Florida, Flipping Out, Part I

THE FORMERLY GREAT STATE OF FLORIDA has either totally fipped out and lost its collective mind, or has been taken over by normal, mainstream Republicans, take your pick. It says here that the latter is the truth. In an attempt to brainwash its children into believing that the peculiar institution of slavery wasn't all that bad after all, students grades K through 12 must by law be taught that between the years 1619 and 1865, slaves in these United States weregiven skills that contributed to their betterment,improved their lives by teaching them a marketable skill. Whether said skills were actually utilized in a post slavery life for the forcibly liberated African-Americans remains unclear. History says that they, for the most part, were not. Historical reality says that after a brief period of time (Reconstruction) when freed slaves were treated remotely like human beings only because the victorious Union Army made the defeated Confederacy so treat them, that black people essentially were returned, nationwide, to a condition so resembling actual enslavement, mainly sharecropping and brute labor for slave wages, that the difference was mininal, their pseudo slavery freedom laregly indistinguishable from the real thing, actual enslavement. Why this bizarre, distorted requirement imposed by the Florida state Board of Education? The best guess is that Republicans,inherenty unable to conceal their racism despite their best efforts,are merely showing their true colors,namely,white. Note that the state does not require teachers to tell students that slavery was wrong, oppressive, or even mildly unpleasant from the point of view of the enslaved, but only that it embodied positive atributes. This is comparable to saying that being burned at the stake has positive benefits; protection from cold weather. The marketable kills meme actually has a kernel of truth, but only a kernel. Thomas Jefferson, for example, a reluctant slaveowner who hated slavery but was trapped into practicing it by virtue of having inherited slaves from his father and by his realization that there was no better opportunity for them other than to be freed and therefore either shot or reenslaved by somebody else, had a nail factory at Monticello, and actually paid his slaves to produce nails. But the important point is that they were still slaves, one of them becoming his lifelong girlfriend. But, so what? Jefferson was the exception that proves the rule, the rule being that slvery was miserable and brutal and unrelentingly evil. To deliberately give our children even the most remote impression that there was anything even remotely acceptable about slavery is to commit a breach of historical reality and moral decency which makes their (Republican) denial of Trump's election defeat pale, in terms of dishonesty and moral infamy,almost, by comparison. It almost reaches the depth of moral depravity embodied in the majority Republican conviction that Trump's Capitol insurrection was a noble enterprise, or a tourist activity gone awry. Well, maybe not quite. But either way, we must remember that we are, after all, dealing with mainstream evangelical Christian Repblians here, and that therefor, sadly,there is no low point to which they cannot and will not descend to justify their twisted, evil ideology.