by Max Sirak
“I freed thousands of slaves; I could have freed more if they knew they were slaves.” (Harriet Tubman.) (Although there's no historical evidence she ever said it. But it's a good line. And she was a bad bitch.)
Freedom has been on my mind a lot lately. This makes sense. I'm an American. It's July. And, a week ago today, I did my patriotic duty – gorging myself on grilled flesh, drinking cheap beer, and watching fake bombs burst in the air.
‘Merica!
4th of July half-kidding aside, the real reason I've been thinking about freedom is because a couple weeks prior, I was thinking a lot about it's opposite. See – I co-host a podcast appropriately titled, Ignorant and Uninformed. Last week we were discussing the topic, “What gives you the right?” Over the course of the EpiDose (that's what we call them. It's not a typo. I mean, sure, it was originally. But still.) the topic of slavery came up.
Now, the whole premise of the podcast is myself and two friends randomly drawing listener submitted topics and talking about them for thirty minutes. We don't edit. We don't use the Internet. We just sit down, pull a piece of paper out of a bowl, discuss, and see where it goes.
About a year ago or so ago, I started toying around with the idea of producing additional content inspired by our weekly release. I came up with two ideas. The first was fact checking all the ridiculous nonsense we say and calling us out. The second, in attempts to make us all a little less ignorant and uninformed, was to shine light on an idea, concept, event, etc. that came up during the show.
All of this is to say, while doing research for that EpiDoses' auxiliary releases, I found a website and it made me sad. Then I got real mad.