Will anybody obey, this time?
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, May 23, 2024 – During the quarter-millennium of the American republic, the American people never have liked being told what to do, whom to love, nor what to hate. But, all that seems to be changing while a plantation mentality creeps back into American life.
Before the plantation economy could be established throughout the American south, slaves had to be imported. Some slaves already were available in this hemisphere, on plantations established by French, Dutch, Spanish, and British planters, but most were bought in Africa, then brought to the colonies, and plantations.
It must be noted that Europeans did not import slavery to the West, where it already was common among America’s first nations, particularly as a weapon of war.
why was the Civil War waged?
Whether or not Americans in the south admit that they fomented the Civil War to perpetuate their plantation economy, for Americans in the north, emancipation of the slaves was the only justification for fratricide.
Since slave labor is the ultimate non-union wage, is it any wonder why union jobs are so rare throughout the south? That is because, after Johnny Reb had been thoroughly thrashed on the battlefield, his masters, the planters who started the war, simply ignored the peace imposed on them by the failure of their slavery scheme.
The southern planters, their heirs and descendants today, never reconciled themselves to core American principles, which prohibit theft of freedom, theft of labor, and theft of life. Such principles are not exclusive to Christianity, but nobody is a Christian who doesn’t embrace them all.
During the height of Abolition, in 1845, the Southern Baptist Convention was established, to give cover to people who do not abhor slavery, which ordinary Baptists and regular people always have done.
To believe that a pro-slavery Southern Baptist can also be in communion with Jesus Christ, requires the same moral gymnastics as it takes to believe that what appears on Truth Social either is based in truth or is not designed to disturb society.
But wait – there’s more!
Among those Americans we presume to be delighted by the north’s victory, is a group as eager to impose their will on the American public as planters and their confederates had been. They work from the same script that produced blind obedience throughout the plantation economy – they dictate orders to others.
They have a model in mind for what people should look like and how people should behave. Just now, they seem to be growing restive at how diverse we remain, both in appearance and in behavior, even though the bossy types sport impressive academic credentials!
Even if all they tell us is to get rich, or become famous, still, only parents can issue such orders. It simply is a fact of life that the only authority over children and adolescents is vested in parents; whatever authority may be wielded by public employees is metered via the ancient common law construct known as In loco parentis, which never would allow our petit dictators to enforce their airy directives.
Of course that’s not what they tell us, but they feel entitled to tell us what to hate and whom to love.
Unless I miss my guess, no American will ever vote for any candidate who promises to tell them whom they must love and what they must hate. Let me go one further and suggest that even some second amendment cultists would opt for possession of their own souls over possession of killing tools, whether hand-held or shoulder-fired.
Anyone who consumes what is programmed for transmission by businesses in the the breaking-news sector knows that our sisters and brothers, the ones not in red hats, are scared to death that democracy is fragile and in peril, like a damsel in a British fairy tale.
But, that only exposes a critical gap in their schooling: they must not know that Hitler was elected; they must not know how happy Stalin was to let his people vote; they must not know that what makes America great in the first place is the fact that we are history’s first republic of immigrants.
Democracy is not a form of government, it merely is a tool used in many schemes of governance. The American republic is something else – on paper at least. As Abraham Lincoln said, the United States of America is government of the people, by the people, for the people.
But, in America today, is someone who is a worse actor than John Wilkes Booth was. Is he armed – did he bolt New York because it’s easier to get a gun permit in Florida?