By: Christopher Maffei
Pushing against a system of dehumanization and oppression is pushing against the fundamental nature of American Society. The people that are born into the system see it as a Nirvana.
The ones that push against the machinery of American oppression are seen as traders to culture.
Human psychology was even known to Plato. In the “Allegory of the Cave” He wrote: The prisoners if they were able, would reach out and kill anyone who attempted to drag them out of the cave and into the light.
This is even relative to our time, The freedom of the mind in American society or the absence of fear from the dehumanizing forces in American society will provoke feelings of anger and envy. Just as with the prisoners in Plato’s cave.
As with Scott Peterson, people waited with bated breath to know what kind of hell his punishment would be. A person they did not even know. A person they have never met. Hoping for death. As if their very being was connected to a person they did not even know.
Why do Americans in particular hope for pain and suffering? Why is the culture so connected to inflicting suffering on others and so disconnected from the relativity of their fellow man?
150 years may seem like a long time. But is it really? No. If two men live for 80 years. In only two lifetimes that takes us right back to the American institution of slavery. A very short time to pass on the unspeakable horrors that were prevalent in American culture.
A people that would split children from their mothers and sell them like animals. In Florida, infants were used as Crocodile bait. Children were commonly whipped to death on southern plantations. Starved or worked to death were very common. Of course, this is only a small sample of the incredible brutality that men and women were forced to endure for a long time.
This treatment not only dehumanized the slave but the people that stood and did nothing to stop it.
These people exist in America today, they are the descendants of the overseers and former slave owners. They are the people that are insensitive to the homeless. They are the people that are deeply satisfied when blacks are shot in cold blood. They are the people, that seem to take joy in American poverty. They are dehumanized. They are happy to see the urban poor suffer.