Reparations issue bogus

Having been born on the Fourth of July in Ohio, I don't figure I owe anybody reparations for slavery. Naturally, I can't speak for the the rest of ya'll.

If my ancestors fought for anybody during the Civil War, they fought for Mr. Lincoln. Since most of my early relatives were lacking an education, I doubt they gave much thought to the South's insistence on keeping slaves.

If they had lived in the South, they certainly could not have afforded slaves. They were so poor and ignorant, and their standard of living was not much better.

I am not going out on a limb to say that the vast number of Southerners were in the same boat as my ancestors. A simple meal of home-grown vegetables was just about all they ever had to be thankful for. Meat, mostly chicken, was something that was never on the table except maybe on Sundays. They farmed and hunted the hills in southeastern Ohio, not terribly far from the West Virginia line.

When I first heard the idea that the ancestors of slaves ought to be compensated, I honestly thought that if it weren't a joke, it was a theoretical proposition.

I was wrong. The reparations movement is out there and getting more serious every minute. The Rev. Jesse Jackson plans to make it his number one issue this fall. During one of what will be many press conferences, Jackson has said, "We must make crooked ways straight."

I've lived in Georgia for about 45 years. I can say without equivocation that Southerners have an instinctive desire to "do people right." But the baloney that passes for an argument in favor of reparations strains the patience of even the most saintly Caucasian.

"We have fewer services and less education," Jackson told Reuters during the U.N. racism conference in Durban, South Africa. "We are disproportionately jailed and killed by the state. We have shorter life spans. We have less access to capital."

Civil-rights lawyers are preparing lawsuits on behalf of African Americans. The amount has yet to emerge, but is said to be more than $1 trillion. Part of their argument is that a major reason America got fat, dumb and happy was because of slavery.

No one in his or her right mind is defending slavery, trying to make it less horrific than it was, or excusing the thousands of needless deaths caused by trading in human lives. Those proposing monetary reward for slavery try to equate more recent examples of reparations to bolster their argument.

No matter how many times one uses the word "holocaust," what happened to European Jews during World War II isn't even remotely similar. The Nazis are appropriately paying reparations to descendants of Jews. In that case, they are able to identify specific people and to show that their inheritance was denied. Wealthy and middle class Jews were stripped of their property, if they were lucky enough to live, and their descendants were demonstrably worse off.

The same is true for the Russian survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Germany is paying about $6 million to two million survivors of slavery and forced labor.

It is also appropriate for the United States to pay Japanese Americans who were herded into camps during World War II. They were taken out of their neighborhoods, houses and property. They lost wages. They had less to pass along to their families. It's possible to follow the money.

None of that is true when it comes to African slaves. A key factor in deciding any reparations question is establishing guilt. The people of modern day America may appropriately feel regret that a handful of their European ancestors profited from slavery. But that's not the same as owing somebody a living for something that happened hundreds of years ago.

Not only that, but this whole sense of victimhood on the part of some people, including Rev. Jackson, is not useful or worthwhile to anyone. America is the greatest country on earth, a place where everyone has an opportunity to have a happy, productive life. That includes the distant relatives of African slaves.

The reparations movement is out there and getting more serious every minute. The Rev. Jesse Jackson plans to make it his number one issue this fall

There are alot of whites who think this issue will quitely go away. Like hell it will. There is too much money in this for the race hustlers(Jackson, Mfume, Bond et al) to let this issue die the death it should. Like the author, I thought the whole concept of reparations was a joke- I honestly thought the whole scheme was a SNL parody being taken seriuosly.

I guess I naively expected people to decide what was right and give up the "struggle" since there can be no moral justifications for reparation to people 7 generations removed from slavery. I expected people to think they way out of poverty was through hard work, not justifying stealing money from whitey. As I said- I was naive. There is too much money and political power at stake here. The black "elite" who will control the power and money will NEVER let the issue die. They realize that grabbing this money and power may take the rest of thier lives and their children's lives. They are in this for the long haul. In opposing this shakedown on moral and practical grounds, we should be too.

A good first step is making reparations a litumus test for any politician wanting our vote. We should never, ever vote for any politician who will not agressively fight against reparations.

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