Realization

This is pretty random, but today I was sitting on the train back to C-Town, and all of a sudden it hit me: as little as 150 years ago, this country had SLAVES. Freakin' SLAVES! Just like the ancient Egyptians, who built the pyramids! American slaves carried an entire southern economy on their backs.

For a while, I just sat there trying to wrap my mind around the barbarism of it all.

I guess up 'til now, all this talk about southern slavery has always just passed over me, and I never thought about it with understanding and concreteness. Somehow in my mind, I have always categorized American slavery as something categorically differnet from, say, Egyptian slavery. But it hit me today that it is every bit as barbaric, and probably even more so b/c our society actually had claims to enightened concepts like quality or freedom or autonomy.

I can imagine the frustration of the abolitionist now from that era, literaly sick with disgust at the society that is at once modern and yet somehow still tolerating an ancient and horrendous anomaly. What a horrible tarnish to have on our nation's history.