A Brief Interaction

May 11, 2025 9:15pm

Mother’s Day. I called my mom who will be 90 in a month; we had a good conversation covering topics going back to her own mother and the nature of her family….they didn’t talk much about family dynamics.

We are in the middle of the 1824/25 tour of Lafayette through the United States and because I have done some Regency re-enacting, I was tapped to be Solomon Sharp who was one of the dignitaries who welcomed Lafayette to Louisville in May 1825. We were down at Portland for a ceremony on Saturday morning and then attended the dinner and ball Saturday night. Tomorrow, I will do the same speech a the Big Four Lawn and then we will accompany Lafayette across the bridge to Jeffersonville. The man portraying Lafayette is no fan of Trump or Vance – that much was clear but when I told him of being called a fascist, Nazi, and racist at Concord, he said that Americans know little of true history.

Tonight, I drove 2 miles to Centerfield 2 to get gas in the car and for the mower. A fat man with flabby arms was holding forth with the cashier. She was bored and he looked to me for recognition, but I avoided eye contact, and he left. Outside, he told me of his travails and showed me where someone smashed his windshield. I made a few conciliatory remarks and made my get-away when he concluded that, “people are stupid.”

“I hear you brother,” I said over my shoulder. it is easy to label these people as the stupid ones of whom they speak but I’m sure the guy was just frustrated and lonely – living in his apartment with neighbors who avoid him at all costs.

La Boetie

From La Boetie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows — to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check.

From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free.

Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.

Do not imagine that there is any bird more easily caught by decoy, nor any fish sooner fixed on the hook by wormy bait, than are all these poor fools neatly tricked into servitude by the slightest feather passed, so to speak, before their mouths. Truly it is a marvelous thing that they let themselves be caught so quickly at the slightest tickling of their fancy. Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naïvely, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.

Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.