Plantation Future Quotes

Something as simple and ordinary as drinking a cup of tea can bring us great joy and help us feel our connection to the Earth. The way we drink our tea can transform our lives if we truly devote our attention to it. Sometimes we hurry through our daily tasks, looking forward to the time when we can stop and have a cup of tea. But then when we’re finally sitting with the cup in our hands, our mind is still running off into the future and we can’t enjoy what we’re doing; we lose the pleasure of drinking our tea. We need to keep our awareness alive and value each moment of our daily life. We may think our other tasks are less pleasant than drinking tea. But if we do them with awareness, we may find that they’re actually very enjoyable. Drinking a cup of tea is a pleasure we can give ourselves every day. To enjoy our tea, we have to be fully present and know clearly and deeply that we are drinking tea. When you lift your cup, you may like to breathe in the aroma. Looking deeply into your tea, you see that you are drinking fragrant plants that are the gift of Mother Earth. You see the labor of the tea pickers; you see the luscious tea fields and plantations in Sri Lanka, China, and Vietnam. You know that you are drinking a cloud; you are drinking the rain. The tea contains the whole universe.

Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn’t understand the words, most of them at any rate, but created equal was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn’t understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men. Not if they snatched away what belonged to other people, whether it was something you could hold in your hand, like dirt, or something you could not, like freedom. The land she tilled and worked had been Indian land. She knew the white men bragged about the efficiency of the massacres, where they killed women and babies, and strangled their futures in the crib. Stolen bodies working stolen land.

While Democrats have long acknowledged our struggles and the crimes enacted against us, they have done little to provide actual remedies or prepare us for a future that does not center on our brokenness

When a slave must be executed, the slaves from those plantations nearby are brought to watch; a deterrent, aye? against future ill-considered action.” “Indeed,” Jamie said politely. “I believe that was the Crown’s notion in executing my grandsire on Tower Hill after the Rising. Verra effective, too; all my relations have been quite well behaved since.” I had lived long enough among Scots to appreciate the effects of that little jab. Jamie might have come at Campbell’s request, but the grandson of the Old Fox did no man’s bidding lightly—nor necessarily held English law in high regard. MacNeill had got the message, all right; the back of his neck flushed turkey-red, but Farquard Campbell looked amused. He uttered a short, dry laugh before turning round.

It is unfathomable that black parents would continue to put their children’s future at risk by pledging allegiance to abysmal public schools when the option to drastically improve their educational circumstances sits before them. It is even more unfathomable that liberals would ask them to. Is it not ironic that the same people who claim the American workforce is racist and that black Americans have a harder time securing jobs and moving up the corporate ladder would at the same time do all they can to prevent workplace preparedness by advocating against the best available paths for education? It is too often the case that those with the loudest voices against school choice are the very same Democrats who send their own kids to private schools. Their astounding hypocrisy is evidence of a more sinister intention, I believe. Perhaps Democrats simply understand that uneducated black children transform into uneducated adults, and uneducated adults are far more easily controlled by mass propaganda than those who think critically for themselves.

First, it confirmed how inextricably interwoven the past is in the present, how heavily that past bears on the future; we cannot talk about black lives mattering or police brutality without reckoning with the very foundation of this country. We must acknowledge the plantation, must unfold white sheets, must recall the black diaspora to understand what is happening now. Second,

But race in the United States is not a tidy matter. Only three of the submitted pieces explicitly referenced the future. Most of them were concerned with the past and the present. And that told me two things. First, it confirmed how inextricably interwoven the past is in the present, how heavily that past bears on the future; we cannot talk about black lives mattering or police brutality without reckoning with the very foundation of this country. We must acknowledge the plantation, must unfold white sheets, must recall the black diaspora to understand what is happening now. Second, it reveals a certain exhaustion, I think. We’re tired. We’re tired of having to figure out how to talk to our kids and teach them that America sees them as less, and that she just might kill them. This is the conversation we want to avoid. We’re tired of feeling futile in the face of this ever-present danger, this omnipotent history, predicated as this country is, founded as this country was, on our subjugation.

