Musings on the Coast

Slavery in the Modern World

I’ve been reading a lot of ancient and middle-age history lately. I wanted to know how it was to be alive then. What could one expect?

Here it is:

It was tribal. It was all about your tribe surviving the next onslaught. Those onslaughts never could be categorized because there were too many to keep count. Hence the primary assumption: always be suspicious of outsiders.

Tribes were at constant war. Resources were scarce, so the battle for them was constant. The Vikings invaded what would become England and France because in their own territory it was too cold to grow good crops. Further, death rates were very high and tribes would invade others solely to capture enough people to survive as a tribe.

The losers were killed or enslaved. This is not an exaggeration. The older men and women were slaughtered, the younger ones enslaved, the boys put to work, and the girls impregnated so as to perpetuate minimally survivable tribal population counts.

Slavery was the normal human condition. It was the ultimate bi-furcation of wealth: the .01% owned almost everything, including human beings, who were at their disposal. This was true in ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, and so on until the Enlightenment and ultimately when the United States of America drew a line and fought a Civil War for the world to see.

The rest of the world did see it. In the last 100 years, more freedom—if not peace— has come to mankind than at any time in history. Unfortunately, outside the Western world, this was hardly universal and today slavery still exists in horrific numbers.

And women arose. Countries all over the globe saw the rise of women, who brought a whole new sensibility, including kindness, to politics. Even Germany’s Angela Merkel, the ultimate hardass, had a soft spot for refugees.

The backlash. In current years, there has been a giant backlash against all those “uppity bitches.” The male chauvinist hatred against women steadily grew in numbers and in anger. Then they met Trump; they had a champion and the movement blossomed.

The “Hillary effect.” Think of it as this: if in an otherwise neutral world, if some deep voice slithered out and licked your ear and whispered, then shouted, “Hillary is a crook”—-if that kept happening to you, over and over and over, what would you think?

The backlash was magnified by the “Hillary effect”. She is so hated in America that the haters no longer can remember why they hate. They only know hating Hillary is a necessary condition for saving America.   She is the ultimate uppity bitch.

Women re-objectified. In Trump’s world, women appropriately should be viewed as ornaments. Except a few like his daughters—except oh jeez, he objectivized them, too—like I was saying, there is a worldwide backlash of males against females. It is real. The public symptoms are obvious. Just look around.

It is dangerous. If a woman is a bitch, it is okay to hit her, she’s gotta know her place. It is the American thing to do.

I could go on. The logic trail is so airtight one could run with it for a 100 pages. And if one follows the logic trail to its end, one would find there are not too many pretty endings.

So I analogize it to slavery. Men do not want women as equals. They want them to be what they always were: subordinate. Women should know their place. Women should not try for anything other than perfect motherhood, and certainly not run for the presidency of the United States of America.

This does affect you. Trump has legitimized the most base and cruel instincts of every disaffected crazy splinter faction. Random violence toward women, especially those with dark skin, has increased. This will not stop soon. Even in Laguna the shadowy hoods lurk.

Michael Ray grew up in Corona del Mar and lives in Laguna Beach. He is a real estate entrepreneur involved in many non-profits.

Editor’s Note: The column was written prior to Election Day, Nov. 8.