Mine!

(Please click on the title for a reading aloud by the author.)

I recently finished reading Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk To Freedom. Mr. Mandela’s story is one of amazing resiliency, compassion and commitment; it is a great inspiration. It is also a story of coping with and struggling against a brutal system of oppression, Apartheid, and ultimately overcoming it.

In human history oppression is a relatively new thing. The earliest societies were egalitarian, nomadic groups of hunter gatherers who traveled light and followed the resources. These groups were and are characterized as being peaceful. In response to their success (an increase in population) hierarchical agrarian societies formed in Mesopotamia around 8,000 B.C. The roots of oppression are linked to this shift in social structure. People started accumulating resources and enter greed, fear and conflict. Someone decided they would do just about anything to hog the best kamut seeds or the biggest and juiciest slices of ibex tenderloin, and here we are today.

Presently around the world there are some forty ruling dictators commonly thought of as oppressive bad dudes. They routinely commit gross atrocities against their people and stay in power for surprisingly long periods of time. Even in the relatively “free” world, we find some pretty mean spirited ways of oppressing one another. Over the past million years nature has provided extremely well for us. Only in the past 10,000 of these have we gotten ourselves in all kinds of trouble and caused one another all kinds of pain and suffering in the name of gimme - gimme! and mine!

While a lot of us agree this behavior is awful, we keep doing it. Why is this? Will we ever stop?

Gordon Bunker