282 Modern Miracles

1824 is interesting in southern America. Before Eli Whitney and his 1793 invention, the cotton gin, it took one slave 10 hours to de-seed one pound of cotton. The cotton gin, even as a hand-cranked machine, could separate 50 times as much.

Thanks to Mr. Whitney, it was hoped the cotton gin would lower demand for slaves, by reducing the work needed to separate those pesky cotton seeds from the fiber.

But the opposite happened.

Instead of it lessening the need for human labor, efficiency meant slaves could be used in places where, also needed, were never used due to the nature of the workload of pre-gin cotton. Now they could.

The cotton industry took off with a meteoric rise in production; so did the slave trade. Northern states eyed the cotton gin as a Trojan horse, with the seeds of a civil war inside, waiting to overtake a sleeping, but oppressive system.

It was just about a dozen years prior that the machine-breaking in Nottingham, England, began by followers of the mythic anti-automation hero, Ned Ludd, rumored to have wrecked several textile machines.

The parallel isn't perfect. But cotton was textile. The cotton gin was machinery. The "Luddites" "raged against the machine," while the cotton industry raged against Abolition.

In one case, the machine replaced workers for efficiency and cost containment, ruining livelihoods; in the other, a machine replaced dark, raw, sore-pocked fingers in a cruel efficiency that ruined lives, just elsewhere in the labor assignments.

Automation, it seemed, was not exclusive of pushing the downtrodden further into the Georgia mud. When an erstwhile workforce is driven out, it is only driven elsewhere. One problem solved moves pawns to the next squares of opportunity on an uneven playing board.

Rage against one machine is only rage. It's not the machine. It's not even the injustice or inequality. It's the bitter poison that leaks out of a society when you try to squeeze out the humanity.

They say there's a war looming. Who will our enemies be? Cotton? The gin? Eli? When we rage, against whom will we rage?

We must pick the right machine, lest we be no better than a bunch of stupid Luddites.

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AUTHOR'S NOTES:

For Tuesday, October 8, Day 282 of the 2024 Story-a-Day Challenge

366 WORDS (without A/N)

ABOUT THE STORY

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84 DAYS TO GO! THIS CHALLENGE PICKES ON, 366 CHORES A DAY.

There are currently three Vocal cotton-pickin' writers in this textiled-text 2024 Story-a-Day Challenge:

• L.C. Schäfer (Sheer)

• Rachel Deeming (Silken)

• Gerard DiLeo (Tie-dye)