How History Will Judge Us: My Black History Month Thoughts

I don't believe that slavery ever ended in the United States. It simply changed form. The system used to threaten the brown and the poor with malnutrition and poor quarters, capture, imprisonment and death for noncompliance.

It now threatens the brown and the poor with:

• malnutrition (via cutting people off from their food supplies and then rationing “food stamps” as the elites see fit) and poor quarters (sometimes outright homelessness)
• capture and imprisonment (via the police state and prison industry), and
• death (via both external forces like executions, infant mortality from poor nutrition and medical care, high use of the poor and minorities in the military, as well not providing funds and appropriate training/ mentoring for programs to help with effective programs to address self destructive forces like substance abuse and gang violence).

I truly feel that someday, if the human species survives (and that is a BIG “IF”), the humans of the future shall judge us at least as harshly as we judge the entire slave culture of the south. People will shake their heads and wonder things like:

Why did people do that?

How can members of the same species treat one another so poorly?

Did people seriously believe that it was correct and rational to deliberately starve out a significant portion of the population as a means of furthering progress?

Did the government seriously lock millions of people in cages for the majority of their lives over petty infractions that most people didn't even regard as dangerous? And that problem wasn't widely questioned or challenged? Why not?

Were human beings honestly afraid to walk around in their own neighborhoods, where most of the scary elements of the jungles we evolved within had been removed ? Was the phenomenon of humans preying upon other humans that prevalent?

Why were people choosing to hide within the perceived safety of their boxes—driving very short distances in their oversized cars with locking doors and tinted windows, building additional walls around yards in order to protect the walls within and the people within the the walls? And why, after pulling curtains to the windows closed to their houses in their semi-segregated neighborhoods, did they keep trying to peep at the lives of others through their TV's and computers?

Did people seriously fear other people who didn't share roughly the same skin color and hair types?

Why did they all care so much about their weapons?

What kind of crazy, paranoid, aggressive people were they, living in perpetual fear of one another?

What the f--- were people thinking?

How did their leaders convince them that this was an acceptable, and even desirable, way to live?

I also feel that these (minus the F-bomb question) will be the text book questions written about our present society. And if I were lucky enough to live in a future time when humans had finally learned to get along (at get along least well enough to not savagely destroy one anothers' lives, either through direct violence or through a slow and deliberate campaign to wear out, demoralize, and suck the spirit out of one another), I would wish that I could write some of that textbook. And my my next questions would be these:

How did humans change? How did they get past this? What makes us better humans being now than we were several hundred years go?

And I would hope that my answer is not the same one that I have today.