The Benefits Of Being A Slave
My friend K. Sheshu Babu wrote a statement:
If government’s see people as private property, that may be ok because at least they ‘ value ‘ them. But, they see people as ‘ voting machines ‘ which is worse than slaves … The politicians Garner votes during elections and forget that they are in the govt because of votes and voters …not even valuable property that can be looked after …!!
Sheshu’s words remind me of comments that another person emailed me around ten years ago. They, paraphrased, went something like this:
Slaves brought over from Africa received a certain basic level of care in the USA because they were valued as money-makers. So if they got sick, they were tended. They were fed and clothed. Yet they were not done so until reaching USA shores and sold off to plantation owners and others. Otherwise they were just a shipment of product for which a certain loss, such as loss of life, was expected. So they were lain down and chained in place in cargo holds, and so be it.
How ironic to name the ship “Jesus,” but a common view of these earlier times was that Blacks were descendants of the Biblical Cain and needed to atone for sins in the way that Adam and Eve had to do so for eating the apple of knowledge at the snake’s (the Devil’s) urging.
There are many images extant of Mary, the mother of Jesus, stepping on the snake, the symbol of the Devil, as a way to kill wrong. Here’s one of the older ones:
Accordingly the slaves were taught that they were bad as a part of Devilry and had to do the labor on plantations as slaves as recompense for sin for their ancestors derived from Cain. (How can anyone love wacky and dangerous religious deceptive views, trickery, aimed at putting oneself in power as opposed to science regarding skin color? Religion posed as something unless profitable for their own kind – how convenient? So the Cain view prevailed as justification for the heinous act against other humans, ones enslaved and, of course, the same awful views exist in many other religions … but never mind on that topic since it doesn’t fit with the main gist of this writing.)
Therefore, it was acceptable to let the supposed Cain’s people conveniently die as ultimate sinners while lain down and chained in place on such ships since they were supposedly derived from an ultimate sinner, Cain (which is a religious fiction like so many others from various religions). Besides which they were just cargo, seen as a product, and easily replaced by future cargo in the process of selling even more slaves for profit for which, I’ll add, some Blacks in Africa rounded up the future slaves and were complicit in the whole ordeal. So just don’t just blame Europeans of white skinned decent. … And don’t blame, as a white blond, me personally, although I have been called a racist and a Honkey, as has been my sister, who are willing to put our lives on the line for social justice regardless of whom we are willing to protect and regardless of their ethnic background. … How dare we be called racist!
Not true? We’re somehow culpable? Then look at who we are: The Good Sister, A Model For US All! | Countercurrents
Such a dire insult! How can anyone accuse us of bigotry when we both are willing to even lay our lives on the line onto death to support social justice regardless of the skin color, culture, economic class or social group of those whom we are willing to protect even if it involves our own demise and death. Yes, how dare anyone accuse us just because we are white-pink skinned! Infuriating!
Go ahead. Name me. Give me an identity based on your viewpoint, but it had better be accurate or else watch all fury break loose as I refuse to subsume lies and be complicit in them to denigrate me.
It’s the same state for someone like this poor Muslim teenager, who was savagely butchered on a train. Don’t you dare name him as your enemy – some child, who can’t defend himself against a racist or religious rampage involving him being knifed, kicked and pummeled to death!
No, we are not at fault, we ones who try to rise up in goodness. Others are – our assailants!
Perhaps when that teenager died, he felt like me as someone wrongfully accused of being a person who he is not, an abomination that must be destroyed. I don’t know his thinking when he was killed.
I just know that I would have thrown my body on top of his, this poor child, to protect him when he was being butchered. I know my own meddle.
I’d be yelling as my own ribs were being shattered that my USA government is coming for you if you harm me. (Sometimes this ploy works as it did when my friend stood before Bosnians against Serbs and they freaked out at his stance so as to not shoot through him to bet to the Bosnians behind him. Other times, it doesn’t work:
While protecting a Palestinian family’s house against unlawful demolition, Rachel Corrie, a lifelong Olympia resident, Evergreen pupil and community activist …
I know my limits in ethics when IM willing to lay my life on the line and don’t anyone dare accuse me of bigotry because, in return, I’ll come at you like a wraith out of Hell for an insult that totally crosses the core essence of my being for my short time on this Earth. … Yes, this teenager could have used my protection. So I’m sad that I couldn’t have been there when he was murdered because it could have turned out differently had I been, with the full force of myself, involved in the fray.
You should see my sister. She’s twice me in force and passion in terms of which to be met face to face. You do not want to reckon with her underlying underpinnings and power of will. (She was my teacher.)
