People are suggestible, but because they want to learn; that’s the shame of it, how the best instincts and life-drive get used against their interests. Breaking the Biblical commandment to honor ones’ parents, and by extension all of real history, is a truly important building block for those who want to destroy people generationally. But honor doesn’t mean love or like or follow. It just means what it says: HONOR. And by extension, one learns to honor the past, generally.

Once, to decide just how culpable I really was in regards to the slaves, I read the censuses numbers (to see what they really ate and such, to see if they were starved), and also Slave Narratives, the ones collected through the Federal Writer’s Project in the 30s, where laid off writers were paid by the government to interview and record what REAL slaves had to say.

In the first one I picked up, the REAL slave said something like, “Well, what you have to understand, is times then were just exactly like now. People never change. There were good people to work for and bad people. And some were abusive and nasty, and some were real nice and you had a decent situation…” And so on.

It’s hard to believe that wasn’t deep-sixed because the first paragraph spoken turned everything upside down that we were taught in school. You got a sense that she’d just been going to a JOB with bosses. And a plantation sounded more like a city, not just a TV image of someone with the cotton bag. They had livestock workers, accountants, carriage maintainers, people to buy food for all the people at once, and so on.

Also, you could realize a shift in the “left,” from the elevation of the “worker” (and even white ones–like the image of Woody Guthrie and his guitar they always show) in the 30s, to the more Trotskyite model of today. Out with labor’s personal voices and class, in with dictatorial ethnic-conflict and race-gender controls. But people are the same. There are still good and bad ones, and awake and asleep ones.