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Theresa Connelly's avatar

It is startling how one need not reach very far back into history for evidence that shatters "settled" historical narrative and shocks our sense of basic decency. I have been reading about the so-called "Orphan Train" of the late 1800s -1920s: another wonderful social engineering program in which children of the beleaguered working poor were rounded up, enticed or "nabbed" in the "overcrowded Eastern cities and transported to the midwest and western states where they were farmed out as "orphans" (very few of whom actually were! The majority had two living parents) to work on farms or God only knows where else; in effect, as forced labor. My own father knew children who had been brought to Kansas in this way and of course, unprotected and penniless and far from home and family, they were abused. It is deeply painful ... and soul-wearying... to see how much of history is about human beings enslaving other human beings.

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