Every once in a while I’m reminded history was filled with the worst average person and I’m glad never to have met them.
This was culture. Just because we have managed to slightly altar a few cultural norms over a hundred plus years hardly makes us better people.
In fact…
Majority of these people lived without electricity, phone, or private vehicle.
Huge percentage of these people still did not have indoor plumbing.
Many had never had a hot shower.
Hygiene norms for the majority were a once a week bath of that.
Impoverished children were born to parents that sent them to work as early as four years old.
They were beaten with heavy blunt objects if they objected to anything.
Many watched their mother’s murdered by drunken fathers who received zero consequences for the murder and would not receive consequences for the suspicious death of a child either.
These children went to work the next day.
I’m no expert on this but I look at the faces of the children in the forced child labor pics and I can see that they are dead inside.
My heart goes out to the people who built this country. Millions were once enlaved. Millions more lived in a harsh universe where death of loved ones was common place and ailments we now think nothing of were deadly.
These were hardy people doing the best they could in a world that would astonish us if we were teleported through time on a one way ticket. That their sense of humor trended dark makes sense to me. I’m glad that found anything funny at all.
This was culture. Just because we have managed to slightly altar a few cultural norms over a hundred plus years hardly makes us better people.
In fact…
Majority of these people lived without electricity, phone, or private vehicle.
Huge percentage of these people still did not have indoor plumbing.
Many had never had a hot shower.
Hygiene norms for the majority were a once a week bath of that.
Impoverished children were born to parents that sent them to work as early as four years old.
They were beaten with heavy blunt objects if they objected to anything.
Many watched their mother’s murdered by drunken fathers who received zero consequences for the murder and would not receive consequences for the suspicious death of a child either.
These children went to work the next day.
I’m no expert on this but I look at the faces of the children in the forced child labor pics and I can see that they are dead inside.
My heart goes out to the people who built this country. Millions were once enlaved. Millions more lived in a harsh universe where death of loved ones was common place and ailments we now think nothing of were deadly.
These were hardy people doing the best they could in a world that would astonish us if we were teleported through time on a one way ticket. That their sense of humor trended dark makes sense to me. I’m glad that found anything funny at all.
Eh, it’s true that this isn’t a real pig. It still brings up the very real horrors and suffering that humans have put pigs through (and still put them through to this day).
So, it still hits different, based upon our history, in a way that a “dying dinosaur” wouldn’t. It’s similar to how a racist joke against African-Americans hits different to a racist joke against Italian-Americans. The context is important.
This ad was produced decades after the abolition of slavery. Yes, things were even worse during slavery. And slavers were not average people; they were scum then and now.
When I read Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, one of the parts that stuck out for me the most was how people used to burn cats alive for fun. This wasn’t just entertainment for the lower classes, either. Even nobility and the wealthy enjoyed a good cat-burning from time to time.
Take my money now!
WHY, THIS RUBBER PIG HAS DIED! IT IS A LAUGHABLE NOVELTY! I AM AMUSED AND DELIGHTED, SIR!
Excluding all the terrible things about the past, it seems like it ruled.
One dozen dying pigs please
Duck army, surely
