Boomerang

"This man had a serious defect: he could not stick to a job or trade.  He lacked stability; called it 'hard luck'"

-Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

Father loves Mother

I find it fascinating in this story that a man who spends his entire life running away from situations that are unpleasant to him decides to make a living catching runaway slaves.  The story goes on to describe many of the jobs he tried and all the excuses he came up with to leave perfectly good jobs be it because they were too time consuming, too back breaking or too hard to learn. 

The story seems to come full circle in a couple of ways for me.  First off just this idea of the runaway turning on others who would runaway.  The second thing is that he finally gets something worth fighting for, a family.  He is willing to do whatever it takes to keep his wife and his child.  What he ends up doing in order to protect his own assets, is to catch and turn in a women who was doing the exact same thing that he was, she was running away and she was doing whatever she could to protect her child.

It is interesting to me that because of his own circumstances he was willing to turn a deaf ear on the women.  Even as he watched her miscarry her own child because of his treatment of her, he did not care at all. 

"You're the one to blame.  Who told you to go having babies and then go running away?" Is what he asks the pregnant, runaway slave when she tells him her master will whip her.

In a way this reminds me of "The Emperor's New Groove" when Eezma reprimands the peasant about his state of affairs and blames it on him.

I recently watched the film "The Official Story" which is about Argentina during the Dirty War.  The movie is about a family, the parents and their adopted little girl.  Throughout the movie the mom becomes suspicious that their daughter was stolen from one of the people who "dissappeared" during the war and that her husband is not the man she thought he was.  The husband does not care at all what happened to the mother of the child or how it happened, he knows exactly where their daughter came from but he turns a blind eye on it much like Candido Neves. 

At the very end of the movie he comes home from work and his wife is there but his daughter isn't.  He goes a little crazy and asks her where their daughter is.  She coolly responds by asking him how it feels to be the one that is missing a child, trying to drive home to him the emotion that these other people are feeling.

There is so much violence and hatred in the world and it is easy to put up our blinders to others pain, as long as we get what we want we are fine.  We need to take down those blinders and be aware of what is going on around us.  It is time for us to dust off the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have done unto you".