SLAVERY-BULLYING BY ANOTHER NAME I hear a lot of people talking about the movie, 12 years a slave. I havent seen it because I read the book and Im pretty schooled about slavery and I dont like to sit and watch people suffering. But I hear people say things like, how could that happen? How could another person treat another person so cruelly. Well.....I am appalled by what happened, obviously, but I understand how it did. If you do your research you will know that legally, African Americans were not even considered a full human being until after the civil war. If you cant empathize with another being and see yourself in them, its easy to justify abusive acts. To understand the atrocities of slavery, or the Holocaust or Rwanda or.......just look at the way we treat animals on production farms. Its often brutal and yet many of us turn a blind eye and support the treatment of these poor creatures and eat the meat by justifying it with the belief that they are not humans and we need to eat. It s not a big stretch to imagine the people in the slave states whose economy has been built on the backs of slaves to justify it, but they are not really humans, there niggers. Its not the person so much as the socializing of society that allows this to happen. I think about this every time I yank on my dogs leash a little harder then I should or raise my voice to her for not listening to me, after all, shes just a dog. And those slaves were just niggers. Its a very slippery slope when you start to draw the lines of justification based on your own agenda. It happened in Germany, Vietnam, Rwanda and almost everywhere in the world at one time or another. At the heart of atrocity is lack of empathy. And so it is with every act of bullying. Bullying can only happened when you see the other person as less then you. Solomon Northrops story is heart wrenching but not unusual in its brutality. Check out the slave narratives which documented the first hand accounts of over 2000 of the last of the living slaves in America. Brutal. My point is this: history is best served when we learn from it and slavery is the perfect lesson in empathy. Bullying will end, just as slavery in America did (Mostly) when, and only when, we learn to empathize and see ourselves in every other living being. Rather then cast blame and miss place our focus, lets learn from powerful movies and stories like this and create a sociology the is based on empathy and understanding of one another instead of competition and self centeredness. Lets learn from history and use it to end ALL FORMS OF BULLYING!
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 15:41:16 +0000
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