“God does bless America, whether you believe it or not,” the man said to me. We were standing… “God does bless America, whether you believe it or not,” the man said to me. We were standing on the sidewalk along Centre Avenue, halfway into an argument about patriotism; not the first I’d taken part in since last Sept. 11, and almost certainly not the last. I’m pretty sure it was the 7,000th time I’ve heard the phrase “God bless America” since that day.

Nevertheless, his words stayed with me – his words, and the fervency with which he said them. “God bless America” is a catchphrase, a patriotic slogan. But what does it really mean?

Our ancestors – the ancestors of some of us, that is – knew. When Europeans first arrived on the land that would eventually become the United States they found a land truly blessed by the divine. Their accounts speak of an abundance few would recognize today.

On the East Coast, birds, including now-extinct species such as the great auk, could be found in “number so great as to be uncountable,” as one contemporary wrote. Passenger pigeons flew in flocks of billions, darkening the sky for days at a time as they passed overhead. Eskimo curlews, puffins, teals, plovers and more could be found in numbers genuinely unthinkable today.

And that’s just to speak of the East Coast, and just to speak of birds. Writing from the Pacific Northwest in the 17th century, Nicolas Denys noted that “so large a quantity of salmon enter[ed] the river [that] at night one [was] unable to sleep.” Elsewhere cod were “so thick by the shore that [one] could hardly have been able to row a boat through them.”

In 1620, the crew of the Mayflower noted “every day saw whales plying hard by us; of which, in that place, if we had instruments and means to take them we might have made a very rich return.” Tens of millions of buffalo dwelt on all corners of the continent, as did wolves and great cats.

The people, too, were blessed: They lived long, healthy lives, owing to low population densities, fewer domesticated animals – a number of diseases are transferred to humans from livestock – and for that matter, an understanding of basic hygiene – they bathed. Their social and political structures were highly egalitarian. As Benjamin Franklin noted, “All their government is by Counsel of the Sages. There is no Force; there are no Prisons, no officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment.”

Across the continent patriarchy was the exception rather than the rule. “The rise of gender stratification often seems to be associated with the development of strongly centralized states,” wrote the anthropologist William Haivland, and north of the Rio Grande there were no state societies. Native attitudes toward wealth can be summarized by the words of Christopher Columbus himself, speaking of the Arawaks of Hispaniola: “[The Indians] are so naive and free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask them for something, they never say no. To the contrary they offer to share with everyone …”

This is not to say that Indian societies were perfect, nor to engage in Rouseavian noble savage romanticism. There were some stratified, highly warlike Indian societies – the Aztecs, of course, and the peoples of the Pacific Northwest – but none of these were quite as stratified or nearly as genocidal as our own culture (see “Man’s Rise to Civilization” by Peter Farb, for more information). In addition, some patriarchic native cultures existed, but still the violent misogyny characteristic of Western Civilization was unknown. Regardless of all this, the facts still remain that in nearly every native society quality of life, in the forms of security, peace, freedom, leisure, equality and connection to the natural world, was much higher than our own, then or now. They were, like everything else on this continent, blessed.

So what happened to all these blessings?

I believe we all know the story. Of the great multitudes of seabirds I wrote of: “They slaughter them with iron-tipped clubs in such quantity that it is an incredible thing.” Of the native people: “The soldiers mowed down dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed the dogs to rip open limbs and bellies, chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer them on sword and pike, and ‘with God’s aid soon gained a complete victory.'”

The great auk was gone by 1844. The last of the billions of passenger pigeons died in 1914. Both hunted to extinction, along with the eastern buffalo, the Eskimo curlew and many, many others. Those who were lucky enough to escape complete annihilation, such as the cougar, the gray wolf and the old growth forest, are greatly diminished in their numbers.

What the man on the street said, what all the signs and bumper stickers and sloganeering politicians say is nearly correct: God, if there is a God, did bless America. Quite generously. But then the Americans came, spit in God’s face, and systematically destroyed every one of those blessings over the course of 400 long, bloody years.

I’d like to see a bumper sticker that says that.

Steve Thomas is a columnist for The Pitt News.