so you think you’re a slave?
In these heady days of entitlement, workplace safety and PC propriety we tend to think of ourselves as little more than slaves if our employer gives us demeaning work to do, keeps us back after hours or doesn’t pay us what we think we’re worth. Right? Well, Mikki thinks we should thank our lucky stars that we have a job and have freedom to complain!“A brief chat with our grandparents might remind us that we are, indeed, lucky to have a job,” says Mikki, “and a quick look around might remind us that there are millions of people moving into western countries who are willing to do what we do for half as much money and without much care for their health and safety, either.”
"Imagine being transported, sold in a slave market and forced to work as a slave in the small farms, workshops and homes of people of the same social class as yourself just because of economic market fluctuations." sighs Mikki. "Being unemployed during a recession is no picnic now, but back in colonial times it was a life and death matter and, in many places in the world, it still is, and the profiteers take advantage of this fact just like the old colonists did."
"America’s Founding Fathers started off with a motley crew of citizens and, despite their noble words about liberty and the pursuit of happiness, life was abjectly miserable for the vast majority of souls in the new land of the 'free' -- and still is," sighs Mikki. "Although the Northern colonies were not exactly slave societies in the sense that the Southern colonies were -- where slavery was the foundation of the economic and social order -- they nevertheless prospered from a slave system that allowed their settlers to take unfair advantage of the unfortunates transported for no other reason than failure to find work in the Old Country."
"The Northerners were by no means Lords and Ladies and to be honest, some of their slaves, the so called 'indentured servants' would also have been convicted felons, and they knew it," says Mikki. "Good God-fearing people all of them, they justified lining their pockets and working to death their poor indentured servants, especially the convicts, with biblical platitudes about giving idle hands work to do and Auschwitz slogans about work making you free."
"This was the culture upon which the American Dream developed and it was as mythical then as it is today -- cleverly designed purely to whip people into working harder for potential future gains that their masters were able to actualize immediately."
"Of course, there were kind souls among them who bought and freed their slaves immediately," says Mikki, "but overwhelmingly the Northern settlers were a mean, grasping lot whose own humble origins did not endow them with any pity for the orphans and widows, felons or not, they bought at the white slave markets and whipped into working for them."
“When a critical mass is reached, will we all, once more, return to the bad old slave days when whites as well as blacks slaved for a chunk of bread and a few rags to wear?”
Read more by Mikki on this issue:
Labels: America, Barbados, barbary coast, convict transportation, England, freedom, indentured servitude, Ireland, Jamestown, kidnapping, Scotland, slavery, slaves, west indies, white slavery
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