Page 19 - Introducing The Gratitudes

“Dat man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to hab de best place everywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud- puddles, or gibs me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could
get it – and bear de lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen chilern, and seen ‘em mos’ all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”
- Sojourner Truth, 1861
Born into slavery in New York State. Sojourner Truth (1797–1883) after gaining her freedom in 1827, became a well known anti-slavery speaker.
on himself. There are five interconnected ar- 19
eas that allow people to experience the enjoy- ment of life: productive work, human relation- ships, recreation, art, and sex. The esteem one holds for oneself affects all of these.
■ We Can Work It Out
The theme of meaningful work appears in the works of American moral philosopher Susan Neiman, author of the 2008 Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists. She argues that growing up means finding meaningful work, travel, and education. Further, that all humans have a yearning for truth and freedom, and that joyful existence is found in moral clarity and good use of the mind.
Arguing from another angle, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the Swiss-American psychia- trist, a pioneer in near-death studies and au- thor of the 1969 groundbreaking book On Death and Dying, gave society the theory of the five stages of grief, and permission to practice the art of dying gracefully.
Similarly Ernest Becker, a Jewish-American cultural anthropologist and writer, noted for his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The De- nial of Death, believed that contemplation and acceptance of our mortality supplied the sweetness, tincture, and the lessons about life. Becker instructed that awe, fear and anxiety are accompaniments to our contemplation of the fact of death.
Alvin Toffler, in his 1980 book The Third Wave, describes three types of societies, based on the concept of waves, with each wave push-
INTRODUCING
THE GRATITUDES
Field Guides to Learning and Living Everyday Values
ing the older societies and cultures aside. He describes the first wave as the society after the agrarian revolution that replaced the first hunter-gatherer cultures. The second wave he identifies as the society during the Industrial Revolution from the late 17th century through the mid-20th century, that saw the increase of urban industrial populations which had undermined the tradi- tional nuclear family, and initiated a factory-like education sys- tem, and the growth of the corporation. The “Third Wave” was a term he coined to describe the post-industrial society, which be- gan in the late 1950s. His description of this period dovetails with other futurist writers, who also wrote about the information age, space age, global village, terms which highlighted a scientific- technological revolution. Toffler said:
“Never in history has distance meant less. Figuratively, we ‘use up’ places and dispose of them in much the same way we dispose