School defends slavery booklet (Critic says text is 'window dressing')

News Observer ^ | Dec 9, 2004 | T. KEUNG HUI

[cyborg]

I try to be careful when searching. I use firefox now. That seems to help.

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LOL. Good one.

[cyborg]

I don't believe in birth control. I don't get the question about ancestors. My parents are immigrants.

[TaxRelief]

...love your neighbor as yourself?

What is loving? Nurturing? Kindness? Generosity? Compassion? Financial gifts? Material gifts? Sharing the Good News?

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I guess from here on out I shall have to be more careful in what I try to google when it's something about slavery.

I'll make sure I put in the words, 'African slavery'.

Do they have weird bondage stuff in Africa? LOL

[cyborg]

I don't wanna know LOL

[TaxRelief]

What if someone wanted to be an indentured servant?

[cyborg]

That's their own business. What does that have to do with slavery where a person has zero rights.

[risk]

I'm not sure that this material is appropriate for K-12 levels, but it is a private school. If I lived in NC, I'd definitely be sending children elsewhere. Here's more on the school, at least from what I can tell:

http://www.google.com/local?q=Christian+School&near=Cary,+NC
http://carychristianschool.org/

If you see me posting anything with a leaning toward the south it's because of the disarmament issue. I blame the institution of slavery on the same type of thinking that gets us today's illegal immigration. America's elite has always had a glint of evil in its eye. Our Founding Fathers were the type who sacrificed to root King George's Tories out of power. Those Tories were in the South, too.

Today's slavers are bipartisan according to Victor Davis Hanson. They're landed, propertied, and they own the multinational factories and agribusinesses that have driven our small town farmers off their land for the last 100 years. They're the socialist elites in universities and city councils across the land. They're the environmentalist whackos and pseudo-scientists claiming America's economy should be linked to UN. They're the grade school teachers who are teaching that culture is irrelevant and America should give way to every savage creed that we can bring in from Asia, Africa, and the mideast.

In other words, there are a lot of lies being passed off as anti-slavery today that are anything but. If only we just had the Cary School to deal with! This one isn't sponsored by our tax dollars. I'm worried about the ones who are!

We can learn at least three things about our erroneous and deadly experimentation with slavery. First, the Founding Fathers weren't 100% correct on everything. Second, we have to think for ourselves. They didn't establish everything as it should be, and we are expected to rise to each challenge history brings us on our own. Finally, when they come for your community's guns, don't count on the ensuing civil war being a short and painless one.
As Bill Cosby and Star Parker have shown us, it looks like we have plenty descendants of former slaves who are up to the occasion when all too many whites aren't.

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Now I'm afraid to search 'African Slavery'. I might come up with an African version of what I just cleaned up on my 'puter

[cyborg]

amen

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Agreed.

[cyborg]

I just googled it. I didn't get anything bad. Just use your judgment. I usually look at the url first before I click.

[mikegi]

I don't get the question about ancestors. My parents are immigrants.

The ancestors question was a way for me to, whatever answer rdb3 gave, condemn his ancestors as evil.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that a lot of people get off on condemning average people in the past. I guess it makes them feel superior about themselves today. Maybe I have a higher threshold for tossing out "evil" when describing people.

[TaxRelief]

So, the fundamental issue is the fact that slaves do not have constitutional rights: no freedom of speech, no right to assemble, no freedom of religion, no right to pursue "happiness".

Therefore, it is not an issue about living conditions, treatment on-the-job, nor the security or lack-of security in that life style.

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Cyborg, don't you think these kids would come to this same conclusion without just having "slavery is wrong" memorized for their mid-year exams?

You see, it is critically important for kids to learn to reach their own conclusions while they are still under the moral supervision of adults. If you force feed them your opinions of right and wrong, they go off to college completely vulnerable to whatever brainwashing they are exposed to in liberal classrooms.

[dsc]

"I don't disagree with your premise, but would simply point out that American slavery is a lot more recent and relavant to our current society than the slavery from ancient Greece or Rome."

When we evaluate the moral status of the American slaveholder, are we not making a judgment about what he could have and should have known?

We can't hold anybody responsible for what he could not have known, and it's only slightly less difficult to hold somebody responsible unless we can say he should have known.

It is very relevant, then, to point out that slavery was nearly ubiquitous throughout human history. The notion that slavery is morally wrong didn't really catch on until the 19th century. England didn't outlaw slavery in her colonies until the 1830s. There's probably no living human that doesn't have ancestors who were slaves.

For all of history, throughout the world, slavery was as much a part of life as the weather, and nobody thought about abolishing it any more than they did abolishing the weather.

Gradually, though, the perception that slavery is a moral evil began to grow. It caught on here, it caught on there, but slowly. The first slaves in North America, excepting the Indians, who practiced slavery, were white. The first slave market was in New York.

Now, when it got to be about 1850, and slavery was clearly on the way out in the Western World, you might want to say to the Southern slaveowner, "Hey, catch up. Get a clue." But he is not practicing an atrocity of his own invention, nor one unique to himself. He's been slow to change, but he's doing what has always been done, since the dawn of history.

Even so, there was movement in the right direction. Before the war, a motion to end slavery was defeated by the Virginia legislature by only one vote. Many leading figures, including Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, were known to advocate abolition.

One reason that John "Ossawatomi" Brown had trouble getting funding from his northern sympathizers was the widely held perception that the edifice of slavery would collapse under its own weight within a decade.

[muir_redwoods]

Slavery in any form is an abhorrent abomination. It is a stain on this country's history. It matter not the least whether or not the slaves were comfortable or well cared for because the slavery itself was a poison to the spirit of both the slave and the slave-owner.

It is and always will be an indefensible evil.

[cyborg]

understood... I don't knH

[dsc]

"What is loving? Nurturing? Kindness? Generosity? Compassion? Financial gifts? Material gifts? Sharing the Good News?"

I wouldn't claim perfect knowledge of that, but I would go so far as to assert that it doesn't include enslaving your neighbor.

[cyborg]

What I meant to say was I understand and I wouldn't be so quick to call people evil. I don't know the people who owned slaves and don't think everyone who did so was 'evil'.