Where is it written, where even intimated by these free-thinkers of the 18th century, the Framers of our Constitution, that the Public Good is advanced by banning books, by censoring content, by denying education? Where, except in the practices and remarks1 of the owners of human beings who wanted their property to remain in the Edenic state of god’s grace before tasting the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? But such a pretext betrays (as many a pretext betrays) an ignorance of the human heart, except their own sociopathic heart.
It requires no reading to know that unwarranted physical pain is bad. It requires no letters to know the delight enjoyed from receiving a mother’s love. Good and bad are in the received sensations of life lived. Delight and pain. Love and hate. They rise to moral matter when occasioned by humans—because THEY OUGHT TO KNOW. Even higher when they DO know.
Lightning strike, flood, locusts, lava flow, tornado—all so very painful that, once upon a time in our ignorance, we assigned their existence to an unseen, unknowable moral force whom (mea culpa) we had somehow offended and now must placate, perhaps by deference, offerings, pleadings—the currency of subservants.
Who does not enjoy from time to time a sense of luxury, of ease, of respite? Many a fool has decried the life of plenty as the path to perdition. We become “too soft”, no longer able to foresee danger, withstand assault, face reality. This fool decries the life of luxury because it makes us too hard, no longer able to feel for our fellow beings, immuring ourselves in gated barnyards with signs that read, “Keep Out! I’ve got mine—to hell with you.”
The fellow-feeling for our compatriots is the literal vital force that binds our Nation as one, indivisible. I feel your pain. We will not tolerate it. My oppression is your oppression. It will not end unless we all end it.
- “Learning would spoil the best n***** in the world. Now,” said he, “if you teach that n***** (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.” Mr. Ault as quoted in Chapter 6 of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass ↩︎
The Long Clasp 