It was a good weekend. We spent Saturday just hanging out and running errands. Cath and I did a crossword puzzle at Starbucks and browsed the books at Borders. I really like lazy reading days. Then, Saturday night, we had fondue with our friends the Hacketts and watched Tina Fey host SNL.

Sunday was Cath's mom's birthday celebration. We had tickets to a show at the Steppenwolf: Harriet Jacobs. It was based on the book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl written by Jacobs. Great play - a bit of a downer, but I think that was part of the point. It told of a 15-year-old's experience in slavery, living on a large plantation in Virginia. It did a good job portraying the exploitation of slaves, beyond just the fact of them being a piece of human property. Slaves were sexually abused and grossly mistreated by their masters.

Things like that always make me wonder what are we going to look back on one day and think, "how did we ever justify acting that way?" I mean, it's very difficult for any American today to imagine ever treating an entire race of people that way, but in every generation, there's something similar. For our parents, it was the Civil Rights movement. What will it be for us? Gay rights? Immigration rights? I tend to think, at least, that one day we will look back on our treatment of immigrants with great disdain and amazement that we could ever act that way.

Growing up in East Tennessee, in a small farming community, we would annually see a great influx of Mexican families, moving in temporarily to pick the tomatoes and strawberries in the fields. School populations would increase by 25% or more for the first semester before trickling back to a normal class size during the winter break. I can't attest to how the migrant communities were treated back then, because I wasn't very aware of what was going on (unfortunately). But, I do know how immigrant day laborers are treated in my town now.

A couple of years back, I became interested (along with the 2 I worked with at the time) in a group of men who congregated outside our local grocery store early every morning. There were dozens of latino men crowded into the small parking lot. Occasionally, a large white van would pull up (or a pick up truck), and men would rush the vehicle before it would quickly pull out of the lot. These were contractors or factory owners, picking men up to hire them out for the day. The men were told how much they'd receive in wages for a day's work, and they'd be off to work in whatever pursuit the white man in the cab had lined up.

I know from those men's stories that often, they would work a full day and only be paid half of what they were told they would get. Or nothing at all. Men and women alike were sexually harassed and abused by their supervisors. Even when they were paid, it was often far below a living wage - one that any white high school kid could earn.

Let's face it, too, our country is really built on the back of this type of cheap, disposable labor, isn't it? I believe (and hope) one day we'll look back with great disgust on how we treated human beings in these situations.