Chapters 13, 14, and 15

Chapters 13, 14, and 15

It seems to me that the people of early modern era were experiencing as many changes as we are presently, although on a bit slower timeline (as it took 18 months to cross the Atlantic at that time.) People’s eyes were opened to new people, cultures, lands, foods, materials, religions, science, diseases, and whole new ways of considering where they fit into the universe. It must have made their heads spin, just as today’s ever changing technology makes my head spin sometimes!

It also startles me every time I think about how we humans justify our actions for conquering new lands and overrunning existing civilizations, and resources, using God as our right to do this. How we can call it the “good hand of God” at work, “sweeping away great multitudes of natives that he might make room for us.” How we can enslave people to do our bidding and the work we refuse to do ourselves. How we can treat them as less than human, look in their eyes and not see their humanness as they are wrenched from their families and homelands. How we can starve people out of their homes for spices, and replace them as if they were nothing more than a pair of shoes. How the pope can hand down an edict and say who can be enslaved into perpetuity because of their beliefs or their non-beliefs. It all makes me so sad.

Did we all just follow so blindly and not see the contradictions? Were our eyes not open to the destruction that was happening to the land and animals? Because it was so far away, it does not concern us, we don’t see it, it doesn’t affect us. So much of what happens today: where our cloths are made, where our food is produced. As long as we get what we want and are not inconvenienced, we do not question. I am just as guilty as anyone else. It is just too hard to find out where to buy fair trade anything, it is made obscure and so we don’t ask, until there is a revolt an uprising and we discover people are getting paid .03 cents a day to make our t-shirts and under ware, and they can’t feed their families or have a decent place to live. We still have slaves, they are just located far away where we don’t see them, in an obscure factory in Bangladesh, Taiwan, China… And we won’t question as long as we have what we want. We too choose to remain as blind as they were in the early modern era, because it suits our needs, and we get what we want, without being inconvenienced by the unimportant facts.