Happy Thanksgiving

For John, BLUF:  This Democracy thing is a string of good fortune.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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How the Mayflower compact sowed the seeds of American democracy

Opinionator Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe, 22 November 2017.

Here is the lede plus two:

Driven far off course by gales and rough seas as they crossed the Atlantic in the fall of 1620, the Mayflower’s 102 passengers made landfall at a spot much farther north than they had planned.  They anchored at the tip of Cape Cod in what is now Provincetown, hundreds of miles from the Virginia territory they’d been aiming for — and well beyond the jurisdiction of the Virginia Company of London, which had issued the patent authorizing them to build a settlement.  It was a setback, but not enough to weaken the resolve of the ship’s Protestant Separatists, who had come to America to create a community true to their religious beliefs and would stick together no matter what.

A majority of the Mayflower’s passengers, however, were non-Separatist “Strangers,” some of whom now insisted they were no longer bound by the original plan.  William Bradford, who would become the foremost Pilgrim leader, wrote that several Strangers began to make “discontented and mutinous speeches,” announcing that when the ship anchored they would go their own way.  The Virginia patent was now void, they said, and “none had power to command them.”

Something had to be done to keep the group united.  That something turned out to be the Mayflower Compact, the foundation stone of American democracy.

Interesting that the majority of the MAYFLOWER passengers were not separatist Pilgrims, but rather "Strangers".

I worry that we think of the idea that all men (and women) get an equal say in government is considered common place and not the revolutionary idea that it was just four hundred years ago.  If we don't respect and nourish it we could lose it.

Regards  —  Cliff