but history's a bitch, ain't it?
you are a historical product who operates in an ideological environment that enables you, as one of your historically-specific features, to pretend to yourself that history does not matter because, as you so daintily put it:
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I have never owned slaves, and I don't know anybody who owns slaves or ever has. Slavery sucked, but it happened a long time ago and not to anybody living today.
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but you can't make history go away simply by hiding from it----whether consciously or through ignorance, it hardly matters---it stays where it is despite your wish that you could find a level of being so superficial as to not have it weigh on you--and because it doesn't go away, history becomes yet another persecuting Other, and the Victim is not the folk who were objectively fucked over--and not just by slavery, but by reconstruction, by an entire system and/or culture built on the basis of reconstruction, which was only gradually undermined across the 1950s and 1960s---and which persists today in more dimensions that you would care to think about---rather *you* become the ultimate victim of history, the poor petit bourgeois who wants nothing more than to exist in a tiny sliver of reality and be left alone, but who just can't do it because, no matter how hard he (typically he) tries, the past just won't go away.
it is amazing to me that this shallower than shallow view of the world ever got any traction, and i look forward to the day when it finally returns to the jurassic park of reactionary ideologies that is the vast American Backwater whence it came.