Running from protest to protest as I do weekly, and standing holding signs with neighbors and talking — sometimes deeply with smart, principled, committed people I respect — the conversation always turns to: how did all this chaos and destruction happen?  Where did the violence come from? And the desire to dominate and control others?

The violence and threats of violence began at the beginning of American history as Europeans began to move across the American continent.

The natural landscape as America grew seemed empty, inviting desperately poor people to try to farm it with their families.

Conflict erupted, continued and turned into all-out war on the plains and in the western deserts. 

Driven by white supremacy and the Monroe Doctrine declaring U.S. colonization of this continent, the US Army attacked more savagely as the conflict moved westward with white pioneers and settlers.

Between the War for Independence and the genocide of indigenous Americans, our nation was born and grew in violence and struggle, as well as the desire for freedom and democracy.

We are a product of white supremacy that led us literally to slaughter and imprison indigenous people,  including the horrific Trail of Tears, when all southeastern tribes were forced to walk or herded to Oklahoma, losing any way to make a living or practice their culture, destroying entire societies of native people. Ten thousand indigenous people died in the forced march across half our continent.

That same white supremacy led to building an agrarian economy and white wealth on the evil practice of African enslavement. That white supremacy still envelops us. I’m still shocked at white supremacists who condemn John Brown, who raided the Harpers Ferry armory for weapons to arm a slave rebellion. They call him a terrorist as if three centuries of working and “owning” people with the consequent casual rape, murder, vicious whippings and separating families were not terrorism.

Our most vicious and violent war was our own Civil War, which took the lives of some 700,000 of our people in the horrific conflict to free enslaved people.

Our history has been a struggle to overcome our flaws and faults amongst a people who were and are armed and proficient with firearms.

Abolitionists, both Black and white, toiled tirelessly generation after generation for an end to slavery.

Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Sojourner Truth and William Lloyd Garrison became heroes. 

After the end of chattel slavery, abolitionists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony moved to the freedom struggle for women, especially the right to vote, the suffrage movement. They struggled for decades and generations until American women won the right to vote.

The American Industrial Revolution started with the technology improvements and rapid manufacturing of war materiel for the Civil War. Workers began to organize in the new railroads, mines and factories. Again American workers suffered greatly to win union organizing and collective bargaining.

Ours is the most violent labor history in the industrial and post-industrial world. 

The massacres cover our massive landscape with workers’ blood. Homestead, Pa.; Ludlow, Colo.; Chicago at Republic Steel; The River Rouge fight. All the sit-in strikes were to win the right to organize and bargain collectively.  Workers in America still must struggle for human rights and livable wages. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while supporting a strike for union recognition and collective bargaining. Cesar Chavez died in part because of the cost to his body of the fasts he endured for a farm workers union and improving conditions.

Through it all, freedom lovers fought, sacrificed, lived and died for freedom, democracy,  equality, equity and peace. All our generations have struggled.

All our victories have come at a great cost.

Our government and private wealth have used brutality, vicious violence and blood lust to subjugate some of us to serve and sacrifice for the rich and powerful.

Now the story of domination, greed and violence is being played out again.

We will resist as we have constantly since the inauguration until we strengthen our tattered democracy and defeat the latest of American violent charlatans.

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This commentary was originally published in The Spirit of Jefferson, West Virginia’s oldest newspaper based in Charles Town, W.Va.