Amazing, even in the comments — “We didn’t enslave anyone…”
Even in these responses people can’t get with the idea that Africans were enslaved by the millions, used as resources, generating fantastic wealth because there was no regulation, no conscience, no humanity considered in their abuse.
Just stop. If you can’t handle the idea that slavery was monstrous and that the United States made a great deal of its wealth and prosperity on the backs of slavery, mayhem and murder, then you have chosen to pretend it didn’t happen and you are exactly the person Dave Winer is talking about.
Watch this video created from the records of the slave trade turned into an informational interactive video.
The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes. (Watch it all, if you can bear it.)
Each dot is a ship. Each ship held as few as fifty or as many as four hundred slaves. Watch the dots flash by during the later decades of slavery. You also have the option to click on a dot and learn something about the ship, its port of origin and where its Human cargo was delivered.
If you can watch that and knowingly hold the knowledge of the lives destroyed and lost during the Middle Passage, let alone after they arrived, spending their lives trafficked in a strange land, maliciously separated from their families, their languages, their cultures, their religions, and feel nothing, then you are just as monstrous as Trump and indicative of the problem of this country.
Adulthood means accountability. If you can’t acknowledge the effects of this is an ongoing issue, not just one that stopped in 1860, whose ramifications continued for another one hundred years until the 1960s when it was no longer LEGAL to discriminate due to the color of a person’s skin, then everything Donald Trump represents is exactly what’s wrong with this country.
I am going to quote a friend and writer: Jay Bazzinotti regarding Donald Trump just so we are all on the same damn page.
He wants to alienate and humiliate one of our largest trading partners and neighbors, Mexico
He wants to create unconstititional religious tests for certain minorities and force them to wear a symbol on their clothing the way the Nazis did to Jews
He ridicules the handicapped and mocks them
He wants to bomb the shit out of Iran and alienate our allies and partners who get a lot of oil from Iran
He wants to force Iraq, whom we attacked and destroyed for no real reason, to pay humiliating reparations as a reward for us destroying their infrastructure
He thinks he has the power to change the Constitution single-handedly and eliminate birthright citizenship
He wants to censor science and force CHRISTIAN religious education in public schools
He subscribes to, and gets the support from, white supremacy organizations
He wants to put American soldiers on the ground in Syria to fight a war the Arabs don’t want to fight at whatever expense in money and American lives. His children won’t be anywhere near the action. Yours will.
If it was anyone else we would have laughed this clown off the stage. But for these positions he is the Republican front runner. What does that tell you?
And if this video and Donald Trump resonate with you, YOU ARE THE PROBLEM, and America is just reflecting more people like you. It’s a goddamn shame.
