While some feel it would have been better for America if the Mayflower has simply sunk to the bottom of the sea, taking its cargo of miserable Puritanical scolds and punishers with it, they made it to Plymouth Rock on December 22, 1620, forcing the rest of us to celebrate these dour idiots on
NATIONAL MAYFLOWER DAY!
If only a mellower, less judgmental crew of pilgrims had arrived in America first, we wouldn’t be constantly condemning each other over silly little things and throwing people in jail for sport and profit.
But nooo, we had to be founded by Puritans, who did not flee England to escape religious persecution, but because the English (!) weren’t oppressive enough for their tastes.
So they wrested control of New England from the same locals who helped them survive their first winter by killing them (no good deed goes unpunished), and for the next decade or so it was all abolition of Christmas, scarlet letters, pillories and witch burning, until Roger Williams showed up, knocked heads together and instituted religious freedom and separation of church and state in his brand new colony of Rhode Island (which neither resembled Rhodes nor is it an island, but that’s another story).
Luckily for the rest of us, the Framers of our Constitution were more the intellectual descendants of Roger Williams than the Puritans, but the damage was done and the “Puritan Ethic” is alive, well, and condemning your sorry ass to a lake of hell fire for all eternity as we speak.
Puritans: Putting the grim in Pilgrim for nearly 400 years.
•Suggested Activities: Live and let live, Karen!