The whole premise of the July 4th holiday is that we celebrate the day our nation declared independence from a tyrannical government. Additionally, it's a celebration of the beacon of freedom America has become for its own citizens and the world since 1776.
But that’s not how Ben & Jerry’s (B&J) see it. Instead, the Vermont-based ice cream company thinks that the country built is due for a time of reckoning.
Using a strong mix of leftist talking points, B&J published a post on Instagram that guilt-tripped America for violating a land treaty with the Lakota Sioux Indians in South Dakota. B&J used this to launch its argument that all of America is built on stolen land and that it's high time we give it back.
While it's true that America and its government did some pretty horrible things to the Indians that lived in this country as it expanded, that doesn’t even remotely mean that Indians are entitled to get the land back. Just like black people are not owed reparations in the present because America had an obvious slavery problem in the past and corrected, Indians are not entitled to all of the United States because of a list of wrongs committed - however long it may be.
If we were to apply this level of logic to every group of people that had conquered another in its quest to expand its borders, that means Indians would have to give the land they owned back to whomever they took it from, since other groups of people called this land home long before they got here. Indians also weren’t innocent from committing great wrongdoings towards American settlers either; they’re not just the peaceful, completely helpless group revisionist historians paint them as.
America's history is far from perfect and, at times, quite disturbing. But no country should be torn down and dismantled because of an imperfect past, because if that’s the standard, no empire, nation, tribe, or territory should ever be allowed to exist.
This isn’t the first time that B&J’s has used its platform to aid progressive causes. Not only did it create an ice cream flavor in honor of Colin Kaepernick, it stopped selling its product in Israel’s West Bank in an anti-Semitic move, and financially aided the CHAZ community in 2020’s “Summer of Love.”
As an aside, I wonder if B&J's plans on starting the trend of giving land back to Indians. After all, Indians at one point lived all across Vermont...
