Reparations? An idea so bad it can’t be repaired.
July 9th, 2006
Apparently the
Not with me it isn’t.
- People should only be held responsible for their own actions…not the actions of their great, cialis buy viagra great grandparents. (Oddly enough many of the folks who champion reparations don’t believe in holding hardly anyone responsible for their own actions, buy cialis stuff today. Ahh, irony, sweet irony.)
- Who pays and who gets paid? My family didn’t arrive in America until the 1930s. Do I pay? What about the son of black immigrants who arrived in the 40s. Does he get money?
- Where does it stop? Do we pay reparations to the native Americans? Do the Anglo-Saxons pay to the Celts? Should the descendents of the tribes in Africa who aided the slave trade pay?
- What is a clean conscience worth? $100 each? $100,000 each? How do you put a price on the human suffering caused by slavery?
- Does affirmative action save us a few bucks on the bill?
I’ll tell you what, if people will drop the idea of trying to get me to pay
Personally, I think America paid enough at Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg.
Asking for a few bucks on top of that seems a tad ungrateful.
Entry Filed under: Observations,Politics
2 Comments Add your own
1. fanny | July 9th, 2006 at 9:56 pm
This country is being ruined by lawyers and therapists. They have created a mythical social entity which is to blame for every bad thing that happens, and is responsible for all human failings; while obliterating the notion of individual responsibility. That said, even if I thought anybody alive today deserved to either be paid or have to pay for something that happened generations ago, which I don’t (in big red letters), how would you ever compute the damages?
I’ve heard the figure $43,000 per person bandied about. (Several years ago, the IRS actually investigated specious claims for that amount, after refund checks had already been mailed. ) I’m guessing that whoever set the price figured out that it’s what forty acres and a mule would be worth in today’s economy. However, if you split that up among all the possible descendents of a slave, it would probably come out to maybe twenty dollars a head. And do we assume that each and every slave would have hung on to the windfall and invested it wisely, therefore having an estate to leave?
And would the taxpayers have to foot the bill for all the DNA testing it would involve?
And BTW, has everyone forgotten Reconstruction? Lots of former slaves did get forty acres and a mule, when the big plantations were broken up. (The ones that were left after the South and been pillaged and burned.) No former slaveowners were reimbursed for the huge capital investments that went down the drain with the Emancipation. Would their losses be a set-off against what blacks today are “owed”? Southerners were certainly severely punished, economically and physically, for having been part of the system (Unlike the New Englander families who got rich off the slave trade .) And slavery, while it was the most horrible, immoral, shameful thing that had happened in this country (up until then, anyway) was, after all, legal at the time.
And I don’t want anybody yelling at me about being a racist. I’m actually a recovering liberal. I know that in any situation there is a set of facts, but the truth in those facts can differ according to who’s looking at them. I’m trying to learn to look at facts unemotionally.
2. Kate | July 9th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
My granddaughter’s great grandfather(on the paternal side) was African American, does that mean she would get a big paycheck too?
I’m a good chunk American Indian, will it trickle over to me as well?
Good grief! This nonsense is getting out of hand.
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