My grandfather on my mother’s side was also a member of the last generation of traditional sharecroppers. He grew up just outside of Valdosta, Georgia.

He rarely talked about that life or his experiences because most of it I think was so horrible. He did describe to me once how he’d wake up at 5 AM every day, seven days a week, to tend to the animals and to do his chores. Amazing he even graduated high school with that sort of burden.

The post talks about the neo-feudalistic sharecropping economy that is returning. Looking back at history, though, the amount of personal freedom enjoyed by certain swathes of people in Western Europe and the US for a period of time is anomalous.

Feudalism and oligarchs in control seems to be the way humans operate. Suspect the remainder of human history will look that way, too.