine, number 53.
Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine were very prominent in our early days when we were very busy colonizing South, Central and North America, for the 'new' American Empire. Communication was difficult so when the rest of the world was told to leave this entire Hemisphere to us - it was basically ours to deal with as we saw fit. As colonial Europe had enough problems of their own to deal with; this American-abuse-of-power is pretty much what happened in the deepening shadows of the Western Hemisphere, at least until shortly after the Second World War.
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