Abolition Was A Con...

I have often said that the oligarchs were very clever in abolishing slavery...

In business, the biggest cost is labour; with slavery, profits were weighed down/eaten up by the costs of keeping slaves - housing, feeding, keeping them healthy...

By freeing slaves, the oligarchs transferred most of their costs back onto the slaves, who continued to work for almost nothing because they still had to, to survive...

And then they lost those jobs to industrialisation and the mechanisation of plantation agriculture...

Abolishing slavery was not a humanitarian act; if it was, the abolitionists would have ensured the newly-freed slaves had a life of dignity to go to - which, supposedly, was the whole justification for the anti-slavery movement...

What is humanitarian about letting beings out of cages, setting them free, sending them off into the wild to fend for themselves without giving them the skills and means to do so?

We don't do that with animals we re-introduce to the wild, but we did it with people...

Abolition was a con...

On the other hand...

The Oppression Of Children...

Via my friend Conny Jensen:
 

"..they cannot survive without you. It is a question of life and death!.. Instead of making them more alert, more aware, more alive, more reflective, instead of making them more mirror-like, pure, you make them full of ideas...layers and layers of dust.  And then it becomes impossible for them to see that which is.  They start seeing that which is not and they stop seeing that which is."


This is bondage. But everybody is living in bondage, because everybody who brought you up wanted to have power over you, to enjoy the mastery over you.

 

And children are the most helpless people in the world, the most exploited class.

 

It is not the proletariat who are the most exploited class, it is not women who are the most exploited class.  It is the children who are the most exploited class -- and so helpless. 

 

The proletariat can revolt -- they have revolted in Russia, in China and in other communist countries. The women all over the world are making efforts to revolt, but it is impossible to imagine how children will revolt.

They are so helplessly dependent on their parents, they cannot think of any revolt. And unless revolution happens in them all other revolutions are going to be superficial.  The basic conditioning, the basic imprisonment is created in childhood when the child is so helpless that he has to accept whatsoever conditions you put upon him just to survive." 

~Osho

 

 

Wow... extra WOW as I consider which of the two temporary housing options I should take up - have to decide THIS MORNING...

 

One keeps the boy more in his already fragile comfort zone, the other opens new doors for us both...

 

I am veering towards the second...

Look How Far We've (Not) Come...

 

 
Lyrics:

In the year twentyfive twentyfive
if man is still alive
if woman can survive they may find

in the year thirtyfive thirtyfive
ain't gonna need to tell the truth
tell no lies
ev'rything you think, do and say
is in the pill you took today.
 

In the year fortyfive fortyfive
you ain't gonna need your teeth
won't need your eyes
you won't find a thing to chew
nobody's gonna look at you.
 

In the year fiftyfive fiftyfive
your arms hangin' limp at your sides,
your legs got nothin' to do,
some machine's doin' that for you.
 

In the year sixtyfive sixtyfive
you won't need no husband,
won't need no wife,
you'll pick your son,
pick your daughter too,
from the bottom of a long glass tube.
 

In the year seventyfive ten
if God's acomin'
he oughta' make it by then.
Maybe he'll look around himself and say,
"Guess it's time for the Judgement Day."
 

In the year eightyfive ten

God is gonna shake his mighty head,
he'll either say,
"I'm pleased where man has been."
Or tear it down, and start again.
 

In the year ninetyfive ninetyfive
i'm kind a wonderin'
if man is gonna be alive.
He's taken ev'rything
this old earth can give,
and he ain't put back nothin'.
 

Now it's been ten thousand years,
man has cried a billion tears,
for what he never knew,
now man's reign is through,
but through eternal night,
the twinkling of starlight
so very far away
maybe it's only yesterday
 

In the year twentyfive twentyfive
if man is still alive
if woman can survive they may find...