🚀 go-pugleaf

"trebor@sirius.com.no.more" <user@example.com>
> >Then Trebor wrote:
> >
> >> Life for the vast majority of slaves was a meaningless, exhausting
> >> drudgery with death as the only release. How is that different from
> >> working at Walmart or Target?
> >
> >Because even if you work at Wal Mart or Target, they don't whip you for
> >being unproductive.
>
> The whipping makes for good movie scenes, but the average slave got by
> with a lot of yelling, threatening, shoving, and kicking.

Oh, is that all?   (sarcasm) I've been writing a book that starts in the
antebellum south and I've been researching slave/white relations pretty
extensively thanks to Powell's.  We could talk about this forever if you
want...I have some really interesting source material.   In any case, you're
right in that whipping was less common that what is generally thought, but
at the same point, if my boss ever kicked or shoved me I'd stomp his ass.
(Except for one former boss who's a 6'4" body builder and rugby player, at
which point I'd run screaming to the nearest lawyer.  :>)

In the purest sense, America treated its slaves far better than most
slaveholding civilizations.

> >They don't take your children away from you and sell them to strangers,
>
> Okay, no, but they can put them in foster homes.

Well, not Wal Mart.   Your point here is interesting, but it's a whole
discussion in itself.

> >and they didn't take you from your world, chain you to a ship to
> >languish in your waste as you're taken to a place you didn't even know
>
> More slaves were born in the US than brought here.

Eventually that became law, but it was widely broken in the Mississippi
River region thanks to privateers like Jean Lafitte who captured slave ships
bound for south America and sold them in New Orleans and along the gulf
coast on the black market until about 1816.  The time period in which slaves
were imported, however, is much greater than the last century or so when the
majority of slaves were domestic-born.

> >You can quit your job...
>
> Actually, that's one of the things a Walmart/Target worker is least able
> to do.

Please explain.  Now I'm curious.

> >If you think working at Wal Mart sucks
>
> Not particularly. Someone rhetorically suggested slavery be
> reinstituted. I merely pointed out that, except in the most abstract
> sense, slavery has never gone away.

I think Wal Mart sucks, period.  Anyway, part of the reason the southern
culture was so freaked out about abolition is because it believes that in
the absence of slavery their families would be forced into sweatshop-like
labor conditions exactly as was happening in the north.   By the time the
industrial revolution came around, it turns out that this fear was founded.
Lots of southerners would agree with you to an extent, but there's still a
fundamental distinction to be made between the lower working class of 2002
and slave labor.   Up until the 1930s, I don't think I would have been able
to say that so easily.

Interesting subject!

-gatt