My inner defiance forces me to state that I will kindly continue to do whatever I wish, within the rules of the board, and if that includes making comments to the mockery of my home country I will do so. Perhaps you live in a much better area, but the America I know has a EXTREMELY difficult problem with owning up to it's mistakes. If it bothers to even admit something happened at all. The Genocide of the Native tribes, of which I have some ancestry, for instance. I'm also a member of the LGBT community. I've had people openly state, sometimes directed right at me if they know, that people like me should be imprisoned or killed.
That being said. Every country has things they are less than proud of. No one is perfect. I gotta say this, lest someone else bring it up.
In this context, I meant "Kindly" to be akin to "Please," rather than as a command, but your point is well taken.
I actually think it gets tiresome being told we don't "own up to our mistakes," when we in fact seem to dwell on them and have them hammered in our face as if we were still making them. Yes, there are people who still won't, but the nation as a whole? We have every right to be proud of how we
resolved many of our mistakes. Slavery is illegal because we
fought a war to end it. Half a million people died to reclaim the rights of men and women in this nation to be free. The way American Indians were treated was shameful, and I don't think Americans gloss over that at all. If anything, we flagellate ourselves for it to this day. (I won't go into the current situation, because it is rooted in well-intentioned efforts to make up for it, but its effects are...well. I won't go into it.)
We fought long and hard politically and socially against the Jim Crow laws and other forms of institutionalized bigotry, and we still seem to be told that, because they happened at all, the nation is still guilty. Even when nearly none alive today put them in place, and many alive today fought to end them, and still more are happy that they were torn down.
It's like there's an Original Sin for which the descendants can never be forgiven.
One person jokingly said that they're sure that some would gladly "return the favor" done "for" blacks by enslaving them...by enslaving whites. But in the current zeitgeist of this Original Sin mentality, I don't think that even legalizing slavery of white people for 200 years would make people stop claiming that America's history of slavery of blacks invalidates any claims to virtue those people 201 years in the future might make.
It is critical that we acknowledge the sins of our past, but also that we acknowledge the efforts
and successes made in ending those mistakes. We have every right to be proud of having abolished slavery, and of the strides made in civil rights of all sorts. We have every right to reject the notion that we, the people alive today, are guilty of the sins of those our ancestors fought to defeat.
Man is not to be condemned for the sins of his father. Only his own.
