Day 328: 8/4/12 - "Fight For Love"

"And that's why,Some people fight for love
They stick with it
Just can't quit it...
Cause you know that some people die for love
And I believe it's true cause I'd do the same for you"

-"Fight For Love" by Elliott Yamin

A Lingering Sadness: I love to read about history and though I am fascinated by the early history of America, I'm also still deeply saddened by what is truly a horrific time in history.  I'm reading Help Me to Find My People by Heather Andrea Williams and it is the first time I've read a book that is focused on the separation of black families.  It has been a heartrending read - children recounting being taken from their parents, mothers recounting losing their children, husbands and wives recounting losing each others.  Nothing can ever convince me that people during that era were truly dense enough to believe the bull that they spouted about the legitimacy of slavery.  That many people could not truly have been imbecilic enough to think that they weren't enslaving their brethren.  Money was the fuel, and an overblown sense of superiority.  Combine those two things and you wind up with an institution that the majority know is wrong - but that the majority were also willing to turn a blind eye to, or do their level best to convince themselves and other of their superiority.  I like to believe that I would have still been the fighter that I am today and would have chosen to fight and die rather than to accept the institution of slavery as a livable option.  I still don't understand (though I know the reasoning) how so many people allowed themselves to stay enslaved when there were many times in history when they outnumbered their captors.  I know there was fear attached to the idea of fighting back.  I know that the unknown is scary (still is today).  And I know that I can never understand what it would be like to be told, and reminded every day through words and actions, that I am not worthy of anything other than the servitude of which I would have been born into.  But I do cling to the hope that my will to fight, and my belief in fairness and justice would have made me a fighter.  People often ask us whom we would like to meet if we could go back in time, and I always struggle with this question.  I think now I know that it would be someone like Sojourner Truth or Fredrick Douglass.  To ask them why they fought so hard for something that others simply could or would not fight for - that would be what I want to do.  We wonder why the institution of marriage and the idea of a complete family is so often foreign for people in this world (not just black people, either), but after reading this book, I can understand why the idea of marriage and of a strong "traditional" family, just would not be the dream of many.  Where are my relatives, I wonder?  How many cousins do I have out there that I'll never meet because 4 and 5 generations earlier, the families were split up and never reunited?  40 acres and a mule?  Fuck that, I want my family.