Sixth annual potluck seder! This is getting to be a habit! I'm glad.

If it wasn't for these get togethers, I would ignore Passover, as I do most holidays most of the time. But anticipating these seders has prompted me to reflect on the Passover story, and each year it has been interesting.

This year, I was just too busy to even think about it. No rereading Exodus, no time to go over the Haggadah. I didn't think twice about Passover until the night itself.

Ironically, what I was so involved in, and what was giving me fits, was a commitment I had made to prepare a presentation on slavery in America. I was setting the stage with a discussion of slavery in ancient society, then focusing on the Atlantic Slave Trade, slavery in the colonies, in the antebellum South, emancipation and the civil war, etc. Then I topped it with a couple of sections on the legacy of slavery and slavery today.

So I wasn't thinking about Passover, but I was thinking about slavery, and I guess they are related.

Remember when we were slaves in Egypt? I don't think so. Very little evidence of slavery in Egypt. It's almost certain that the great building projects were built by free labor. They had slavery, yes, but it doesn't seem to have been important to the economy in ancient Egypt.

If, on the other hand, you look at ancient Greece and Rome, from which we take our democratic ideals and many of our institutions, those societies were built on slavery; one third to one half of the population was slave. Great Athenian democracy, as well as great Spartan militarism, were only possible because slaves did the work.

And America! Poor great tragic wretched America. "One nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Well, yes and no, and maybe that is America's unique conflict and lingering angst. Ideas about the rights of man had been simmering in the English consciousness since the Magna Carta in 1215, to pick a plausible starting point. Unlike the Spanish and the Portuguese, the English of the 16th century didn't keep slaves, although they did have indentured servitude. They didn't really believe in slavery, but they did believe in making a profit, and that was why they (and other Europeans) colonized America: For profit. In Virginia Colony in 1619, two firsts for fledgling America: first legislative body, the Virginia House of Burgesses, and the first African slave sold in the British Colonies. So slavery and democracy both grew in the fertile soil of America (once the pesky Indians were driven off). History is such a dismal subject for reflection!

Lincoln freed the slaves, right? Why dwell on the past? (Another interesting topic for a Passover discussion.) Here's one new thing I learned on this project, and for some reason I find it particularly distressing. Everyone knows the phrase "40 acres and a mule," the supposed promise to get the freed slaves on their feet. I never realized where it came from.

When Union General William T. Sherman concluded his march to the sea in Savannah, he was followed by tens of thousands of freed blacks who had left inland plantations and followed Sherman's forces to the coast. Sherman had a refuge problem, and on January 16, 1865 he issued Special Field Order 15 to deliver "forty acres and a mule" to each freed slave. The order gave abandoned plantations on the barrier islands of South Carolina and Georgia to freed blacks; forty thousand resettled there.

The order was rescinded a few months later by President Andrew Johnson. The land was given back to the original owners, who now had crops to plant and harvest. The former slave still had nothing but his toil, and so the system of sharecropping was born. It wasn't slavery, but it wasn't like having your own mule. And then Jim Crow, Plessy v. Ferguson making segregation constitutional, lynchings, poll taxes, etc.

I read in this morning's Times (May 16) the President Vincente Fox got in a bit of trouble over remarks he made about immigration, that poor Mexicans come to this country to do work that "even blacks won't do." Shame on Fox for pointing out that a permanent black underclass persists in the land of the free.

And then we get to today. “Trafficking leaves no land untouched, including our own. Approximately 50,000 people are trafficked into the United States every year. Here and abroad, the victims of trafficking toil under inhuman conditions -- in brothels, sweatshops, fields and even in private homes.” - Special Briefing on Release of Trafficking in Persons Report, June 2002, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

In Africa and Asia...I'm not even going to go into it now. Check out these web sites. It will make you cry.

• Free the Slaves
• Chocolate and Slavery: Child Labor in Cote d'Ivoire
• Anti-slavery
• The American Anti-Slavery Group – Slavery Today
• The Anti-Slavery Society

Here's my guess: something on that seder table was produced by slaves. Bought and sold, whipped and chained, overworked and underfed slaves. Some piece of clothing was made by a child sold by a starving family and put to work in a factory when he should have been in school. Someone involved in moving the goods or the money or whatever that made it possible for us to be together in the style and comfort to which we have become accustomed paid to have sex with a girl who thought she was escaping from desperate poverty to work as a maid or a nurse and finds herself against her will in a brothel.

So what? Who cares about four million slaves worldwide? Or is it 20 million? Even that's not so bad with a population of six billion, right? It's not a half to a third like Greece and Rome. And anyway, what can we do about it? Look for fair trade labels. That will save the world, right?

Spill some wine. For the Egyptians. For the ones who suffer.

I will stop. My overly quick and superficial romp through history has left me with feelings of dread and despair. I leave you with some lines of Robert Burns:

But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

Peter

ps: I can't leave it on this negative note. I can't believe we are doomed to perpetual war and slavery. I think we can and should transcend it. Joyce said: "History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake." I think we can and might wake up to a world without slavery, without war. I think the Passover story can help us focus on this. Once we were slaves, but now we are free. Only that "we" has to be everyone. Won't that be a day to celebrate!

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