“Sad thing is that we may soon find ourselves in the position of envying even the positions of slaves back then”
I certainly hope not. I mentioned Williamsburg above, there and similar historic re-creations show that slaves were usually very poorly treated. House slaves charged with (white) child care slept in hard bins with thin blankets. Then there were the field workers. Then there is the food. And the constant reminders that you are subhuman, inferior, and property. An entire societal apparatus designed to “keeping them down”. The depth of slavery really can’t be easily grasped today, even as we work for more than half the year for our masters.
We have a long way to go before we are subjected to that. Nobody in the next 50 years will be punished for being able to read.
I agree with everything else you said, though- being a “citizen” now is clearly not what the Founders fought and died for.
New version: Jim, you are one worthless Obama!
Change we can believe in.
“Nobody in the next 50 years will be punished for being able to read.”
No, but they may very well be punished for what they read...or write.
>I agree with everything else you said, though- being a “citizen” now is clearly not what the Founders fought and died for.
Thank you / at least I’m not alone in my disgust/sadness there.
>I certainly hope not. I mentioned Williamsburg above, there and similar historic re-creations show that slaves were usually very poorly treated.
>House slaves charged with (white) child care slept in hard bins with thin blankets. Then there were the field workers. Then there is the food.
>And the constant reminders that you are subhuman, inferior, and property. An entire societal apparatus designed to “keeping them down”.
>The depth of slavery really can’t be easily grasped today, even as we work for more than half the year for our masters.
All that is coming, I believe. Consider that our politicians will do ANYTHING to keep things like social security going... things like seizing 401Ks or mutual/money-market funds are becoming more and more plausible as SS gets worse and worse. The economy will likely NOT recover for a VERY VERY long time and the reasons are simple:
1) the government has made it virtually impossible to make a profit in manufacture/industry,
2) the government has made it difficult for even a service-based company to make a profit, especially with the obamacare mandates which will kick in, and
3) even if you DO manage to personally profit and, say, buy a house and be utterly free-and-clear of outstanding taxes the government can seize your property and give it to someone else [so long as they ‘project’ doing so will raise the taxable-revenue from that parcel of land] all “legitimately” as per the 2005 Keelo v. New London Supreme Court decision.
Because there are so fer people actually PRODUCING something of a usable nature, and because the startup of such an endeavor on any sizable scale is pretty much cost-prohibitive [if allowed at all; IIRC it is absolutely illegal to build a NEW refinery in the US... or if it is not the licensing and regulations make it very near so] there will be no increase in the economy in that sector [industrial]. In other sectors, like say Software production, MANY jobs are being outsourced to places like India or China because the parent-corporations. In sectors like ‘hotel & restaurant’ things are about to go WAY down, in addition to more people avoiding air-travel to avoid the TSA there will be the cost of increased energy & fuel costs [which we are beginning to see] due mainly to government meddling & ‘environmentally’ motivated prohibition of our own otherwise accessible fuel sources.
>We have a long way to go before we are subjected to that. Nobody in the next 50 years will be punished for being able to read.
The government has made GREAT strides in eliminating literacy through its ‘education’ system. Literacy does not include JUST being ‘able’ to read/recognize-a-word, but some form of comprehension thereof. (i.e. being able to recognize “Korushite wa naranai.” as: “’to-murder’, subject-particle, ‘must-not-do’” is only the beginning... you must recognize how they relate to each other and combine they [”’to-murder’, subject-particle, ‘must-not-do’”] into its proper meaning. In [old] English that would be, of course, THOU SHALT NOT MURDER.) My post you replied to showed EXACTLY that failure of the understanding of the meaning of the words.
{If you’re interested http://www.improve-education.org/id46.html & http://www.improve-education.org/id58.html are interesting reads on the subject of reading.}
But then that incident at court only underscores a second and equally dangerous philosophy: the rejection of Logic. It is perfectly acceptable for the government to do what is flatly prohibited for it to do so long as it can appeal to the masses, no? Say something like guns, we certainly can’t allow GUNS on school property! “Schools are “sacred halls of learning” and guns are only tools of violence, and anyone who might bring a gun to school can mean only evil!” is what they get the masses to cheer, even if ANY such law is illegal. And they get away with it, not because they have logic or the [actual] law; but because they have emotion, and ‘benevolence’, and PRECEDENT (which is the APPEARANCE of law, at best).
If the government is to be defeated in the legal arena, a VERY difficult prospect —precisely because they clothe themselves in the falsehoods that are precedence and virtually the whole of the Judiciary, I fear, will hold to precedent over the actual law*—, then it is those who can both read and reason/apply-logic who are the most dangerous to the government.
*I so suspect because to do otherwise the Judiciary would be giving up power; history has shown that those in power are disinclined to voluntarily surrender it in whole or in part.