Past Things Need No Apology

In one of John Wayne's old movies, he would often say to a young lieutenant, "Never apologize, Mr. Cahill. It's a sign of weakness."

Well, I don't agree that apologizing for a wrong you actually committed is a sign of weakness, but this current fad of apologizing for things that happened in the past is definitely a sign of a weak mind.

An English wit once observed that not even God can rewrite history, though historians do it all the time. What happened in the past happened, and since we were not there, we bear no responsibility for it. Not only should we never apologize for things that happened in the past, we can't apologize for it without making a fool out of ourselves. In other words, it's goofy to apologize for something you had nothing to do with. And it's even goofier to apologize to people who were not even victimized by whatever it is you're apologizing for.

The idea (which has floated around in the corners of Congress) of paying reparations for slavery is plain stupid. There are no slaves and no ex-slaves. There are no slave owners and no ex-slave owners. Furthermore, American slaves were enslaved by Africans. They were emancipated by white Americans and white Europeans.

Speaking only for myself, if I were black, I would a heck of a lot rather be born a descendant of a slave in America than a descendant of a king in Sierra Leone or the Congo. Not all blacks are descendants of slaves. There have always been free blacks in America. In fact, the 1830 census listed nearly 4,000 free blacks who owned slaves. In 1860, there were about 160,000 free blacks living in the South.

As for the claim that the present condition of some blacks is a result of their ancestors being slaves, I say that's a load of horse apples. To quote Cassius, "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in ourselves that we are underlings."

Amen, brother Cassius (one of the plotters against Julius Caesar). Neither stars nor ancestors are responsible for our lives. We are. To try to lay the blame for our failures on our ancestors is the ultimate cop-out.

I have to say, though, that if there is a psychic disease of epidemic proportions in America among people of all races, religions and ethnic backgrounds today, it is avoiding responsibility. The U.S. government ought to change the national motto to "It Ain't My Fault." That, of course, is a sure-fire way to guarantee failure, because anybody who wastes energy blaming others for his or her own shortcomings is a loser, pure and simple.

As a matter of fact, that's a common characteristic of petty criminals. Whatever they did, it's never their fault. Whenever you hear people repeating that theme, you might as well write them off. They are and always will be worthless to themselves, to their families and to their countries.

It's important to study the past because it's easier in hindsight to see what worked and what didn't work. But it's a big mistake to get hung up in the past. The past was not our time, not our world, not our responsibility. The present is our time, our world and our responsibility.

Better to make sure we don't foul up than to waste time pointing fingers at people long dead.

All we owe the people of the past is to look at them in the context of their own time, not in the context of our time. They, like us, fell out of the womb into an already-existing society with already-existing beliefs and institutions. Like us, they had no choice but to play the cards God dealt them.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Charley Reese can be contacted at briarl@earthlink.net. © 2002 by King Features Syndicate, Inc. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Profound!

Once again Charlie Reese hit the nail on the head.

It is presumptious, it is dishonest, it is wrong to apologize for something you didn't do, to someone it didn't happen to.

Slaves and slave owners have all gone before a higher court, and have faced a higher justice than anything we can mete out here.

Slavery as an institution once stained this world from one end to the other; but God broke its back here, and when we ended it its days were numbered around the world.

If we must recognize that we were once complicit in the slave trade, and it is only fair that we do so, we must also recognize that it was the US Army and the British Navy that ended the slave trade world wide; that thanks to us it no longer exists anywhere outside of a few miserable, muslim hellholes.

It should likewise be recognize that the largest, the worst, and most brutal example of Western enslavement of Africans was committed by Belgians in the Congo. This most horrific chapter in African history did not end until after the second world war. Belgium has yet to come to terms with its record there.

The drive for reparations has nothing to do with repairing an injustice. It is simply another way for many blacks (though thankfully not all of them) to attempt to keep extorting handouts while avoiding labor at all costs.

The shakedown racket which Je$$ie Jackson turned into an art form is losing it's effectiveness. People are wising up to what a disaster welfare has been and it is getting cut back. Affirmative-action is rapidly losing its protection by the courts.

Furthermore, blacks are losing their political clout with increased latino and asian immigration. These latinos and asians further undermine blacks by working 14 hour days whereas the blacks (not all of them, mind you) sit on their asses, collect welfare, bitch about past injustices and whine about reparations --which ain't never gonna happen!.

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