Can America ever truly pay for its sins?

[ToTheMoon]

When I mention sins I'm talking about the fact that hundreds of years ago the people who came to this country slaughtered the people who were here first and took their land. Later they enslaved the blacks, treated women like property and wouldn't even allow them to vote until as soon as 1920. Sending the Japanese people into camps after the attack at Pearl Harbor. And I'm sure the list just gets bigger and bigger.

Is there anyway for America to truly confront its past and change for the better or is it just too great a wound to heal?

Discuss.

Okay, first, way too much attention is paid to America's historical failures. Nobody's hands were clean in the past, in fact all countries in 1776 were arguably worse as they never even had the pretense of individual liberty. Anywhere else you went the commoner was kept down by a class of power-hungry, despotic elite, in fact, I can't think of a single exception where people in power were not complete monsters if you judge them by modern standards of human rights. Maybe places without a central government? Not to say that I advocate for no government as that has its own problems.

All these media influencers that like to focus on America's evil past should be looked at with suspicion because there are obvious signs they're pushing an agenda and they're not acting in good faith. Ask yourself, why are they focusing on this issue with such ferocity? Do they really want to improve the country or just stir up unnecessary conflict and make Americans hate their own country? What is their track record? Has their "activism" made the country better or worse? I'm not even an American citizen so I have no patriotic stake here, but there is a difference between specific, constructive criticism of one's country and demonization. The talking points these people use are the same I would use... if I was a psychopath and my intention was to destabilize a country and get people to hate each other. If you have a friend with a very unhealthy lifestyle do you slowly try to talk him out of it or do you mock him with things like "haha you're fat, you're ugly, you're dumb, you'll never be anything and you'll die of OD by 35"?


Second, I don't agree with the implication that Native Americans had a valid claim to the entire land that is now the USA. Some of it, sure, but most of it was empty land with no government, no infrastructure, no clearly marked border. Why shouldn't it be up for grabs on a first come first served basis? Does it make any sense for a population to have ownership of millions of square miles simply because it is close to it? If I somehow build the first house on let's say Olympus Mons, Mars, do I get to claim ownership of the entire planet? How about half? How about just Olympus Mons? Or is it just the house itself, maybe the immediate surrounding but no more?

Third, everyone involved is dead, there's no wound to heal. The perpetrators are dead, the victims are dead, their direct descendants are likely dead (if we're talking about slavery, all of their direct descendants i.e. sons and daughters are dead, no exception). The people in the US government today are not the people of 1800 or 1900 or even 1950. The descendants of the perpetrators don't owe the descendants of the victims anything, one cannot even accurately determine which people alive today are affected by the injustices of the past and to what extent. Maybe in some hypothetical alternate reality where the US never had slavery or Jim Crow, a poor black dude is a millionaire with an amazing career. But you don't know this, he could still end up exactly the same because wealth, status and knowledge isn't always passed down the line. Sure, you can in theory sue a dead guy's family for damages, but there are limits on that so you don't end up with more injustices. For one thing, if you sue for a 1M$ but the estate is only worth 10k$, you can't get more than 10k out of the family. Are you able to prove precisely which people living alive today directly benefit from slavery? Strong doubt. Many descendants of slaveholders never inherited anything, wealth is actually easily lost over multiple generations.


There is a reason civilized countries have a statute of limitations because it's simply not productive or practical to hold grudgers for extremely long periods especially over multiple generations where people barely even know members of their own family beyond grandparents. Maybe it's time a statute of limitations was put on injustices done multiple lifetimes ago.

Fourth, it's pretty obvious that the US has changed, a lot of the things mentioned aren't done anymore. There's no slavery, there's no segregation, there's no genocide. People still holding a grudge should get over it. If anyone needs reparations, there is a stronger case for Russia paying reparations to all eastern European countries for spreading communism as this happened even within the lifetime of millennials (I lived 2 years through communism). But I don't know any of my people actively demanding that Russia pay reparations or using Russian communism as an excuse for why they're addicted to drugs or getting into easily avoidable fights with the cops. None of that is an excuse. The same is true for Turkey. Turkey as the Ottoman Empire subjugated eastern Europe for centuries at the height of its power, nobody talks about how Turkey can pay for its sins, nobody tries to excuse their criminal behavior or the failures in their life by saying it's Turkey's fault (and if they did, they would be laughed at), pretty much all criticism of Turkey is related exclusively to the present. It doesn't even get criticism for the Armenian genocide, only criticism because it doesn't admit to it.

So to answer the question "Is there anyway for America to truly confront its past and change for the better or is it just too great a wound to heal?"

Yes, there is, and it's the same answer if it were any other country. Stop doing what you were doing, admit it was wrong, move on. (You should pay reparations if the injustice happened recently, like in the same lifetime, but you shouldn't if it happened long ago and most records were lost.)

America has changed, it isn't doing genocide/slavery/Jim Crow anymore and the consensus is that it was all wrong. Nobody apart from a fringe minority of ridiculous hillbillies supports these things. It's the woke left that isn't letting this issue go and pretending that "white supremacy" is actually a widespread belief.