If it sounds like compassion and slavery are mutually exclusive, it may be time to dust off the family bible. In the bible we learn that slavery is the ultimate survival option. Let me and my family serve you for six years. All we want is food, shelter and a decent life, you can easily provide. In turn, we will labor to expand your wealth, estate and prestige as though we were well paid associates. By this means we no longer go hungry for lack of employment. Nor do we constantly seek shelter from the weather. On the seventh year we will go out and start over with that which we brought and whatever we might be given in the previous six years.
Perhaps we can see that voluntary servitude provides a social service to those who are down and out. In six years, those who are without marketable skills will have opportunity to acquire them, which they can then offer in the marketplace at competitive rates. If the servants and their master/ mistress have bonded in six years, as often happens, they can become employees of the family or business partners. They become interdependent even as the former slaves gain independence in their ability to move away and establish their own home and property.
To serve well, servants develop humility and obedience toward their economic superiors. Good lessons for a time perhaps ten years into the future, when the servants become masters in their own right and rescue some other family that is down and out. It is when slavery becomes involuntary and a profit making business that it loses all social validity and divine approval.
When this compassionate sort of servitude is done collectively, it becomes social welfare, entirely impersonal and dispassionate. There is no definite contract except for the limited period for which benefits are paid from the common treasury. There may, in modern times, be some requirement for the unskilled to gain marketable skills, which may not adequately support a family even in good economic times. The personal servitude of voluntary slavery may be a superior option in every respect.
Any society, whether a village of fifty people, a great city, or a nation, can practice this biblical, compassionate slavery by teaching very young children compassionate mastery. I cannot imagine a better method to teach children compassionate mastery than to create a worm ranch. Earthworms are quite possibly the most productive and beneficial animals on this planet. Their care and feeding require minimal effort. When well cared for, they will multiply more than one hundred times in a year. Few legal businesses can offer such returns year after year. This also develops prosperity consciousness in a child. Earthworms are multi taskers. They will dispose of vegetable wastes and convert them to the richest of organic fertilizer for the garden or houseplants. They will till and aerate garden soil, allowing essential air and water to plant roots in a way far superior to mechanical cultivation. They will eventually reproduce in such numbers, the rancher can no longer provide food, water and shelter for the offspring. At this point, they can be sold to new worm ranchers in the neighborhood or fed to chickens as a high protein dietary supplement.
When a pre school child is given a guided opportunity to raise worms, the greatest benefit of all is the altered psychology of the child, which will carry into old age. The child with the cruel streak will, of course, torture some of his/ her servants, even as I did as an adult, just for the thrill of being an evil god every now and then. In spite of such bad intentions, a bonding and attachment to these innocent creatures occurs in very little time. By the end of a year, one is studying and experimenting to learn how to be a better parent and master. It is a lesson too many walking this earth have yet to learn. Love your earthworms and your children.
Parents handicap their children because biological imperitives overcome the desire for wisdom, such that wisdom not imparted to the growing child is nowhere to be found in young adulthood. All parents do this and it is only a matter of degree when we decide these parents are good and those bad. Children trained by ignorant parents become ignorant parents, co- creating ignorant societies. Societies controlled and manipulated over successive generations by political - economic masters, having little or no compassion for the servant class, just as their parents and ancestors had not.
Once upon a time, the wisdom of grandparents came to the rescue of the developing child and many a childs fondest memories were of the lessons learned from loving and infinitely wiser grandparents. With the near total destruction of extended families demanded by Twentieth Century industrialism, most of us have lost out on the possible wisdom of four loving grandparents. If you are young and planning on family, for the sake of the planet, wise up and have some honest discussions with whatever loving old timers you can find.
It is a small leap from the care of earthworms, to larger animals, to the homeless people and down and outers. Provide them shelter, sustenance, comfort and care. In turn, they will do for you what few employees can ever be expected to do. Genuine bonds are created and prosperity overtakes the pain and suffering of self centered living.
In a compassionate society contract slavery is hardly necessary, even if mutually profitable. There is a military option for those who qualify, want a sense of family and security. If we truly wished to end poverty and the resulting suffering in any society, the cheapest way to do so is probably the establishment of campgrounds. There is an ever rising demand in the American sunbelt states for both inexpensive and upscale Winter accommodations for the growing numbers of retired gypsies, affectionately called snowbirds by the permanent residents.
Noting this growing trend some years ago, it seemed to me that we could, as individuals and communities, accommodate these Winter visitors with attractive and fully landscaped parks for motorhomes and travel trailers. Arrayed around the perimeter of a ten acre plot, these sites would be provided with tall roofs for shade and rainwater collection, electric, water and sewer hook ups. Solar composting would recover the sewage, flush and gray water, which can then be filtered and used on park trees and gardens.
In the center of the park would be the formerly homeless in landscaped tent sites. They have a common kitchen and dining hall, common toilets, bathing and laundry facilities. They provide fresh food and services for the Winter visitors and build pop up/ out travel trailers to replace the more fragile tents. A homeless family with a home built pop up camper and a tow vehicle, need never be homeless again. It would take no more than a year of family effort to reach such a point of independent mobility.
Righteous social welfare is so much easier in any community than any government program will ever be, one must wonder what it will take to prove the point. Salary and wage slaves are all locked into a system of dispassionate slavery. As more of us move out of our self imposed debt and wage bondage, compassionate slavery will become the rule, instead of the exception.
Ed Howes sought and found. Knocked and entered. Now he sees things differently. To see more of what he sees, please visit http://www.justanotherview.com -- or do an author search right here on Ezine Articles.
