This Land

 This land is your land. 

This land is my land. 

From California to the New York Island. 

Thanks to Amerigo Vespucci, that is. If you don't have an encyclopedic memory for such things, Mister Vespucci was the guy who correctly pointed out that Christopher Columbus had not managed to sail around the world to Asia, but had run into a completely different continent. For his navigational cleverness, folks back then started calling this new place Vespucciland. Finding that is didn't have quite the ring they were hoping for, they went with his first name, anglicized to "America." He got two continents. His buddy Chris eventually got a city in Ohio named for him.

Then, for a couple hundred years things stayed pretty quiet. Back then it was a whole lot easier to "discover" places than to commit to actually living there. Probably the one star ratings from the folks in Roanoke just before they all disappeared had something to do with that. As it turns out, the best way to get folks to move to a new country is to chase them out of the places where they had overstayed their welcome. I'm looking at you, William Bradford. 

Suddenly, Amerigoville was open for business. Which came as a bit of a shock to the people who had been inhabiting hills and valleys for centuries prior, but heck, why not help the new kids out? Have a big dinner and invite everyone? A couple years later, another big party was held, but there were mostly white faces sitting around that table. 

And so it went for the next hundred years or so until the east coast of this "America" place was full up. So full in fact that rather than sending boats back with troublemakers to England and so forth, it was decided that we would start pushing west instead, "discovering" all kinds of strange new worlds and new civilizations to disrupt and overwhelm. We said goodbye to the King and set about making ourselves a brand new country. 

From the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters. 

And it's about there that most renditions of Woody Guthrie's song stop. They don't go on to that next verse: 

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
Sign was painted, said, "Private Property"
But on the back side, it didn't say nothing
This land was made for you and me

So here we are, nearly two hundred fifty years after Cornwallis handed his sword to George Washington and said, "You're a nation." and we're trying so very hard to make ourselves out to be "great." Again. And just how do we go about doing this? By rounding up immigrants who helped make this land and sending them somewhere else. This land was made for them every bit as much as it was made for you and me. That's what the voice was "a-sounding." You and me. 

Us. 

Get it?