Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.
Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
What is the core value of knowledge?
One might argue that knowledge is the foundation of everything. And they would be accurate. For without knowledge, we are limited in our understanding as to how our experiences are correlated to the world around us.
If we were in a vacuum and we wanted to understand much broader topics, without any exposure or access to that information, are we not a prisoner of our own environment?
If you take a society that was primitive (by comparison) to advanced civilizations, their ability to understand all of the technology, ramifications and outcomes of our expansive new world, would be severely limited at best.
Such as it was for those slaves in the outermost western boundary of slave states in the United States after the Emancipation Proclamation. While Freedom’s Eve took place on January 1, 1863 and all enslaved people in the United States were legally free from slavery, it took two and a half years before Union troops would finally arrive in Galveston Bay, Texas to enforce the final acts of freeing the slaves in that territory.
News travels around the world in milliseconds now, but 160 years ago, things moved at a substantially different pace. And even with the news traveling, it still required official power to arrive and terminate the slavery of an additional 250,000 enslaved people to be freed from bondage.
We discuss these things as historical accounts, but to absolutely appreciate that, we would need to conceive of having zero freedom, and being subject to the anger and demands of another human being who “owned” us. Imagine how that may have felt if a few messengers ventured into the territory to announce that the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed but the people in your part of the world were remaining deaf to that information until law enforcement arrived 2.5 years later to enforce it.
It is truly unimaginable.
On this Juneteenth, I invite you to contemplate how important freedom is to all human beings and to empower your compassion to recognize that only through knowledge and shared information does freedom stand any chance of surviving. As forces in our nation continue to operate outside of the law, with intent on enslaving some of our freedoms and personal rights, it is truly only the spread of valuable knowledge that may save us from becoming slaves and forgoing the freedom that we take for granted in our day to day existence.
Happy Monday!
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