Justifying One's Bad Behavior, Andy Jackson Style

ANDREW JACKSON wrote a letter in which he discussed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which he had promoted and signed into law as president, resulting in the forced removal of hundreds of thousands of native Americans from their ancestral lands and home. The expanding United States empire wanted the land, and wanted to get rid of the Indians. the most outspoken critic of the act was Congressman Davy Crockett, whose passionate arguments were ridiculed and unheeded. "That don't make good sense. hell, that don't even make good nonsense". In his letter, Jackson argued that by being forced to walk from Georgia to Oklahoma, they were being given the chance of a lifetime, the opportunity to seek new lives and fortunes as farmers in the wide open west, full of potential. Hadn't white people done the same thing, picked up their lives and moved west, in search of new hope and success? The letter made it sound as if the U.S. government were doig the natives a huge favor, making their lives whole, instead of committing genocide and spreading misery and death, as was actually the case. Jackson, who would stand straight in a gun duel, take a bullet, then laugh at his opponent and carry the bullet in his body for the rest of his life, a moral coward. There is currently an epidemic of moral cowardice in America. People refuse to wear masks because they claim they are bravely resisting government tyranny, or that masks damage your health by forcing you to inhale carbon dioxide, rather than simply admitting that their refusal is prompted by the inconvenience and discomfort of wearing a mask, which everyone who wears one experiences. Or that Michelle Obama is a man, an Barack Obama is a foreigner, and that the Black Lives Matter movement is anarchistic and violent, rather than admitting that personal racism is the motivating factor. We seem full of rationalizations and justifications for our personal shortcomings and petty hatreds, just life Andrew Jackson, who need only have written in his letter that he hated Indians, and wanted to get rid of them.