Thread by @homemadeguitars

About half of the people who thought up and wrote down the structure of this nation though slavery was morally justified. Ethical.
They had convinced themselves this was true.
Without slaves they would not be able to take, hold, and reduce for profit, great swaths of this, then,

2. wildly grand, undescribably productive, continent, whose owners did not have firearms.
This is called "Human nature" today, except the believers believe it is high energy machinery which makes this objective ethical.
Back then it was slaves.
Same purpose. Same *exact* purpose.

3. Without slaves, having the natural power of food grown on Earth for ourselves and animals, one family could take ownership of and control about 5 to 10 acres.
Anti-slavery Founder John Adams grew up on a prosperous 10 acre farm in New England.

4. There were approximately zero prosperous 10 acre farms in any slave states, because if you didn't have slaves you couldn't produce enough to make a living in a money economy.
You could live there and feed your family, but not be rich.
So sooner or later the slave-owner

5. would also own your ten acres.
And you'd move to the city and be poor.
Particularly if you were black.

6. But that came later. Black people as not-slaves on the land, for a few years until the rich grabbed it all. After slavery.
Slavery ended (here) and the industrial revolution took off, about the same time, here in the US, so the rich people could still grab the power to hold

7. more land than they could be stewards over.
Mostly the rich stayed rich. They had all these black people, and the government said, "OK, you're free! Oh, by the way, the other guy still owns your house, your garden, and your hand tools. Good luck!" And the black people got

8. sharecropping. And as the machinery improved, more and more of the black people become more costly than the tractors, and they had to go.
But factories were starting up, and full-blown industrial urbanism, and nothing could be handier than a bunch of hungry people with

9. no bargaining chips.
No farms, no tools, no money, here, ya want enough to live in a ghetto on, or would you rather starve?
Of course, after the big tractorized farms got rid of all the small black farmers, there was nobody left to get rid of than the small white farmers,

10. So they all moved to the city too.
I am telling you this part by memory. I personally knew a lot of these small farmers, some from the country half of my life where I knew their farms, or from the city half if my life where I went to school with their kids.
Bitter, angry ppl.

11. Now today, that is the norm. Almost everyone lives in cities, like it or not. Most like it. For a human natured human, no matter what life is, there are good days and bad days.
I had good days in the Vietnam War. Lots of them. Any day nobody is shooting at you is a good day.

12. So everyone who lives in the city says, "I love it here and I'd be perfectly happy to stay here forever.*
That's good. Since that's the deal you got, the best thing to do is be happy in it.
Bill Gates owns more farmland than all the family farmers in America put together.

13. So it's a good thing you don't want any.
Because fuck you if you do. It's almost impossible for a working class American to buy even enough dirt to live in one modest house on.
Not all of them can rent one. Good thing everybody's got cars.
OK, most people.

14. This is the reality of industrial life every place on Earth where it is the operating model. The developed world.
In the developing, third, global south, or as I like to refer to it, non-climate-changing world, the average farm is about 5 US acres.

15. They produce most of the world's food.
We produce the vast majority of the world's industrial agricultural raw materials.
We are, intentionally on purpose, killing off the bees, insects, wildlife, and small scale human society. And the climate.

16. I believe that our industrial, high speed, mechanical chemical energy interaction with Earth upon which we live and of which we are demonstrably no more and no less than walking components, is profoundly unethical. Evil. It was rooted in keeping what slavery made. It did.

17. To those who want to know why I am opposed to "alternative energies" - for the same reason I am opposed to slavery.
Which, by the way, is still big business worldwide, only now instead of race it's mostly gender based.
Goes with the territory. It's part of the system.

17. Break the machine. It is evil. Be sand in the gears. Find ways.
It is profoundly unethical.
Break it.

PS.
What was the first step in enslaving an African?
Take that person off the land. Isolate them from their community, environment, and ecosystem.