She and I don’t go looking for trouble, but when it comes our way – watch us in action to address wrongs that need confrontation. Formidable and relentless until totally expended in resourcefulness and capability, we are able to go to the extent of our beings in addressing strife even to the point of our deaths!
I get afraid of confrontation and try to avoid. Yet my older sister taught me to leap forward to address all wrongs. So I follow her path forward since our views to be our best selves are the same. So we’ll both jump forward for social or environmental justice even though doing so is more scary for me. (I know her ilk and mine that strives hard to duplicate.)
Look, I’ll be frank. I don’t like most organized religion. Look at that Cain junk that I exposed and in that vein, I don’t like the Islamic either despite that I’m spiritual and, in a way, worship all life from the cow to the butterfly to the worm.
It is because of this deep respect and love for the totality that I could willingly lay my body on a teen’s of Moslem faith to take the brunt of the wrath against him. Respect and love give me no other choice. … and don’t you dare accuse me of pacifism. I’m way past that at this point:
… but back to the main gist since I got tangential in drift of my discourse …
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Unfortunately many of the enslaved healthy young women upon being sold into service at plantations were planned to be and were subsequently raped by the biggest strongest black male slave (and as an act not always wanted by him). Yes, it was on purpose so as to create future big strong slaves based on the rapists’ physical characteristics, hopefully, going forward to make further robust plantation slaves. … or else they were raped by plantation owners and their friends in a night of revelry. Hence, we have a genetic population of blacks in the USA, ones who are closer to white people in genetic endowment now than in their African side of the mix.
They were still slaves, but called mulattos and some of them were gorgeous in looks and temperament. Look, look and you’ll see my sense in terms of the way women ravaged still brought something good into the times forward:
Now, though, a different pattern is in place. Yes, still rape happens, but not to create beautiful and hard-working future slaves.
Instead nobody has value as all are easily replaced by slave-laborers, the low wage workers receiving a wage as close to bottom dollars as can be achieved. Then they can be replaced due to overpopulation and not enough jobs existing. So forget health care and more due to your being property as were slaves receiving benefits. You are, instead, an easily replaced nothing unlike slaves tended due to their value to the owners. Your worth is, instead, zero.
Yes, you, these days, can be just fodder to make profits for those at the top at many corporations. You have no intrinsic value as a human being. You are nothing except for a money-making machine/mechanism for other people using your skills and knowledge to make profits for themselves and paying you as little as they can get away with doing.
As a consumer, you can keep buying products from various companies, the allurements. Then you can keep the current pattern of wealth sucked to the top in place.
That comment from Sheshu reminds of my sister’s related ideas. She returned from a trip to Egypt and told me that she was initially very disturbed and angry to see young girls, aged five or so, being sold by their parents to rug makers, who would have them sit day after day in dark huts, which were dark to prevent bleaching of rug color pigmentation by the sun.
They sat on the hard dirt floor hand-weaving oriental rugs for hours on end each day rather than being in school and learning to read, write, play and experience other benefits that American girls their age have as the makeup of their very different lives.
Yet they were minimally tended: received food, clothes, medical care, safety from rapists, a shelter to sleep undisturbed. So they had something (just had USA slaves had).
Then when thirteen or fourteen years or so, they were sold off to a husband when their eyesight was poor from all of those years in the dark and when their hands were crippled from repeated patterns of weaving. So they continued to live even though physically and psychologically compromised from prior experience thrust upon them for years on end.
If fortunate, they could continue to be tended, such as getting an adequate amount of food and shelter. Why, they could even breed their own girl-children to sell to continue the rug-maker pattern or if males to continue the ones that their fathers have and get a compromised rug-maker wife at an early age of her. Pathetic!
Yet, I suppose that it better to have a job as a child and be fed than to be cast out of your family because you’re a girl and starve to death on the street. As an alternative view, how about not having children that you cannot materially support in terms of feeding and otherwise tending them?
