Excrement and History

In 1972, archaeologists excavated the slave dungeon at Elmina Castle in Ghana...what they found was eighteen inches of the floor's surface (that had been pressed into oblivion by thousands of tourists and hundreds of years of historical amnesia) covered in a combination of dirt, human feces, blood, and skin.

Elias Canetti (Nobel Prize Author) writes of this "cannibalism" of the powerful:

"Anyone who wants to rule men first tries to humiliate them, to trick them out of their rights and their capacity for resistance, until they are powerless before him as animals...The ultimate aim is to incorporate them into himself and to suck the substance out of them. What remains does not matter to him.

He disposes of them as he does his excrement...by it we know who we have murdered."

On this MLK weekend, I hope that we could dream, rise up (even from the flesh, blood & excrement of our ignoble past) and live out the true meaning of our creed...that all men are created equal.