Birth Lottery win

 Thanks for choosing this book, for your research and thoughtful presentation of the history of Louisiana and the corruption, cruelty and inequity that have persisted since the first explorers claimed lands for their European empires. 

It never ceases to amaze me that the doctrines of freedom, democracy and true capitalism I had been inoculated to believe were underpinning our North American wealth and privilege (privilege presented as rights) when I was growing up through school and through until somewhere in mid life was based on outright lies and misrepresentations of race, culture and religion. 

There is something so very uncomfortable in the learning of this. When I started thinking about it my Privilege of being born middle class and white in Canada was a gift at birth I didn't deserve but having lived with it so long I now felt entitled to ... which is an icky kind of feeling, because I just couldn't figure out why I would be so blessed and other people not. I studied Economics in University and for a while I totally bought into the belief that our free American countries were desirable places with the opportunity for anyone to create financial security for themselves if they worked hard, and that our political economic systems were the glue that kept everything together. Through philosophy and searching for some bigger meaning to life I came in the back way to examining what colonizing entailed and how everything we have today was built on the back of exploitation. Exploitation of people, resources and the environment. There was no "fair" fight for freedom, for land or for rights. America, our bastion of freedom, is a house of hot air and posturing that tries to gloss over and justify atrocities only humans with our egos, our fears and our imaginations can design. 

Reading Sarah Broom's story in The Yellow House was another peeling of that onion. A personal story of a family that grew up with a very different reality than mine. It is hard to come to terms with a lot of this, yet this is the path we need to go so I recognize my culpability and take action against the inequality still happening in the present. 

Jeanne