Suppose you are an errant traveller through time, and your malfunctioning time machine has just sent you back into the past, to an era when pretty much nobody questioned the institution of slavery – and you happen to be of the right ethnic group not to find yourself enslaved.<\/p>\n
Presumably you would want to fit in. But you find that all the people you meet socially have slaves. And those people think you should have slaves too, like any “normal” person.<\/p>\n
The problem is, you know something they don’t: That at some point in the future the entire concept of slavery will be considered abhorent. But you can’t tell people that. You can’t even tell people where you’re from, because they will just think that’s crazy talk.<\/p>\n
As far as society is concerned, the problem is you. You know something nobody is supposed to know yet. So what do you do? Do you take on slaves and try to treat them really nicely? Do you refuse to have any slaves, and risk being a social outcast?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Suppose you are an errant traveller through time, and your malfunctioning time machine has just sent you back into the past, to an era when pretty much nobody questioned the institution of slavery – and you happen to be of the right ethnic group not to find yourself enslaved. Presumably you would want to fit … Continue reading “Past imperfect tense”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}