The Truth of Slavery in the world of Divided

I know one of the biggest questions I’m going to get is why bring slavery back into the picture in the series of Divided? Why be so harsh? Surely, we’ve come further than this as a society and won’t fall back into human beings owning other human beings?

While I really love the heart behind all those questions, I can’t help but look at our society, especially in the year 2021, and realize that maybe we haven’t come as far as we think. Yet, in those days, I heard the hatred, fear, and prejudice that calls their hearts home. Political lines and lines of ideology have divided the US even more than ethnic lines. We, as a society, have not learned how to play well in the sandbox with each other. Nor have we learned how to argue honorably and to disagree without becoming disagreeable.

Have you ever been driving in your city and realized, “Wow, I’m in a different neighborhood”? In my hometown, neighborhoods can switch at a corner. When we were moving up here from Nashville, we were told, “don’t live south of here” or “stay away from such-and-so” road.

Why is that?

People have this unfortunate tendency to want to live in an area that’s comfortable for them socially and culturally. As a result, we live around people who “resemble” us in key ways - socio-economic, educational status, ethnicity, or political ideas. We insulate ourselves from opinions or ideas or people that may threaten our own sense of psychological security. I do it, you probably do it. We all do it to some degree.

If you supported one political candidate in this last election, how shocked were you to realize one of your close neighbors supported the "other" side, whichever side that might be? Did it make you question how they could see the world that way?

I watched this very situation play out over social media and in town hall discussions for months, from people who under other circumstances were boringly “normal”. Yet, in those days, I heard the hatred, fear, and prejudice that calls their hearts home. And this darkness, left unchecked, is what leads one person to control the actions and life of another. And the logical end of the need to control is oppression and enslavement.

It is for those reasons that I brought slavery back into the picture for our nation, though with two critical changes. First, the dictatorship enslaves all ethnicities in the world of Divided. Second, the enslaved people closely resemble political prisoners and state enemies in modern-day work camps in North Korea, rather than the African slaves in our own nations' past. I made this distinction, as I felt a cruel, narcissistic dictator would never allow another person to hold concentrated power within his realm. He would want to be the one with all the power.

Those differences notwithstanding, the hatred in our hearts, if taken to its logical conclusion, leads us right back into the days of slavery. And the hatred today goes beyond just targeting one ethnicity or another, though that certainly exists. Putting our nation into the hands of a narcissistic, formerly criminal dictator like I do in the first book of my series opens the door for that person to use their power to keep others in check. For this reason, the Supreme Commander Martin enslaved his political opponents, rather than executing or imprisoning them.

We have the seeds of Divided in our current culture today. At some times, I wonder if we have maybe more than the seeds, if perhaps foot-tall weeds have grown and are ready to spawn more weeds when a good wind blows.

And unless we do something soon to change our trajectory, we’ll end up captive as a society to the oppression that lives inside our hearts. My use of slavery in a book centered on ethnic reconciliation and fixing societal divisions is an intentional wake-up call.

Are you willing to face the darkness inside your heart today? As hard as it has been for me, I know we all must, or we'll becomes slaves to that darkness in reality.