There are infinite forms of human bondage and every one of them is the direct result of man's endless effort to unlawfully and without any sane justification enslave his neighbors. These ever-menacing perpetrators will employ any number of physical or mental constraints, and even more likely, their countless victims are apt to be fraught with a shrewd entanglement of both. This ominous millstone of subjugation is employed in every conceivable part of our lives from the simple indenturement of domestic help to the endless spiritual addictions deceptively wrought by most of our religious institutions.
     We are all most familiar with the long history of mans' endless physical servitude illegitimately inflicted on him by either privileged individuals and/or oppressive governments. This slavery has been so prevalent throughout mankind's history and on every continent that one might just resolve himself to this being simply the inevitable nature of man to either enslave or be enslaved. Certainly mankind has need of physical labor to accomplish the fulfillment of his most basic needs of food and shelter. But the relentless laboring of mankind has been increasingly magnified and greatly intensified by our modern technologies and conveniences. The American government begrudgingly sets a minimum wage that has consistently been significantly below the poverty level and thus continues a now legitimized form of economic slavery. As in my initially described enslavement of the native American's neighbors, one wage earner even in the lower-income class as well as many middle-class America families can hardly provide for their family's most basic needs. Tragically these burdened laborers certainly have no viable means of ever getting ahead of the game. No wonder they turn to secular opiates as a form of mental relief to their constant misery. It is not only that classic Death of a Salesman, but also the total devastation of any hope and the ultimate annihilation of any healthy self-worth/image.
     Frustration begets even more frustration, and often the enslaved takes out his mounting rage on the nearest and most vulnerable of the oppressed. Children and women have traditionally been relegated to the very lowest ranks in society and even with all the recent advancements still appear to have no true parity with man. No wonder that child abuse and spousal abuse has become so prevalent in our modern Western society. This is particularly true of our Judeo-Christian heritage where even our religious institutions have themselves indicted and condemned women for the troubles of mankind with that initial mythological introduction of original sin. Man then dramatically denoted and mandated their continued secondary position to man in society through the churches' own contrived mythological story of the creation of the whole universe with the singular idea that man was created first and not so strangely in the very image of a masculine deity. At least the men who came up with this divine farce of creation had the not so good sense of humor by designating the woman as the life-giving perpetuator of man; what man would want to endure the pains of true labor? We now know that this marvelous earth and its splendidly diverse inhabitants are not in fact the result of some illogical and magical creation of some omniscient magician. Our Holy Father in Rome and the other less notable Christian leaders refuse to give up their unholy and less than credible positions of superiority and spiritual power over their deceitfully indoctrinated, betrayed and oppressed congregations. They have continually refused to accept easily observable reality, and it was amusingly that less than a decade before I had written this treatise that Galileo was finally fully vindicated of a wrongfully imposed indictment of heresy by the Holy Roman Catholic Church. If this God was actually so all-knowing and the actual creator of the universe, why didn't he let on to early mankind that this earth was not only round, revolved around the sun in contrast to the idea that the sun revolved around the earth, and most importantly that we are just one of billions of stars that he had miraculously brought into existence; long before the that imaginary story of creation. I have often facetiously wondered just who was this heavenly God that so many ancient prophets and theologians had claimed to have so seriously engaged in such profound discourses. Surely this God of our ancestors must have had a tremendous sense of humor to have played such totally unimaginable games of such farfetched fantasy. Of course, none of this make any reasonable sense and why should it? What continues to astonish me is that so many of my most intelligent brothers and sisters continue to willingly revel in this quagmire of religious reverie and ignorance.
     Spiritual enslavement begins specifically with that fallaciously conceived notion of original sin. If I can convince you that you were born totally devoid of any true and spiritual worth and thus destined to a life of emptiness and misery unless you willingly partook of my mystical potion, I would likely have you selling your very soul to me for any little portion of that promised salvation. This erroneous notion created by some earthly and less than credible religious institution was exactly what had given rise to Martin Luther's voracious attack on the Catholic Church. The reformation rightfully gave notice to many of the blatant religious fallacies that had continued to be perpetrated on man's sense of self-worth, but it sorely failed in having provided a possibly more viable alternative to the religiously indoctrinated and spiritually bankrupted populace. Protestantism only poorly imitated and slightly deviated from the vas deceptions previously instituted in Catholicism, with only that one obvious change encompassing the absence of the authority of the Holy Father in Rome. There still remained this overly ominous cloud of spiritual enslavement that was originally conceived and disguised as the doctrine of obedience in that most of all, secular and political Catholic Church. This same doctrine of obedience was exactly what had dramatically reinforced the erroneous idea of a woman's inferior position of servitude to the head of the household; a woman was to honor and obey her husband with the same devotion that man was to honor, worship and obey his church/God. There is little doubt that this religiously sexist attitude is the actual etiologic beginnings of spousal abuse by men.  After all, this "God" had power over man and thus man had the same absolute power over women.  Women should be cursing the church!
