As with Horses

It could not have been more than three or four years before I was born that mechanical devices finished taking over from horses as the main means of carrying around people and things in this country.

As a child, I can remember seeing iron hitching posts and horse troughs set on curbs in various streets in D.C. that otherwise hummed with motorcars.  In my head I can still see those anachronisms, ornate and bearing fresh coats of green paint that made them glisten in the sunlight.   And one year they were there and the next year they were gone.

Where did all the horses and the iron hitching posts go?

Whenever I see people in film stories casually climbing on the backs of horses and riding off, I flinch, because their bouncing behinds look as big as those of the horses.   It looks cruel, and I keep wondering why, in bygone days as well as today, riding horses is not considered to be animal cruelty, because it certainly looks that way to me.

I’m aware that horses are big, strong creatures, but I also think of humans as being big, semi-obese and obese creatures that can often  weigh several hundred pounds, such as the current President-elect, whose campaign said that he weighs 267 pounds, which is officially obese.   It has been many a year since I’ve been able to lift anyone older than, say, 10, even one inch off the ground.   Therefore I would think that throughout the ages humans have been painful loads to be carried around for various amounts of time over usually rough terrain and on the slightly bowed and not especially well-cushioned spinal columns even of horses, and I've never understood how the horses put up with that.

Now, instead of pulling heavily laden carts and stagecoaches and allowing people to go back and forth to town without walking, horses are mainly used for gambling purposes and as playthings of affluent girls and women, and I live just a few miles from a girl’s school that has facilities for students to bring their favorite horses with them to college.

I am thinking of horses because I see uncomfortable comparisons between their experience in this country and those of the ethnic group of which I am a member.  In both cases they were brought here to be mainly beasts of burden, until, through technological advances in the one case and the end of slavery in the other, the former usefulness's of both were seen as having come to an end, with the difference being that today horses are mainly seen only in movies, while rainbows (i.e, “black” people) resolutely continue to be not beasts of burden but people, and they are chronically visible as well and so they also continue to be a big problem for various among the lighter-hued brethren, since as yet no tidy means has been found to dispose of them or otherwise forget them as easily as it was in the case of horses.  But we can’t say that elements of those lighter-hued brethren haven’t stopped trying.

As evidence we have the latest national elections, with the effect it will have on anything having to do with the well-being of rainbows, beginning with trying to repeal the health care system called “Obamacare.”

As its name implies, Obamacare is seen as existing only to maintain the health of those expendables called “black” people, and therefore it must be wiped out. 

In other words, one of the big but carefully hidden corollaries of that motto that is so often howled, “Make America great again,” is, “If you can’t kill ‘em, then at least keep “em in sickness instead of in health.”