RUMINATIONS

I wil admit this entry is a little disjointed. It's edited from and earlier entry and seemed worth sharing again with some updates.

I’m not quite sure where I was going with this. Part of this was triggered by a story on the net about an attempt to rename a park in Memphis originally named for a confederate general. And basically it's seen as a Civil Rights issue. Comment after comment on the thread had the theme that nobody alive now was a slave or owned slaves so African Americans should “just get over it.” It's a few years later and statues are coming down. There's a push to rename military bases.the mayor of DC redecorated the street that leads to the White House. We haven't gotten over it. 

Aristotle taught that some nations were naturally meant to be slaves. Except for the Greeks of course. And that kind of depended on who was at war with whom and how PO'd they were about it. No. No Americans living now own slaves. And most of us don’t have ancestors that owned slaves. That we know of. And I’m not going to go into the why fors and where fors of why our ancestors thought slavery was the right way to do things.

But I’ll throw out some random thoughts. Society condemns the drug addict or the down and outer who steals our stuff so they can sell it and get money to buy drugs or whatever.  The stuff that we believe we need to survive. Our money. Our cars. Our electronics. Our jewelry. They steal them because they “need” it at the time.

Outside out houses and our cities it a great, big wonderful, divinely created world full of creatures that depend on that world for their food, their homes, their futures. And in the words of the seventies song “we plunder, we pillage, we tear and we tunnel. Trees lying toppled,they finger the sky. Building a land for machines and computers, in the name of progress the farms have to die,” And I might add the rivers, the meadows, the sea and the mountain tops.

We rip up the land. We spread our poisons, We literally take the tops off mountains and dump the waste at the bottom of the hill. Because we “need” the the coal.. And as the coal plants shut down in this country, the coal companies "need" the coal to sell to China and India.This country cleans up our skies while they pollute theirs.

We need the cheap crops, We need stuff to fill the bottomless pit in our souls. And no, we don’t own slaves. But slavery still exists.Too many of us do turn a blind eye to the sweat shop labor paid pennies or nothing an hour to build an Iphone that can cost hundreds. And we’ll line up for hours to buy the newest one to replace the one we bought last year. And it proves what? Damned if I know. 

I do believe that there is a worm at the heart of civilization and it goes back thousands of years. Somewhere, sometime, somebody decided that they had the right to take another human being; take them from their homes, their families, their place in Creation and force them to do their will. And claim divine sanction for it.

When the conquerors came to the New World they didn’t see people who mostly lived in harmony with their world they sawpotential Christian converts and potential slaves. And yes, there was war, and conquest and bloodshed on this side of the pond. The poison goes back further than the migration to the New World from the west.

But the native peoples in the "new world" made terrible slaves. They rebelled, they killed themselves and their families, they had no immunity to our diseses and died by the hundreds, thousands. Yes there was slavery in Africa. Tribes enslaved other tribes and sold them to the slavers from the Middle East and I suspect hundreds died getting there. but I haven't heard of Muslims searching the Koran for verses to prove that selling certain human beings was sanctioned by God.

And we are having to rewrite some history books. Turns out the brave English captains who faced the Armada were also slave traders. And Francis Drake didn't end up sailing around the world for the joy of exploration. It was a privateering voyage to hit the Spanish silver colonies on the west coast of South America. And a very profitable voyage it was.

But it was left to citizens of this country to try to justify their "peculiar institution" with Bible verses and spend decaded trying to prove that all Africans were good for was being slaves because they weren't fit for anything else.

I’m not sure where this is leading me, except that I suspect that African Americans aren’t the only ones who need to “get over it.”