Thoughts on Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass
Like many of my peers, I learned to read at a young age. With access to extensive school programs, a luxurious public library, and a community surrounding me with similar interests, I was well on my way to advanced literacy. Frederick Douglass learned to read by trading his own slave-rationed-bread with young, white boys. He literally used each measly piece to purchase a new word from their lips. And yet, he became the most forth-wright and infamous speakers of the abolitionist movement - a man of intellectual and historical importance. A man who forces open my eyes to my own ungratefulness, forcing me to take on life more solemnly and perceptively.
The benefits of our modern luxury can deaden us to the beauty of simple privileges - reading, writing, and even singing freely. In the slave-era, luxury and power shut slaveholders' eyes to the inhumanity of their barbarism. We try to ignore the fact that too recently in our nation's history these human privileges were violently snatched from so many innocent members of our populace...in the name of religion. The purest Christian religion, a religion that demands love for the poor, by the wants of temptations - luxury and power - can be turned into justification for the most unjust sanctions, allowing institutions and mechanisms plagued by evil to thrive. The putrid, pharisaicalness of the southern religion should be a solemn lesson for us all, as Douglass notes, "They [southern, pro-slavery Christians]...are represented as professing to love God whom they have not seen, but they hate their brother whom they have seen. They love the heathen on the other side of the globe...pay money to have the Bible put into his hand...while they despise, and totally neglect the heathen at their own doors" (100). The cruelty of this barbaric slave-economy-hellscape is something that terrifies me...as a Christian. How can men so religiously dedicated participate in such a vast contradiction to their belief? How can the preacher plunder the cradle (to use Douglass' phrase)? How can the deacon deeply disregard the dignity of an individual? We are tempted to write off these men as "lost causes," yet they read our same Bible, our same Luther, our same Calvin, our same Paul and turned into demons...cruel, unloving demons. Douglass is no optimist nor pessimist about the matter - he points it out as it is, sometimes prosaically and other time poetically, Christianity in America has failed many of its trials. We close our ears when we need to be listening and open our mouths when we need to shut up. We eschew progressiveness with unthinking dogmatism and eschew dogmatism when progressivism thrills the passion, failing to arbitrate with more sincere discernment. We must all lay prostrate before the King, begging Him for aid and comfort and guidance... ...may He establish our steps.
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