Can't fathom why this bothers you so much but it is relevant as this sentence immediately leads into a story the conductor on the train was giving about the history of the rail. Would you rather the author leave that experience out of the story because it makes you uncomfortable?
It doesn't make me uncomfortable. I just think it's stupid. I guess it made me roll my eyes, so that was sort of uncomfortable.
(To be as charitable as possible to your point, I did say "cringe", but I didn't mean it in the way that you're interpreting it. I just meant "cringe", in the same way that I cringe when I see someone who boldly expresses an opinion about anything that is factually incorrect, or perhaps, when a stranger starts selling you on their multi-level-marketing scheme in the bathroom. More like "oh god, we're going to do this now, are we?", than a "I reject basic facts of history that the average US high school student should know, including the approximate order of major historical events" sort of thing.)
I guess it just depends on your point of view. I would have found a sentence lauding the railroads and the mechanized opening of the West to be pretty 'cringe' if they had not mentioned this.
I submit that you could cut the entire sentence out of the piece and not lose anything other than a vague sense of judgment from the author.
But hey, I also don't think observing the basic fact that the railroads led to the "opening of the west" would qualify as "lauding" that fact, any more than observing that "George Washington was the first US president" would be "lauding" George Washington. For that matter, I can also enjoy a train ride without feeling the urge to "acknowledge" that Cornelius Vanderbilt did some bad things.
(...though I sadly acknowledge that we're well 'round that bend as a society)
Because most of the time it takes a nice, feel good story and immediately sets the tone.
It's like having a casual chat with a colleague and then they trauma dump about what happened to them when they were 15 or whatever. Like okay, cool, take it to therapy, this isn't the place, you're just making things awkward for everyone.
Seems like lip service slacktivism that does nothing but inject a bit of weird misplaced guilt. Railroads were a huge technological innovation. Handwringing about the skeletons in the national closet without really understanding how or why the railroad played a role seems distracting. The quote from the article says, in essence: ‘railroads and the Indian Wars happened at the same time, kinda, so… railroads bad, maybe?’
And op’s point stands. Tech is power; and almost any tech can be used and abused. But tossing this in seems lazy at best.
Did you read the article? The sentence OP objects to is the lead-in to a conductor on a trip telling him about how rail passengers were encouraged to help reduce the native population. It's a bit of context for an anecdote, in an article that is entirely compared of lightly contextualized anecdotes.
You could remove the sentence I quoted, keep the thing from the conductor about bison, and it wouldn't make a difference to the story [1]. It's a "lead in" only in the extremely literal sense that the one sentence comes before the other one.
[1] It might even work better, since it lets you draw your own conclusions about the anecdote. Not everything needs to be a lesson.
