Weird News

[Happy Monkey]

Washington Post columnist watches "12 Years a Slave", and is surprised to discover that slavery was brutal:

I sometimes think I have spent years unlearning what I learned earlier in my life.
...
slavery was not a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks. Slavery was a lifetime’s condemnation to an often violent hell in which people were deprived of life, liberty and, too often, their own children. Happiness could not be pursued after that.

Part of the story is in what a (probably deliberately) horrible job the school he describes did when describing slavery.

But the other part is that he's not fresh out of that horrible primary education. He's a Washington Post columnist with pure white hair. How could he have made it to his age, in the journalism field, and still have to unlearn THAT?

I guess there are plenty of people his age who hang on to that view, but still.