Toward U.S. Remorse and Repair

Note: Throughout this essay, crimes against humanity is used as a modern moral and legal category applied retrospectively to historical acts — including invasion, genocide, forcible population transfer, land dispossession, enslavement, lynching, persecution, and other systematic abuses — that would today be widely recognized under international law as crimes against humanity. The term is used to evaluate historical conduct, not to suggest that the legal category existed in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.

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The nation counts itself by 1776. It should begin its ledger with 1606 — and recognize that Jamestown in 1607 made that project territorial.

Emperor–Healer Jesus Messiah does not forbid gratitude for what is good in this experiment. But He, who alone holds panta ta ethnē — all the nations — accountable to His mishpāt, does not let a count of years stand in for a count of the murdered and abused. Paul told the Athenians the same court is already convened — that God “commands all people everywhere to repent, because He has fixed a day on which He will judge the world with justice by the Man He appointed” and raised (Acts 17:30–31, translations mine). The audit did not end with the prophets.

America is not 250. It is closer to 420 — four hundred twenty years since the Virginia Company of London launched its expedition to establish an English colony dedicated to extracting wealth from this continent, four hundred twenty years into a ledger this nation has still not closed.

More precisely, the Anglo conquest-and-land-theft ledger begins in 1607, when 104 English invaders–colonizers arrived and selected what they named Jamestown as the first permanent English settlement in North America. The 1606 voyage launched the project; Jamestown gave the Anglo invader–colonizer enterprise its first permanent territorial foothold.

The number in the parade is a theological and historical evasion, and it is time to say so plainly.

The lie hidden in the number

“250” tells a story that begins at Independence Hall. But tsedāqāh — justness-righteousness — requires a longer ledger.

The Virginia Company dispatched its first expedition on December 20, 1606; the colonists reached Virginia and founded Jamestown the following spring — a commercial venture, not an act of conscience, launched explicitly to extract wealth from land its investors had never seen and people they had not yet met. Extraction came before settlement. Profit came before any professed ideal. Before America had a Declaration, a Constitution, or a flag, Anglo power had already asserted dominion over Native homelands, planted a fort, and begun the territorial system of conquest. Thirteen years later, in 1619, the first documented Africans arrived on that same Virginia soil, sold into a system that would harden into hereditary racial chattel slavery over the decades that followed. Hundreds of Native nations were already sovereign on this continent — governed, covenanted to their own lands, and soon to face centuries of broken treaties, warfare, forced removals, land dispossession, and, in many places, genocide. That ledger did not remain colonial only; it became federal. The Indian Removal Act, signed on May 28, 1830, authorized removal west of the Mississippi and helped turn land theft into national policy.

The founding generation did not open a blank page in 1776. It inherited — and then constitutionally entrenched — genocide, land dispossession, slavery, racialized exclusion, and imperial extraction already more than a century and a half deep. The republic that followed expanded those crimes into further genocide, land dispossession, slavery, broken treaties, lynching, segregation, and other systematic abuses.

To count from 1776 alone is to let the nation choose its own starting line. It is to treat the Declaration as a debt paid rather than a promissory note — a note this nation has been defaulting on since 1619. The 250th anniversary is not a celebration of the debt settled; it is the overdue notice of a debt still owed.

Jeremiah did not let Judah’s kings choose their own beginning either. Jeremiah 22:3 gave the throne a four-pillar test that no monarch, and no republic, gets to grade itself on: mishpāt — justice done, not merely proclaimed; hatstsîl — actual deliverance of the plundered from the hand of the exploiter; protection of the gēr, the yātôm, the almānāh — the immigrant, the orphan, the widow, the structurally vulnerable; and dām nāqî — refusing to shed innocent blood.

A birthday party is not a mishpāt audit. This essay is.

The good, named honestly

There is real good, and tsedāqāh forbids denying it as much as it forbids denying the crimes. The Declaration’s language of unalienable rights, however hypocritically applied by its authors, became a lever that Foundational Black Americans, abolitionists, and believers–followers of Jesus of every century have pulled against the nation’s own conscience. The Fourteenth Amendment — Sections 1 and 5 both — was written in the blood-debt of the Civil War precisely to bind the states to mishpāt they would not choose freely. The civil rights movement, led overwhelmingly by Foundational Black Americans steeped in Jesus’ good announcement, forced the nation closer to its own stated creed. The same century that produced lynchers who called themselves “Christian” also produced Black believers–followers of Jesus and their allies who fought racial terror, helped build organizations such as the NAACP, and gave their lives resisting lynching in the name of justice. Tsedāqāh claims them too. None of that is small. None of it should be minimized in the name of prophetic seriousness.

Every believer–follower of Jesus who has pushed America toward tsedāqāh — the abolitionists, the marchers of the civil rights years — was, in their own moment, accused of hating the country they were trying to save. That accusation is not evidence against them. It is the standard response of a nation asked to turn.

But tsedāqāh is not flattered by half a ledger.

The crimes against humanity, named honestly

Genocide and forced removal of Native nations — the Trail of Tears, the broken treaties, the federal trust responsibility that the United States committed to and then violated again and again — is not a footnote to the American story. It is a load-bearing wall of it.

