Emancipation Proclamation

Emancipation as it is supplied by the Emancipation Proclamation is anything but adequate. From it, you attain freedom from bondage and a promise that you will not be repressed again. That’s it.

How does that play out if you consider being on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic and someone takes off your shackles, throws you overboard, and yells, ‘Good luck’ as you hit the water below. Is that ’emancipation’?

Or, in the same scenario, you are walking down a hallway of a great university as someone again ‘sets you free’ and you enter a room where testing is going on in any subject and you are expected to participate. Is that ‘EMANCIPATION’?

Education is emancipation, it is not just the removal of restraints.

Remember that saying, ‘If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’? Can anyone expect more from disenfranchised folks who have never even heard of tools for reconciliation, ideas for collaboration, mastermind groups and the myriad others that could appended hereto?

The picture above shows emancipated hands. Do they appear to be happy? The pain of decades of incarceration are shown in them. That hurt, is it supposed to evaporate, disappear or be swept under the rug?

Maybe time will be the solution. Just let everyone forget. We have some extra life preservers, don’t we? Throw one overboard to that last individual who was just emancipated. Sure, a sandwich, too.

I wonder about the promoters of this ’emancipation’. No special insights are needed to know you don’t set your puppy free from a leash without training so he or she isn’t killed in traffic.

Emancipation almost always implies betterment, an honest effort to bring about safety, security, health and wealth – something higher.

At the time the Emancipation Proclamation was a big thing – Freedom. In retrospect it was merely a step in the right direction. More importantly, between then and now, what changes have been made to this ’emancipation’ to make it viable?

Maybe we ran out of life preservers, and . . .

not much effort has been made to make these concerns look like nails.