Work: Round #2

When we read the word "slavery", I imagine most of us immediately think of the shameful buying and selling of Africans by plantation owners in the American South. We run some of the video narrative from "Roots" and "Gone With the Wind". Nearly 4 decades from the March on Washington and our national battle about civil rights for people of African descent, we consider slavery to have been a sad, unenlightened episode in American history.
Slavery has been around since the dawn of human civilization. Empires are built as one nation's armies occupy the lands of other people, and the indigenous people are classically denied the rights of citizens, and forced to work under penalty of physical punishment, building temples and shrines and other tributes to the greatness of the king, queen or other human to whom is ascribed absolute power.
And as we reach the outer limits of the Imperial Age, as ambitious demigods are running out of Earth frontiers to conquer; as we come to recognize how much freedom we have given up in our quests for greater and greater material comfort and acquisition; as we wake up to the truth that the public welfare or health or job satisfaction or happiness or meaning has never been a priority for the Emperor ...
... the word "slavery" takes on new meaning for me. As I listen to the national conversation about work and life, I hear people expressing chronic anxiety as the result of losing any sense of job security, let alone the jobs themselves. That psychic pain is easily as punishing as the whip. Of course, it's politically incorrect to make such an analogy. I hear my own voice saying "how dare you suggest any current psychic suffering could even compare with the 18th and 19th century experience of Africans on this continent?" It's that voice that keeps me frozen, keeps me from feeling my own "rage against the machine". And that's a much more effective form of slavery, in the long run. If I can plant the master's oppressive voice inside the people's hearts and minds, I've created a population of slaves who believe themselves to be free! They'll work themselves to exhaustion, not as the result of physical threats from the outside, but because they have believed that NOT to work is itself shameful, and because without work there is no provision, and without provision there is no ... no life! No matter how much rationalizing I do, my geocosmystical mind keeps saying "get up, stand up ... stand up and protest against the oppressor!" Resistance is not futile ... it is critical.