A Picture Book of Benjamin Franklin--and further thoughts

We love the Picture Book of... series. We have a few and pick titles we do not own from the library from time to time. This week I picked up the one on Benjamin Franklin close our vacation study of the great man's life. We listened to his autobiography on audio in the car on the way to Texas, and on the way back we listened to Modern Scholar lectures on his life. The teens will do IEW's American Literature volume this year and Benjamin's Franklin Autobiography is their first book, so we are all preparing for the school year!

The college professor in the CD player, going through Franklin's life, commented at one point on how he owned slaves although he was a virtuous man in many ways. He added that many people didn't think anything of owning slaves then, although for today's sensibilities, to own other human beings as slaves is an atrocious concept.

That got me thinking. I envisioned our society one or two hundred years from today saying the same thing about the pro-life issue. A college professor may be explaining to his students in, say 2150 AD, that "back in a time when people still needed cars for transportation, in the twentieth century, believe it or not, in some developed societies, people didn't think anything of the killing of innocent human life. Today we may gasp at this atrocity, but abortion then was accepted and even promoted by some politicians!"

Not Orwellian at all, my vision, but I pray that for the good of our human race that, like slavery, this will one day come to be!