Can America ever truly pay for its sins?

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

[Anomalocaris]

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.

[The Grand Nudger]

Does America, or even any other nation, really have a moral impetus to change anything? Why should we? When lions kill and eat gazelle, do the lions then apologize to the remaining gazelle? Of course not, because it's simply a part of "lion nature" to eat gazelle. Human nature is amoral and has much less to do with empathy than most people would like to believe.

Well, if it's good enough for lions and gazelle....................  

As for reasons to change..moral, sure, but also practical.  I, for one, would prefer that we had the full productivity and ingenuity of our entire number.  Seems like we might need it.
Disadvantaged communities are breathtakingly underdeveloped.  Their history is a footnote to that future....if they have one.  Don't need a bleeding heart to see that, and even a sociopath like our boy up above can understand why it's better to have communities of fully enfranchised and motivated people.

[Jackie]

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.

Humans don't live forever so memories, unless passed down to the next generation, can and do fade with time. Often I get the ignorant  "Why are you trying to make me feel guilty for something I wasn't around to do?." And that is a very ignorant response. It isn't about shaming the current generation, it is about remembering history as to not repeat it.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

[Ranjr]

To think Hilton Head Island would be part of a 400,000 acre African American homeland if not for Andrew Johnson undoing Sherman's field orders.

[BrokenQuill92]

America won’t even admit that it did anything wrong

[Anomalocaris]

Some time in the future America may well fall because someone else will have done it some profound wrong, a sophisticated nuclear sneak attack seems to be one not too implausible way, and if that were to happen, surviving Muricans will also very likely find no receptive ear amongst those that matter to demands of redress a century later.

[Jehanne]

America won’t even admit that it did anything wrong

America's biggest shortcoming is sometimes not living up to our high ideals.

[Fireball]

America won’t even admit that it did anything wrong

Given talk of reparations for the slavery issue, I'd say that this is not quite true.