"Look to the past" is naturally what I am going to have to agree with you. But in my research, I've also come to not believe white printed version of the past, especially anything written in the last one hundred years. The distortions are enormous and mindwarping, and have made me try to piece together the information to try to understand what may have been added, changed or deleted. I would refer you to my article written on the Puritans, but I just realized I published something else yesterday so it will wait until tomorrow to get brushed up.

But what I've so far pieced together, the Puritans were not "pilgrims." That word was used, but was not promoted to describe the "Puritans" until the 1870s. The Puritans also did "own" or "found" the Plymouth Company. All joint stock companies were officially started through the King and his certification for investors. The capital was thus raised. The Puritans only volunteered to work and set up the new colony in the hopes of setting up the "new world," but they neither captained the ship nor owned. They were known as "Seperatists" though and were hostile to the King. The King in 1534 (Henry) annointed himself "Pope" of the Anglican Church and broke from the authority of the Catholic Church that ruled over him and thus his people by exerting moral authority through the churches and bishops.

The Puritans hated being controlled under both the military authority of the King and religious authority of the King.

But they were no peace lovers in bonnets. The ones who stayed behind fomented a Revolution in the 1640s the resulted in final victory, cutting off the King's head and declaring independence from the "tyrant" and banished that autocratic style of government in their approved declaration. They then voted to disband the oligarchy that the British called the House of Lourdes and the Oligarchs and started a new form of government based on thus control by the people rationally voting on laws in the Parliament. The past their constitution in March of 1649, having banish autocracy and oligarchy successfully.

At least for a time. The oligarchs and King, in Exile in the Netherlands like Puritans, unfortunately had a few centuries of experience on running a government, funding it, raising investment, growing rich, and rasing troops. They started a new war and by 1660 the King returned to Kick out the victorious Puritan Sepratist Revolutionaries. But the Puritan separatists in the colony never forgot their hatred and bitterness, building their own country they would take from that tyrant. How do you think the words "tyrant" and "the oppressions" got in the Declaration of Independence, the same words that express loathing toward tyranny that appeared in the Constitution passed by the victorious separatists in March 1649? By chance and coincidence? By someone throwing tea into the water in the harbor on a whim? Or for over a century of bitter resentment and a profound loss fueling a deep ideological divided over the tyrant who returned to power?

Think of their hatred toward the king/tyrant and his oppression of them like black Americans might think of racism. Are you upset because a couple people you heard said the N-word, or from the last few hundred years of whites endlessly repeated along during that time, along with endless stopping on the streets by police for petty and falsely perceived incidents leading to policies of stop and frisk, that only encourage further 4th amendment violations by police that were already established but now had a name? I chose the second, obviously, and leave the tea party myth as weak junk and the myth of emasculated "pilgrims" in the trash.

Resentment builds from on-going repression. I don't care what the "pilgrims" thought about sex, I only care that they caught the nasty tyrant and cut off his head and declared autocracy over.

Thanks again for your continued reflections and insights.