Colonial Williamsburg

Colonial days were tough. I knew this previously, but just walking around the redone and comodified Williamsburg was tiring. I cannot imagine actually living there. The history spoke to me in a way that was unexpected. Maybe this was due to people dressed in 1780s garb- bonnets, corseted tops, Thomas Jefferson wigs, and knickerbockers.

In conversing with Pendleton, an employee and re-enactor at the park, I finally understood a mentality I hadn’t considered within those days. Newly free from Britain, many settlers wanted to stick closely to their colony and their states own government. Fear of large government bodies made many colonials desire a localized government. Pendleton even said, “I don’t think we will ever have a federal government.” I giggled inside with the urge to ask what he foresaw for the future of America.

The point he made featured the idea that many settlers had no desire to hand over their liberties and rights to the American government. With this, each state seems to have enjoyed and relished in its own identities because the first instinct in the eighteenth century was to preserve a state identity and utilize a national one only if necessary for war or trade.

As far as Virginia was concerned, it could expand its state as far as the great lakes. As long as a man could survive disease and work hard for himself and his family the land was limitless. Nowadays we still use this idea that if we work hard we can achieve anything; Americans expand upwards with buildings, aircrafts, and rockets into the sky which is unclaimed. I wonder if this idea of consumption and growth also needs to be revamped for the new century and post modern age from Pendleton's time.

Are our ideas of consumerism truly good? Is it ok to rise up and want more knowing that others in our country and world will fall lower? Will having more make us happy?