(December 5, 2021 at 8:24 pm)Oldandeasilyconfused Wrote:(December 5, 2021 at 7:44 pm)T.J. Wrote: This topic was inspired by all the things I see online about how we killed off the Indians, enslaved people, and all the terrible things America has done to minorities that I pegged the question if there's anything the country can do to rectify that or if it's always going to be open wounds.
Interesting question.
The US failed to keep even one treaty it signed with native Americans. Tragically, I think Americans of both races will be dealing with the legacy of slavery for at least another 100 years.
Of course in Australia we didn't bother with treaties. Even as I was growing up, the aboriginal people were deemed to be a dying race. That was one way we could justify taking mixed race children from their aboriginal parents.
We treated the aboriginals shamefully. Once we decided we would include them in the census and let them vote, we discovered we had a big problem. From the early 1960's until now, successive governments of both parties have tried to solve the aboriginal issue by chucking huge sums of money at them.
Nothing which has been done has changed much at all. Aborigines make up only 3% of the population, yet make up 29% of the total prison population. As a group, Aboriginal Australians live 15 years fewer than the broader community.
Time for blame and guilt for past sins is long gone imo. I think it's time we began looking at and dealing with the what rather than the why.
The effective impetus to deal with the what comes largely from accepting the blame for the why. It is the acceptance of the blame that makes it possible to pay for the cost of dealing with the what.
To say the time for guilt and blame is past is really to say let’s keeping the part about dealing with that permanently in that costless purely theoretical phase.