How about trying a more favorable way forward in Egypt and in ever so many other countries, including in the USA where I live, wherein people breed past whatever their personal economic conditions and environment can support in some locations? What do I mean? Here take a peek:
https://www.mercycorps.org/…/yemen/quick-facts-what-you-need-know-about-crisis-…
Jun 22, 2017 – It’s bordered on two sides by water — the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden … Yemen imports 90 percent of its food supply but, because of the …
https://www.theguardian.com › World › Development › Hunger
Mar 16, 2017 – Yemen was completely dependent on imports of food, medicine and fuel … “We eat corn with water and the water is not clean, we are suffering …
www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-wheat-idUSKBN16N2B0
Mar 16, 2017 – Egypt has been buying wheat on global markets at a breakneck clip in recent months in what grain traders say is an effort to keep up with its …
www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-wheat-idUSKBN18Y055
Jun 6, 2017 – An Egyptian court has decided to re-instate a zero tolerance policy on common grain fungus ergot, lawyers on the case told Reuters on …
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Every night I hear many freight trains with many heavy cars shaking the rails under them loaded with goods headed into Boston, MA to feed and serve those millions of city dwellers, who can’t provide their own food and goods due to their concentration away from the land that provides for them. These cars do shake the foundational platform on the granite rock base on which my old 1800’s home is located and I can feel the vibrations in the house as these trains strike on past my own location and sink my house further into the granite bed beneath it due to gravity. (The house, well built to stand for centuries, holds steady, but creaks with some of the train passages and it is noticeable through ticking sounds as the home further settles through the events repeated again and again as it sinks into the granite foundation by the might and power of trains impacting upon the land under the home, especially since it is aged despite being so well-built.)
Additionally, what happens when the trains can no longer run due to lack of fossil fuels or for other reasons? So I worry for the people in Boston needing the long trains with a hundred cars or more each for food and other goods, the trains that gradually are incapable to supply the tremendous amount of goods, goods that keep a current lifestyle in place. … I worry. I worry.
Meanwhile, my parents saw their own wrongs in Egypt many years before my sister’s time there. They saw huge vats of old foul oil roasting caught wild dog in the desert, which were sold for a penny a skewer of the dog meat.
They saw an old skinny man wandering away from the place of a vat fall over and lie down. His eyelids, closed, were covered in flies and maggots trying to suck the liquid out of him in such a hot dry place. No one came to help. My parents yelled in English for someone to help him and send for an ambulance. Nobody did and they, my parents, didn’t know what to do other than to put some money in his pants pocket.
They did the same action for scrawny street “urchins” — young children running around the street and encircling them trying to sell a stick of gum or a piece of candy. They, my parents, doled out money without taking the gum and candies. …How has it gotten to this unconscionable state of affairs?
Meanwhile, they also wandered out back at a luxury five star Egyptian hotel where a wedding, which they had observed from a distance, had taken place. The wife’s dress was covered in sewn-in pearls and jewels. … Out back, behind the hotel, was all of the food that had been thrown into dumpsters — a huge supply of five star restaurant food and course after course of it from appetizers to horsd’oeuvres to salads and condiments to main course items to desserts and drinks and European candies and expensive brandies served at the end. All was dumped in conglomeration and in a mix.
How sickening when this excess food and drinks could have been donated to the poor — the ones starving or nearly starving to death! No, dumped away, instead!
In the end, life is “cheap.”A person often means nothing unless s/he can make a profit for somebody else like the family holding the wedding. Yet, it is better to sit in the dirt in a rug weaving hut than to fall over from lack of food with flies and maggots in your eyes.
So my friend, who wrote the comment is right. It is better to be a slave than to be devalued in entirely. What a sorry state of affairs to be viewed as someone whose only worth is his money-making capacity for another and how sad that some people, rising to the top financially, are such sociopath losers!
It is pathetic to be a slave in some ways. However, it is pathetic to be a slaver, too. Both states of being – to be a slave or a slaver –deserve our pity and desire to help them to change their connection to corruption and misery.
Yet even worse is to have no worth and to just be left to die. So Sheshu is right. It is, as previously implied, better to be service as private property! How unacceptable, though, it is!
This brings me to another point. It’s that I’m not particularly enamored of our species at this particular point in time. It’s because I see the used people and the users everywhere around us whether they are wage-slaves, the nothings that aren’t treated well as slaves or the users, who strive to keep the current status quo, which benefits them in gargantuan ways, in place as they ravage other humans and the natural world to simply benefit themselves.
Enough of this:
This sort of event has gone on time since times immemorial and it is time to stop. It is time to stop hurting others, especially children!
No, no, enough! Many of us have had enough of this wrongfulness and we must work together to make the pattern of usury, centuries upon centuries of it in existence, stop! … No more children sold to sweatshops to weave rugs or hawking goods like candy and gum on the street! No more old men with flies at their eyes falling down in the sands without aid! No more ladies with dresses encrusted with pearls and diamonds! No more having to bear witness to such ugly events by sensitive people like me!
Sally Dugman is a writer in MA, USA.
http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/08/04/the-benefits-of-being-a-slave/
posted by Satish Sharma at
22:10
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