Amos, I just reread my post and noticed a couple of typos and ambiguities which I would have caught had I not been in such a haste not to get it right but to get it written: Here are a few changes I should have made:

...the US is culpable for much of the deadliest terror in recent--and not-so-recent--history....

We have demonstrated since our beginning an off-handed willingness to commit genocide against the indigenous population of our continent and the genocidal slave trade--I recall figures of less than half the Africans taken onto slave traders' ships surviving the voyage, with another huge pecentage dying in the Caribbean slave breaking grounds. It's true that half a million Americans died in the war to end slavery, but how many died in the years after the war trying to establish rights for the freed slaves? Ya got a couple of free fingers to count on?

--seed (and when can we get back to the song contests?)