The first time that I went to Tuskegee I was asked to make an address to the school on Sunday evening. I sat upon the platform of the large chapel and looked forth on a thousand coloured faces, and the choir of a hundred or more behind me sang a familiar religious melody, and the whole company joined in the chorus with unction. I was the only white man under the roof, and the scene and the songs made an impression on me that I shall never forget. Mr. Washington arose and asked them to sing one after another of the old melodies that I had heard all my life; but I had never before heard them sung by a thousand voices nor by the voices of educated Negroes. I had associated them with the Negro of the past, not with the Negro who was struggling upward. They brought to my mind the plantation, the cabin, the slave, not the freedman in quest of education. But on the plantation and in the cabin they had never been sung as these thousand students sang them. I saw again all the old plantations that I had ever seen; the whole history of the Negro ran through my mind; and the inexpressible pathos of his life found expression in these songs as I had never before felt it. And the future? These were the ambitious youths of the race, at work with an earnestness that put to shame the conventional student life of most educational institutions. Another song rolled up along the rafters. And as soon as silence came, I found myself in front of this extraordinary mass of faces, thinking not of them, but of that long and unhappy chapter in our country's history which followed the one great structural mistake of the Fathers of the Republic; thinking of the one continuous great problem that generations of statesmen had wrangled over, and a million men fought about, and that had so dwarfed the mass of English men in the Southern States as to hold them back a hundred years behind their fellows in every other part of the world—in England, in Australia, and in the Northern and Western States; I was thinking of this dark shadow that had oppressed every large-minded statesman from Jefferson to Lincoln. These thousand young men and women about me were victims of it. I, too, was an innocent victim of it. The whole Republic was a victim of that fundamental error of importing Africa into America.

Had it not been for the mud and rain last October, we should have been in Moscow in no time. We have now learnt that the moment the rain comes, we must stop everything. When the war ends, the German people need not bother its head about what it is going to do during the next fifty years ! We shall become the most self-supporting State, in every respect, including cotton, in the world. The only thing we shall not have will be a coffee plantation—but we'll find a coffeegrowing colony somewhere or other! Timber we shall have in abundance, iron in limitless quantity, the greatest manganeseore mines in the world, oil—we shall swim in it! And to handle it all, the whole strength of the entire German man power! By God ! how right the peasant is to put his trust solely in the earth ! What's the use of talking about scenic beauty, when the earth is oozing with wealth ! In the future, it will be a pleasure to work ! Stalin is half beast, half giant. To the social side of life he is utterly indifferent. The people can rot, for all he cares. If we had given him another ten years, Europe would have been swept away, as it was at the time of the Huns. Without the German Wehrmacht, it would have been all up with Europe even now. The doors of the Continent would have been flung open for him by the idiocy of the masses. The worst of our winters is now behind us. In a hundred years' time there will be millions of German peasants living here.

In both cases, it’s a meager living. But there is an important difference. Under slavery, blacks had to work; today’s blacks don’t have to work to inhabit the progressive plantation. In fact, they must not work, because if they become self-reliant, then the progressives have no future use for them. Consequently, many young blacks have productivity, creativity, even human dignity sapped out of them. This is the core of today’s progressive racism.

If the forest transition in the tropics runs its course, the loss of carbon to the air and species to the history books would be catastrophic for the whole world. We must halt all deforestation across the world now and, with our investment and trade, support those nations who have not yet chopped down their forests to reap the benefits of these resources without losing them. That is easier said than done. Preserving wild lands is a very different prospect to preserving wild seas. The high seas are owned by no one. Domestic waters are owned by nations with governments able to make broad decisions on merit. Land, on the other hand, is where we live. It is portioned into billions of different-sized plots, owned, bought and sold by a host of different commercial, state, community and private parties. Its value is decided by markets. The heart of the problem is that, today, there is no way of calculating the value of the wilderness and environmental services, both global and local, that it provides. One hundred hectares of standing rainforest has less value on paper than an oil palm plantation. Tearing down wilderness is therefore seen as worthwhile. The only practical way to change this situation is to change the meaning of value. The

the whole tapestry may unravel. After he saw the devastating environmental effects of colonial plantations at Lake Valencia in Venezuela in 1800, Humboldt became the first scientist to talk about harmful human-induced climate change. Deforestation there had made the land barren, water levels of the lake were falling and with the disappearance of brushwood torrential rains had washed away the soils on the surrounding mountain slopes. Humboldt was the first to explain the forest’s ability to enrich the atmosphere with moisture and its cooling effect, as well as its importance for water retention and protection against soil erosion. He warned that humans were meddling with the climate and that this could have an unforeseeable impact on ‘future generations’.

