Letter: Parallel with slavery

Dear Editor

February being Black History Month, book sellers are promoting many relevant books, of which include two autobiographies by ex-slave Frederick Douglass: “Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave”; and, “My Bondage and My Freedom.” Both books offer insights into the relationship between master and slave that are applicable for today.

Douglass: “A master is one who claims and exercises a right of property in the person of a fellow-man.” A slave is one that “toils that another may reap the fruit; is industrious that another may live in idleness….to eat the fruit of his own toil, is considered stealing.”

We’ve not yet reached that degree of bondage, but we’re on the road. Those who wish to keep what they earn for themselves and their children are called greedy, while the truly greedy use the force of government to extort what others have earned and claim it as their civil right.

A pharaoh of old withheld straw for the making of brick, yet demanded the same quota. Our pharaoh / president, takes resources from producers and hands it over to his donor fraternity and then demands from the producers an even higher quota.

Preferring liberty to a life of bondage, Douglass commits all in engineering his escape from slavery. Gaining freedom, Douglass sees the Constitution as a permanent guarantor of his freedom, and claims it as his own, as his inheritance. A century later, in his “I have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King makes the same claim. Today our elected servants mutiny and throw the Constitution overboard claiming that it binds them from acting on our behalf.

The ruling elite fears the likes of a Frederick Douglass, and thus they suppress his and other potent writings on liberty. What they fear most is an enlightened electorate. Again Douglass: “To make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one….or as far as possible to annihilate the power of reason….he must be made to feel that slavery is right.”

Freedom is rare and unappreciated. Even God’s chosen people demanded: “Make us a king like all the other nations.” Too many today, preferring bondage to liberty, willingly forfeit their freedom and demand to be ruled; incapable of comprehending that liberty is not some program to resist or comply with, but an exemption from the rule of another.

Tags: opinion, letters, politics