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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J. C. Dithers who wrote (91165)	12/12/2004 5:29:35 PM
From: Grainne	Respond to of 108807

"I am all too aware of the slavery that still exists. One of my academic research interests was in the exploitation of third-world factory women in the export processing zones throughout Asia." That is very interesting, a subject that I follow in fact. I do not quite understand how a marketer would be involved in such a thing, but you may not want to reveal that publicly, and I understand that. It seems to me like U.S. companies are pretty much utterly unconcerned about the exploitation of third world workers, and do the bare minimum (or less) about it just so that they do not have huge public relations problems. Of course, there are a few exceptions. Women have been aborting unwanted babies for a very long time, thousands of years that we know of. I hope that in 3004 technology and excellent birth control will have made abortion a thing of the past, but I think it is misleading to connect abortion with the feminist movement in modern America, for example. There were always people in America who thought slavery was wrong. It has occurred to humane people for a long time. I do not excuse people based on alien mind-sets of long ago. I think everyone needs to think for themselves and be fully aware and human, not just go along because everyone else does. The Abolutionists were mostly religious folks, actually practicing their faith. So I have respect for them, and contempt for almost everyone else involved. Having said that, there were enormous differences in how slaves were treated. Some masters were relatively compassionate. I know one of my ancestors worked alongside his slaves, and was highly respected by them. In fact, one of the slaves wrote a narrative about his master after his death. On their plantation, the slaves and the white family who owned it all were buried in a common graveyard. When the slaves were freed at the end of the Civil War, their master deeded them land on the plantation that had a mountain on it. I also know that some sympathetic masters taught their slaves to read. On the other hand, I have a relative in Mississippi, an educated man, who doesn't think slavery was such a bad system. Of course, my direct ancestors left Mississippi and freed their minds in California. He still has a real plantation mentality, obviously.