Chattel slavery was not a regional embarrassment; it was two and a half centuries of dām nāqî violated on an industrial scale, defended by law, by pulpit, and by constitutional compromise (the three-fifths clause — which counted enslaved persons toward political power for the states that enslaved them while denying those persons any liberty at all — did not appear by accident). The clause did not merely compromise with slavery; it rewarded slaveholding power by increasing representation while denying the enslaved any political voice. As the National Archives notes, the Constitution included multiple provisions protecting or accommodating slavery, including the Three-Fifths Clause.

Reconstruction’s betrayal — the withdrawal of federal troops, the rise of Jim Crow, convict leasing that re-enslaved by another name under Black Codes and persisted into the 1940s, redlining and housing discrimination that outlived Jim Crow’s formal end, a century of lynching carried out, appallingly, by men who called themselves “Christian” — is precisely the crime Judah’s court prophets refused to name, and precisely the crime GlemMelo.com has already documented in “Lynchers with Bibles: What Jeremiah Says.” Racial terror lynching was not random mob rage; it was a public regime of violence used to enforce racial hierarchy. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented nearly 6,500 racial terror lynchings between Reconstruction and 1950.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised land and citizenship rights to Mexican communities in the annexed Southwest and was violated within a generation. Japanese American families were interned by their own government in the 1940s, within living memory of their grandchildren. The same failure to protect the gēr recurs across American history in other forms — the exclusion-era laws targeting Asian immigrants, the decades in which women and workers were denied full standing under the law, and the long refusal to build a public square accessible to persons with disabilities, unresolved in federal law until the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Mishpāt was withheld from each in turn.

None of these are “white” people’s private history, treated as a biological fact — they are the sociological legacy of a category, “white,” that was constructed and enforced by law. That category’s own boundaries have shifted by design — Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants once excluded from it and later admitted — proof that “white” was engineered, not discovered. And reckoning with that legacy is the nation’s obligation to carry collectively — through law, memory, and institutions — not a personal guilt owed by every living person classified as “white” today for choices made by people who share their category but not their actions.

The ledger is therefore not one crime but a structure of crimes: invasion, genocide, land dispossession, chattel slavery, constitutional protection of slave power, lynching, exclusion, segregation, and the long legal refusal to protect the vulnerable.

Why this is not academic — it is national security

SecureAndWellUSA has argued, and argues again here: internal reconstruction is not peripheral to national security. It is a precondition of it. A nation with unresolved dām nāqî — innocent blood still crying from the ground, per Genesis 4 — cannot claim the coherence it needs to secure itself against real threats, foreign or domestic. A person who cannot grieve wrongdoing cannot be trusted with power. A nation that cannot mourn its dām nāqî cannot be trusted to secure itself, let alone lead others.

H.R. 40 is not a symbolic gesture; it is the overdue opening of a mishpāt process this country has never completed. The gap between America’s 250-year parade and its 420-year ledger is not a gap in historical trivia. It is the same gap this series has named before: the distance between what is already owed under existing legal and moral obligation, and the political will to enforce it. This is why #ReconstructUSAforReal is not a metaphor — it is the work itself, named.

Shuv — the turn that the anniversary avoids

Shuv is not self-hatred. It is moral sanity — the discipline of a nation, like a person, that can name its own wrong without being destroyed by naming it.

Jesus’ good announcement does not ask America to feel bad for one day and move on. It asks for shuv — turning, actual return to the God of mishpāt — not a rebranding of the same unexamined ledger with new bunting. Matthew 28:18–20 puts all authority, in heaven and on earth, in the hands of the perfectly obedient, crucified, and risen Messiah — not in the hands of whichever nation currently holds the most fireworks budget. Kyrios — Lord — is not the flag. The arrabōn — the down payment, the guarantee — of the coming Kingdom is not partisan comfort; it is the standard every nation, including this one, will answer to.

Nations are not saved the way persons are saved through the Messiah. But nations can shuv in public, civic, structural ways — through law, memory, and repair — even where they cannot be redeemed the way a soul is redeemed.

Remorse without renewal is theater. Renewal without remorse is denial. Shuv requires both.

America is not 250. America is the sum of every year since the Native nations already sovereign on this soil were treated as unwanted strangers in their own land by the strangers who arrived among them, since the innocent blood of the enslaved cried from ground that never received them as kin, since the gēr who came seeking refuge were met with exclusion instead of law — and every year since repentant believers–followers of Jesus answered any of it with mishpāt actually done. Both belong in the count.

The parade itself was not built by that ledger. It was built by the same “White” power that committed the atrocities in the first place — the Lost Cause mythology, the sanitized textbook, the monument raised to the perpetrator instead of to the dām nāqî — a machinery constructed to celebrate rather than repent.

The anniversary offers exactly two options: celebrate the triumphs alone, or remember the triumphs and the dām nāqî together. Only the second is tsedāqāh. Only one of them belongs in “Their” parade.

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The Present Call:

#America420

#SecureAndWellUSA

#JusticeAndMercy

#ReconstructUSAforReal

#LandBack

#HR40Now

#TreatyRights

#ShuvUSA

#EmperorHealerJesusMessiah

#USRemorseAndRenewal

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Holy Spirit of Emperor–Healer Jesus Messiah, be merciful to us, anoint us, lead us, and help us.

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Glem Melo is an imperfect, repentant evangelical missionary.

With research and composition assistance from multiple AI tools.