I had lunch with a friend yesterday (probably not a friend anymore) and after a few glasses of the mead tonight, i have decided to pose the following, why is it, mainly in the liberal white upper class we need to apoligize and make amends for everything wrong we have done in the past, now dont get me wrong, i am not saying that we should not learn from the past but why do we have this "collective guilt" when in fact we were either not even alive at the time, nor have we put the event in perspective. the conversation yesterday was along the lines of making amends for slavery, now I did not own any slaves, my parents, grandparents etc etc did not own any, in fact i would venture that my family, being Irish catholic suffered more under brtian's penal laws of the 1700's than any black person did in theUSA as a slave. but i regress, the point being how do we hold today's generation that has no relation to that time period accountable for what happened. if I was to take someone to court today and claim that thier gret great great grandfather did my great great grand father wrong by today's standard (not the standard of the period) i would be laughed out of the court room. yet we continually appease people who have a tenous if not unprovable realtion to the actual event in question. not only that but we seem to be selective in the guilt we choose to assauge, we speak of the holocaust, a disicipable event yet we remain silent on the over 20 million (more than the 6 million) that died during Stalin's reign, we beat our chest in angst over what measles did to the native americans yet we utter no complaints over what typhus did to native south african during the boer war. we yammer about terrorism yet remain silent on the millions of dollars that came out of the USA via NORAID to support the IRA. So is this collective guilt selective, is it just a political tool to gain votes or is it a attitude that we have been conditioned to accept in place of personal responsibility. In fact i would present to anyone a question, how can they explain the chest thumping, bleeding heart, tear filled speeches regarding the plight of certian groups yet remain silent on the plight of Irish Catholics, who as late as 1982 had to declare thier religion on employment applications, were restricted from firearm ownership, had a perecentage of population restriction on social housing and assistance, were segergated in district (defined by religion) social housing and as of yesterday with over 80% of the population have been denied a seat on the council that regulates law enforcement and industry in Northern Ireland.
Cussane
