Slavery

 July 15, 2022

My muscles are a bit sore tonight. My son’s wood splitter decided to give up the ghost in the middle of today’s splitting operation. I don’t know what happened other than after shutting it down to fill the tank, when I tried to start it, it was completely locked up. I’d like to think it’s fixable, but from the sound of it, odds are not in my favor. Except for one particularly knotty piece, I split quite a stack by hand; my body will tell me tomorrow what it thinks of my efforts.

Our culture these days is obsessed with racism. If in a conversation one deviates from the “woke” narrative, no matter how cogent and logical the reasons, there is the very real danger of being called a racist. This, combined with my wood splitting adventure today, has me thinking.

Slavery is an evil nearly as old as mankind. It is ubiquitous in history and in the world today. It is a pernicious and persistent blight that leaves a moral and spiritual trail as disgusting as the slime tracks of a slug. We rightly condemn it in all its forms. But I wonder sometimes if we aren’t a bit too smug and self-righteous in our condemnations. Would we be as staunch an enemy of slavery if we didn’t have modern machinery to perform our menial and physically difficult tasks today? What if every urban resident had to cut, chop, and stack their own wood in order to be warm in winter? What if instead of our automobiles we had to keep horses, feeding them, mucking out the barns, and growing our own hay, oats, and corn?

So much of modern life depends on mechanical slavery, for which I am very grateful. We rightly condemn slavery and its long trail of consequences, but I do have to wonder if our condemnation would be quite as adamant if we were bereft of all the mechanical slaves we take for granted every day. How deep lie our convictions?