You have a point. Some good things come from evil things sometimes. Still, it’s a point that is NOT worth making.
Hitler really DID make the trains run on time, and there are still Neo-Nazis in Germanic Europe who mumble this proudly to each other.
I love the soulful, gospel, anti-slavery songs that came out of the broken hearts and bodies of slavery. They are moving and they make me cry. But I’d rather have NOT had them than had the people go through what they went through.
When I was little my mom taught me “No More Auction Block For Me” and we both cried when we sang it. I learned all I needed to know (the basic fact) about slavery at 5 years old.
> “Still, it’s a point that is NOT worth making [about some good being found in an evil] .”
Perhaps not, at least for a politician in some contexts (though Bachmann didn’t make it quite as bluntly as I did — her emphasis was on things being even worse now in one particular aspect than they were under slavery, which she emphasized was bad). I would hope that by continually defying the demand for politically correct speech we’d eventually be able to weaken it. In the meantime those who defy it — and are in sensitive positions — may have to pay a price. A good politician needs to know when to be bold and when to be prudent.
> “When I was little my mom taught me “No More Auction Block For Me” and we both cried when we sang it. I learned all I needed to know (the basic fact) about slavery at 5 years old.”
Well, the basic fact, yes. How much you need to know depends on what aspect of it you’re discussing. I too wouldn’t want people to have to undergo slavery — and be forcibly taken away from their homes — for the sake of music that would come along later, and which I would like (up until rap and the more recent stuff, anyway :-). I’m not quite that selfish. “I know why the caged bird sings...” is a beautiful line by the black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, but it’s a rather cruel method of producing a particular kind of singing.
Fortunately we’re not considering black slavery as a current proposition. We’re just examining the question of whether in the past, besides its evil results, it produced or contributed to any that were good.