on slavery therefore M & D; Or Learning from Joseph T

[Mark Kohut]

Artists like TRP (and others) focus our perceptions.  Or can. Since
phenomenological views are almost endless as perception. Iceland Spar is a
massive reduction here.

So, with the notion that the awareness of slavery in the US--and maybe the
world, wouldn't have much of a clue--
has grown since TRP was writing M & D; that some Hegelian, or his
labor-centered heir, Marx, small s spirit has been moving
 into fuller cultural consciousness over the decades.

I saw that play out in a museum I had not been in in a decade or maybe 15
or more years:
The Heinz History Museum in Pittsburgh.

Which now has rooms devoted to slavery: Pittsburgh and the Underground
Railroad, with almost as harsh as it should be stuff.
"Enter thru the shackles" as a huge sculpture of one is the entrance, with
real human-sized ones that were actually used in the display.
I had a hard time there. For which I hope this is the reason: Empathy is
the hidden dimension of rationality.
This part of the history had not been there when I last went I was sure and
confirmed with another.
 And I added this perception to other museum and books-related knowledge
about the growth in my United States about that first of all Human Rights
violation.

And later that evening, a 7 year-old nephew had a new favorite book he had
brought for his vacation spring break. Smithsonian
Book of Presidents and I read to him pages he had not looked at yet. (The
founding generation and recent Presidents had been covered).
These pages included most of the "neglected"--by me and most, I say--
Presidents before the Civil War.

Who were judged by the young man as 'good' or bad' Presidents by their
attitude to slavery, that Compromise of 1850, for example.

And a better way to judge is how?