{"id":38,"date":"2006-05-22T16:37:03","date_gmt":"2006-05-22T21:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/weeklyrob.dreamhosters.com\/?p=38"},"modified":"2018-12-06T00:33:36","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T05:33:36","slug":"more-civil-war-still-not-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=38","title":{"rendered":"More Civil War (Still Not Iraq)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently read Frederick Douglass\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s autobiography. I have previously wondered<\/span><\/a> whether the Civil War was worth the human cost to stop American slavery a generation before it would have stopped anyway. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll wonder that again after the emotional impact of the book has worn off.<\/span><\/p>\n

But in the meantime, I say that no cost was too high to wipe the hypocritical grins off of slaveholders\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 faces. Hypocritical because they often used religion to back up their rights to hold slaves, while punishing any slaves who dared to learn to read the Bible. Hypocritical because they preached love and forgiveness on Sunday, and terror and blood during the week.<\/span><\/p>\n

Douglass asks how a person can call himself a Christian, then routinely whip women and children until their backs run with blood. The same question can be asked today about a variety of activities, but none offer quite as arresting an image as that one. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s interesting how reading Douglass\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s story can change my opinion, even though nothing in the book was new on an intellectual level. I think it was the urgency in his voice that did it.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve read first-hand accounts before, but, as opposed to Douglass, they were all written after slavery had ended. They were stories of grotesque events, but of the past. Douglass is filled with rage and outrage, and more than that, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s begging, exhorting, demanding that it must stop, and people must make it stop. Every page cries out \u00e2\u20ac\u0153do something!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/span><\/p>\n

And, of course, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s brilliant, so when he puts his mind to changing yours, he does a pretty good job.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently read Frederick Douglass\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s autobiography. I have previously wondered whether the Civil War was worth the human cost to stop American slavery a generation before it would have stopped anyway. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll wonder that again after the emotional impact of the book has worn off. But in the meantime, I say that no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-humanity","category-languagelit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}