     My maternal grandfather was an active laymen clergyman in the Church of God. Even with its sometimes-radical fundamentalism, my grandfather had managed to become a Christian theologian in his own right by his intensive self-study and deeper understanding of the Bible and its translated rather than interpreted meanings. I remember him spouting that the greatest evil of this US government was the inexplicable taxation of a man's labor. He refused to have ever registered with the Internal Revenue Service and to my knowledge, successfully avoided ever paying any income taxes. In my naïve youthfulness I thought of him as a bit of a rebel, but I now realize his profound depth of understanding the terrible plight of the enslaved general populace. He didn't object to other legitimate forms of taxation and willingly adhered to all except that very taxation on his fellow men's labor. I'm equally confident that should he be living today he would be equally outraged at the government's political establishment of a below poverty level minimum wage that only benefits businesses and cooperate profit margins. I have always had mixed emotions about the continued proliferation of labor unions, mostly because of their reputations of sometimes being associated with organized crime. But at the same time, I'm most appreciative of their earlier history and their having successfully intervened into the world of business and corporate profits on behalf of the American workmen; only if they had remained focused on the original goal and not gotten so damn greedy with money and power.
     The widespread oppressiveness of all kinds of unwarranted discrimination creates other vulnerable classes of slaves. African-Americans certainly broke down some of the racial barriers with the enactment of Civil Rights legislation in the early sixties, but all too much of the once overt hatred of Blacks was only covertly swept under the proverbial carpet. And like the church, our illustrious U.S. Congress enacted programs like affirmative action, which certainly opened many previously closed doors, but at the calculated price of inflicting a fallaciously imposed intellectual indictment fostering the idea of African-Americans' needing outside assistance in lieu of his assumingly naturally impaired and inferior state of being. If we actually accepted our African-American brothers and sisters as the true equals that they truly are, we wouldn't have to make these less than sincere political statements of inequality. Beware of those damn deceptive Greeks bearing political gifts.
     Ethnic cleansing has become a global-wide pustule and is most likely the very conjectural cause of more wars than any other nationalized ideology short of the morose greed for more territory. The victims that only scarcely survive these often-fatal hostilities are then forced into all forms of economic slavery by the very removal from their ancestral homes where they may have once been better able to have survived this hostile world. These racially motivated conflicts are all too often religiously founded on totally hateful and unwarranted prejudices that have absolutely no actual bases in any real perception of reality. Governments and their despotical leaders ingeniously rally their unsuspecting populace under a false banner of national and/or religious patriotism just in order to serve the government's own insatiable greed for more resources, political power and/or territory.
     Once again, I suggest that the continuing enslavement of our brothers and sisters is the direct result of the potential and unchecked greed of mankind, including many of the institutions of the often above-the-law sacred cows of religion. I know that I am not alone when I state that I am infinitely appalled at the excessive wealth of the church in the blatant face of continuing poverty. I don't suggest a bloody revolution, but I do encourage the global education of my brothers and sisters with the truths of the matter. Ye shall know the truth and it is that truth that just might set us free of our own self-inflicted infirmities. I wish we were inundated with people like Gandhi who had most passionately and passively sought only the freedom of his people from oppression. "Where have all the freedom seekers gone? Gone to graves or prisons, everyone! When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?" Think on the immense stature of some of our fellow humans like that of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Bishop Tutu, Jefferson and ask what you can do for the cause of freedom.
     And to think that I haven't even begun to scratch the entire surface, but I trust that you are familiar enough with the long and morose history of man's inhumanity to man to comprehend the contents of this chapter for yourself. It's simply too anguishing to dwell on this hopefully avoidable plight of my beloved brothers and sisters everywhere. I certainly have a great desire and wish for some individual to arise from the masses and lead us from this despair. But I also realize that any successful change will more likely take root if we prepare ourselves individually. There are equally damaging enslavements that we experience in our daily lives and like that inevitable need to love ourselves as a intrinsic ability to love others, we need to exercise our own salvation from those debilitating addictions that keep many of us from ever realizing our greatest potential.
     Physician, heal thyself! I would suggest that we all have the innate ability to achieve most any goal we set out to conquer. The problem lies with the fact that most of us have not had the advantage of having been taught the very basic skills of living in harmonious concert with one another. If we have failed to learn some of these basic skills ourselves, it is only reasonable to assume that we will not be able to teach our children what it is that they need to survive in this terribly complex and diverse society. I would suggest once again that this very lack in life-skills is probably more accountable for the fatal hostilities that existed so prevalently in some of our public schools than the usual accusation like the lack of gun control or the failure of adequate parental control. I know that I was fortunate to have had parents that imbued me with the kind of self-respect and confidence that gave rise to a healthy identify. This strong identity allowed me to achieve more than I might have otherwise been able to, but even more importantly, it gave me the bases for a value system founded on benevolence and the idea that I am my brother's keeper. If our children are raised in a material environment where greed becomes the very foundation of wanting more and more and this dreadful situation is relentlessly reinforced throughout society, then the child will ultimately find itself hopelessly trapped in a vicious cycle of selfishness. A state of selfishness is not by itself necessarily of any great harm to the individual so long as it doesn't preclude the well being of others. In fact, some people are so much the opposite that they are often abused for their very vulnerability.
     We can all prosper from healthy relationships with others, but if we isolate ourselves emotionally we run the risk of having too little joy in our lives. Some people appear to fare rather well in isolation, but I would suspect that this behavior is only a coping mechanism for their not having the social skills to succeed in society or just as likely, they have been unduly ostracized for being a bit different. The one most common trait discovered amongst those children that had demonstrated such violence against their fellow students is that fact that they had been teased. If you understand that those who had been taught prejudices must have initiated those damaging taunts, then it can be more easily understood that intolerance of differences is fundamental to our daily experience of enslavement. We all could benefit from increasing our tolerance of one another and learn that our freedom ends where the next man's nose begins.