American Identity last

. However such practices of cruel vengeance was not enough. By the war’s end, the Algonquian population in New England had been drastically and permanently reduce (Lepore 43). Of those who escaped such fate a worse one, it might be argued, awaited them. After certain battles “Captives,” Lepore writes “were almost surely sold into foreign slavery or, if children, placed into service with an English family” (135). Contrasting radically with the terms of captivity the Indian held to, for “English people owned themselves; Indians did not.” Says Lepore (135). Yet another fate waited those who survived captivity or death.
The Indians were driven to, what I perceive as the forefather to concentration camps, so called Deer Island where Lepore writes “the hundreds of Indians on the small island had few resources with which to feed and shelter themselves for the winter, and the provisions they received were inadequate” (139). And further write, “Those Indians who tried to escape from Deer Island could be killed, while others were illegally taken from the island and sold as slaves” (139).
I think more then anything fear had aided greatly in shaping the American character. In all its endeavors I think the United State was compelled by fear and carried out by extreme pragmatism. As their settlers forefathers American of the twentieth century illustrate this point in almost all their dealings with any threat, real or imagined, to their authority. The tormenting hearings of senator McCarthy, the mob lynching of African-Americans and abhorrent treatments they suffered during the civil rights era; and the most extreme of all reaction the dropping of the nuclear bomb on Japan. “Terminate with extreme prejudice.”
I have heard the sentence uttered time and again on TV and in print by presidents and military leaders, of past and present and I think it sums up how American react and why they are driven to have the best of things then the other party. Whoever that other party is. Like the colonist who strove to protect themselves by any means so are contemporary Americans acting in the same deplorable way they say they are fighting. So I guess in the end it is true. The weapons change but the words and the sentiments behind them stays the same.