The Elegant Slave

It's 8:30 am!!

Honk! Honk!

You're trying to beat the traffic to arrive early for your 9-5. But stop! You don't even like this job!


A century and eight decades ago there was a great demand for workers within the Caribbean to work on the sugar plantations and that my friend was the beginning of slavery within the Caribbean.

  Slavery is referred to as the condition in which individuals are owned by others, who control where they live and where they work. Slavery, was primarily beneficial to the owners and the individuals in bondage were treated like properties instead of humans.

 It was all celebration and joy when the curtains came down on slavery in 1834 in Jamaica. But did it? Yes! The physical shackles came off. Yes! The lashes stopped, but did slavery end? To this I loudly scream NO!! We are free physically but are still enslaved by the system. I will borrow the coined term "Elegant Slave" and use it to describe the phenomena I am about to discuss.

Elegant slaves because instead of ragged cloths and barefoot out in the sun, we are now clothed in three piece suits. We get dressed daily to clock in at a jobs we are dissatisfied with to generate more income for someone else. We sacrifice so much to keep our employers happy and meet their impossible deadlines. We sacrifice quality time with family, we sacrifice our own dreams, we often tend to sacrifice even our health.

We're bond to these jobs by several shackles. Shackles of self doubt. We believe that there's nothing else we can do, we're not good enough and our dreams are not worth while. We're in shackles of debts; student loans, car loans, mortgage, etc. We are in shackles of greed; we are unable to satisfy we desire the latest gadgets and fashion and must be in the 'now' so we slave on these jobs to keep up with trends. We're in shackles of the opinion of others. We're in shackles of promiscuity. We entertain the practice of having more that one partners no t realizing the implications. It cost more to maintain several relationships. It would be more beneficial to settle with one partner and build and plan for your future generations.

We're elegant slaves to a system that keeps getting richer while our financing are hitting ice bergs like the Titanic.