You’re pursuing the highest college degree,” I remind her. “How can you relate?” “It feels empty,” she admits. “What’s the point of spending year after year on historical research? I can’t guarantee any of my work will contribute to the future.

swung his long legs out of bed, and plunged his feet into a basin of cold water—a lifelong habit he believed good for his health.2,3,4 At Monticello, his plantation in the Southwest Mountains near the Blue Ridge of Virginia, the metal bucket brought to Jefferson every morning wore a groove on the floor next to the alcove where he slept.5 Six foot two and a half, Jefferson was nearly fifty-eight years old in the Washington winter of 1800–1801.6 His sandy hair, reddish in his youth, was graying; his freckled skin—always susceptible to the sun—was wrinkling a bit.7,8,9 His eyes were penetrating but elusive, alternately described as blue, hazel, or brown.10 He had great teeth.11 It was early February 1801. The capital, with its muddy avenues and scattered buildings, was in chaos, and had been for weeks.12 The future of the presidency was

Because North Carolina lacked a deepwater port and because plantation-based agriculture increasingly predominated in its eastern counties, white people who migrated into the colony's western, or backcountry, region came overwhelmingly from the north—chiefly Pennsylvania and the western parts of Maryland and Virginia – rather than directly from Europe, as was more often the case in other British provinces. ... These people came to North Carolina to pursue upward mobility by securing fertile land on easy terms, acreage they would clear, cultivate, and then pass on to future generations.

Agriculture is particularly wasteful: Palm and coconut oil plantations discard ninety-five percent of the total biomass produced. Sugar plantations discard eighty-three percent.

At the same time, progressives began to redefine fascism and Nazism in such a way that they could project these evils onto the right, so that future generations would be bamboozled into thinking that the Republicans, not the Democrats, the conservatives, not the progressives, were in bed with Mussolini and Hitler in the critical decades leading up to global war and Holocaust.

I feel like that on a lot of days. And it's at these times that I reflect on what it will be like to see my mother. A lot of people say that she was a "Fannie Lou Hammer" type of woman. My mother would challenge the plantation owners if they were unfair. She died because her body was too weak to nurse me, a seven-month-old baby. She died that I might live. I look forward to crossing the threshold of heaven and rushing into her arms. I'll tell her that I picked up the mantle of reconciliation and ran hard until my day was done. I want to know that she is proud of me. I want to hear her say, "You did well, son." Then I'll go looking for my two sons, Spencer and Wayne. It's going to be some kind of reunion. That "great camp meeting in the sky"...where we'll see Jesus and touch the face of God. Yes, my steps are a little slower now...but my spirit is energized. I still have joy. I am full of hope for the future. We will get there. We will get there - together. We will get there - as one. "When we all get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be! When we all see Jesus, we'll sing and shout the victory!

General Hawkins, administrator of the Northeast Louisiana Delta, objected to the preservation of land monopolies and believed that the failure to break up plantations into small farms would have a devastating impact on the future Southern society. Additionally, he viewed the lessees as men who cared nothing how much flesh they worked off the Negro provided it was converted into good cotton at seventy five cents per pound … Cotton closed their eyes to justice just as it did in the case of the former slave master.

Imperial domination spread. Slaves were the precious life-blood of the West Indian economy, where King Sugar reigned and in which £70 million had been invested by 1790. Under the asiento, British slave-traders transported a million and a half Africans to the Caribbean during the century: ‘All this great increase in our treasure,’ wrote Joshua Gee in 1729, ‘proceeds chiefly from the labour of negroes in the plantations.’ West African gold gave England the guinea. In 1787, Sierra Leone in West Africa was set up as a trial settlement of free blacks, as was New South Wales from 1788 for transported criminal whites. The future of English society was irreversibly being skewed by empire.

Inwardly their spirit was utterly commercial, everything was seen by them in terms of money. It was their barrier, their defence, their hope for the future, their support for the present, it raised them above their fellowmen, and with it they warded off evil. The only mental qualities that they respected were those which produced money in substantial quantities, it was their one criterion of success, it was power and it was glory. To say that a man was poor was to label him a rotter, bad at his job, idle, feckless, immoral. If it was somebody whom they really rather liked, in spite of this cancer, they could add that he had been unlucky. They had taken care to insure against this deadly evil in many ways. That it should not overwhelm them through such cataclysms beyond their control as war or revolution they had placed huge sums of money in a dozen different countries; they owned ranches, and estancias, and South African farms, an hotel in Switzerland, a plantation in Malaya, and they possessed many fine diamonds, not sparkling round Linda’s lovely neck to be sure, but lying in banks, stone by stone, easily portable.