Slaves

 

I saw this a few days ago and it started me thinking. As my wife often tells me that can be dangerous. She is never sure where the thought process is going. For me it took my thoughts back to July 5, 1852. Seems like an odd place to go. I take some time every year to read the speech Stephen Douglass have that day entitled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” It is reasonable to ask what the fuck I’m talking about. We are not enslaved. We are free to go and do whatever we want. Are we really? 

When many of us work for a living and our jobs fail to pay for the basic requirements of life are we not in a manner enslaved? A job that pays so little we are eligible for government assistance. Government health care. Government housing or housing assistance. Off to our little job we go. When we finish with that job maybe we go to another. Eat, sleep, work. Don’t get sick. No paid sick days. Vacation? No money for that. Maybe once in a while you get to go out for a McMeal. Nothing fancy just burger and fries. They say go back to school and get training for a better job. When? With what free time? Eventually if you’re lucky it’s time for retirement. I say lucky because the poor have poor diets and poor health care. Early death is more likely than a long retirement. The meager income from social security will keep you where you have spent you life. Subsisting on the meager scraps thrown your way by a government that hopes you die soon. 

I think that is where Douglass can be enlightening. This is from his speech that day in 1852. 

“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”

It is time for change. No one should be required to work for less than a living wage. We can and must as a nation do better.