Picked up a book yesterday that I am excited to be reading. I have found that, in order to better understand freedom, it is instructive to study its opposite - slavery. The book is Bury the Chains, by Adam Hochschild (2005). It covers the abolitionist movement in England beginning in the late 1700's. I wanted to share a few passages from the introduction and talk about them.
"But this was the world - our world - just two centuries ago, and to most people then, it was unthinkable that it could ever be otherwise. At the end of the eighteenth century, well over three quarters of all people alive were in bondage of one kind or another, not the captivity of striped prison uniforms, but of various systems of slavery or serfdom...The era was one when, as the historian Seymour Drescher puts it, 'freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution.' This world of bondage seemed all the more normal then, because anyone looking back in time would have seen little but other slave systems. The ancient Greeks had slaves; the Romans had an estimated two to three million of them in Italy alone; the Incas and Aztecs had slaves; the sacred texts of most major religions took slavery for granted. Slavery had existed before money or written law...
"If, early that year [1787], you had stood on a London street corner and insisted that slavery was morally wrong and should be stopped, nine out of ten listeners would have laughed you off as a crackpot. The tenth might have agreed with you in principle, but assured you that ending slavery was wildly impractical: the British Empire's economy would collapse."
Really, the only thought I wanted to share was this: We are foolish to take for granted whatever freedoms we have, and foolish to neglect their protection. Historically speaking, we are just coming out of the woods where slavery is concerned - at least, the type of slavery that our country is now famous (infamous) for. Yet, the path to true freedom still remains murky, unsure, and in some cases (human trafficking, manipulative laws written and enforced by the wealthy ruling class) blocked altogether.
True, looking at the difficult path to freedom may cause feelings of anxiety, fear, uncertainty - icky feelings to be sure, feelings that we can easily chase away by surfing through 500 channels of cable nonsense. But please keep one thing in mind that is very important - the path to freedom will never be found and successfully navigated by burying our heads in the sand. And if you had to protect your child from an intruder, ignoring the intruder and hoping he will go away would be the stupidest line of defense, wouldn't it? You'd endure the icky feelings you would experience in fighting him off (anxiety, fear, uncertainty) because you know your child is worth it.
The freedoms we live with are relatively young on the world's stage; they are, historically, quite new. They are fragile and vulnerable. And they were gained by fighting off powerful usurpers who had taken them centuries ago. Our country scrambles to enact anti-bullying legislation to rein in 8th-graders, but we treat with kid gloves those bullies who never quite grew out of their immature mentalities and who now make the decisions that control so many of our legislators. Of course, I'm talking about Big Money. Look at the news over the last few years - it is the wealthy and corrupt who pose the biggest threat to our liberties, not a few poor, disenfranchized, radicalized Muslims. It's time to arrest the real terrorists, like they recently did in Iceland.
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