There’s not one single individual who owned slaves still living, and no person who suffered through the atrocities of being a slave is still alive. But those facts do not matter to the 21st Century Democrat Party and the social justice warriors, even if those alleged sins are from five generations ago. For the Democrats it’s a disgusting avenue to get more votes, and for anti-American justice warriors it’s their ignorance as to actual historical facts.
Last week, House Democrats held a hearing to discuss slavery reparations. Actually, it was a hearing to discuss forming a commission to conduct a study to examine possible reparations to be shouldered by America’s current generations. We may be far from actual monetary reparations being paid, but with last week’s hearing we’re closer to this absurd generational miscarriage of social justice than ever before.
As the Dems move ever leftward it was only a matter of time before this perplexing idea reached the U.S. Congress. To monetarily burden today’s Americans with the possible sins of a nation from 150 years ago is beyond fathomable. These moral failures have been addressed and paid for with the blood of Americans that covered the battle fields of Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg and Appomattox. The blood shed by brothers fighting against brothers in the worst war this nation has ever fought is not enough for today’s social justice warriors.
Extorting money from one generation to pay for the sins of five generations removed is beyond absurd.
So how would this farcical idea be implemented? Would a white person whose lineage can be traced back through the past to a grave marker of a Union soldier during the Civil War be exempt? Would there be some on-line form to fill out that says “Check here if your great-great-great-great-grandparents were slave-owners?” Or would the Reparations Commission simply find that whiteness alone is blameworthiness enough to warrant reparation payments? Gets morally complicated does it not?
Here’s another complication — America, and more specifically Americans that lived in the Southeast United States, did not create slavery. For practically all recorded history, among people on every continent, including Africa, slavery was the accepted norm of everyday life. Many, if not all, the Wonders of the World were built on the back-breaking slave labor of people enslaved to tyrant kings and leaders. Should we make this a global reparations package?
In fact, slavery was aided and abetted for 300 years by African blacks who routinely enslaved other tribes to be sold to Europeans that waited along the shores of too many African nations to count. Moreover, a majority of historians agree that 90 percent of slaves sold and shipped to America were enslaved by Africans. With this knowledge, which is so often either ignored or left out of history brooks, being white cannot be the deciding culpability when it comes to slavery reparations.
If you study the actual truths of history you will find that slavery was hardly the sin of the American white man alone. This was a wicked plague that infected the entire human race for thousands of years. Regretfully, slavery became a part of the American way three centuries ago, but this country righted that wrong many decades ago and paid a huge price in doing so. In 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln declared with a stroke of his pen that 3.5 million slaves in North America would be “henceforth and forever free.” He then then stood by his decision through the most brutal and heartbreaking war this country has ever endured, and witnessed over 700,000 Americans die just to make that freedom stick.
I believe that all reparations for slavery were paid in full, and in advance, with the blood from the hundreds-of-thousands American soldiers who fought and died over this exact issue. In their honor we should stop trying to revert to our failures of the past and work to fix the ongoing struggles we face today.
