The Known World

How can it be plausible that people
can discover functional merit and purpose
in preying upon others in the curse of humanity's
propensity to the practise of slavery? That African
tribal chiefs sought profit by selling their rival
clans - men, women and children as livestock
to be herded into caravans by Arab traders or
to European slavers to die agonizing disease-
afflicted deaths, their frail black lifeless bodies
strewn upon the deep seas as fish fodder.

An ancient, hateful tradition predating
written memory, where the victors triumphed
with the processions of shackled, miserable
vanquished, the conquest of humanity, the dire
misery of hopeless enslavement, the generations
born into inhuman bondage, their lives borne out
in witness to the celebration of the free, the
mourning of those imprisoned in serfdom, no
purpose but to serve a remorseless master.

A man whose daunting philosophical genius
awed with the elegance of his intellect, but was yet
a slave, subject to the imperious whims and commands
of his moral, creative, cerebral inferiors themselves
impervious to the degradation and misery they
sustained. The harvest of human bodies for
righteous duty to those who presumed it right and
proper to prosper from their purposeful enslavement
has stained humanity throughout the shameful ages.

As it does to the present, where the indigent
and the vulnerable, the young, the fragile and the
unprotected are abducted and violated. there is no
universal conscience, no inborn genetic code to
instinctively cause aversion, no god of divinely
merciful dimensions to demand the cessation and the
release of the indentured denied their equal portion of
humanity's dignity, purpose and freedoms.

All is chance, geography, fortune, good or ill. And it
is a decidedly ill wind that lights the embers of human
avarice, ambition and pitiless aspiration to assemble the
users, abusers and the soul plunderers toward the purpose
of hegemonic upheavals, the spoliation of children,
the harsh domination of the defenceless.