The other day in a previous post, I made a semi-facetious crack about how Romney gives me the impression that he would like to restore slavery. Now along comes this Associated Press poll examining that very question from another and perhaps more discrete angle, or perhaps not so discrete really.
Before the Civil War (an oxymoron if I ever saw one!) when agriculture was a mainstay of the economy, and cotton was king, and slavery was rampant throughout those genteel southern states, there wasn't so much of a problem,
because everyone understood their place and could plainly see who held the whip and who yelled, "Please, Ma'sa... Don't beats me - Ah promise I'ze gonna be real good!".
But times change, and like Will Rogers said, "You can't say civilizations don't advance - in every war they kill you in a new way." And slavery, at least the officially recognized variety of it, was abolished. The unofficial variety of it, encompassing both blacks and whites amongst the poor still thrives in its own diabolical ways.
The 'problem' in the good old U.S. of A. with prejudice rearing its ugly head between blacks and whites or blacks and non-blacks perhaps I should say, isn't so very different from the kind of problems we've had here in Canada ever since 1759 when Wolfe's English defeated Montcalm's French near Quebec City and
France lost its claims to a big chunk of North America - for which they've never forgiven us English and never let us forget it for a moment. They've become experts at laying guilt-trips on the non-francophones of our land, and in a futile effort to appease them, we've poured unreasonable amounts of favors and financial benefits into their disruptive and disagreeable province in a useless attempt to shut them up and bring peace to the valley. It hasn't worked, because ever since 1759, every succeeding generation of francophones has considered it their sacred duty to teach their offspring that those goddamned English bastards stole their vast and fertile lands from them, and that Canada rightfully ought to have been a French possession all along. And they intend to harrass us and howl and whine about it until we either give them back the rest of Canada, or cut them loose and tell them where to go and what kind of weather to expect upon arrival. Neither of which is an intelligent option nor likely to ever happen.
In a sense, we're all the authors of our own misfortunes, and to add insult to injury, we seem unwilling or unable to put all that behind us, and start working more co-operatively together for our mutual benefit. Which puts us about on a par with the rest of the human race, which evidently would rather fight than eat.
The proof of that is everywhere, and somewhere on the globe, there's constantly a war or wars in progress. Phrasing that another way, our technology has advanced amazingly throughout our history, but emotionally speaking we're still at about the same level as Ug and Mug, those intrepid cavemen who battled the dinosaurs for their lunch and battled their neighbors for their mates. There's nothing new under the sun, Kiddies. It just looks that way occasionally, but it's
really just a mirage. We're all just gorillas in the mists of time.
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