Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Just making a retort Mary Anne.

The Red and the Black...

...Celts, that is. I've some of both. I'm well aware of the lineage.

Yet there is no such thing as a "pure" race, only one isolated geographically. Men and women married and otherwise reproduced for family or personal advantage, for property, for politics, for lust and for love, regardless of ethnicity, all over the place all the time, even in the USA with its miscegenation laws. Religion made much more difference than appearance or custom.

I further point out that there were other peoples living on the islands when the prospectors came from Spain, and heaven knows where they came from. They are also part of the lineage -- well, all except for the Fair Folk who live under the ground in exile and come out to weave their spells on the eves of the cross-quarter days. You want a pure race? There it is, in all its mythological splendor.

My ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower, either. They also came in the holds of sailing ships, mostly, though, escaping from famine. They had little in common with the descendents of the Mayflower people and their cohort.

What's funny is, the more I learn about those earliest of Anglophone settlers, the more I realize how little in common they themselves had with the legends we have made of them. What ho! for things that never were! And back we come to the legend of small-town America. Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick. Give yourself an early Thanksgiving feast for the mind: read it, and then stop acting like such a turkey.

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