Truthfully, one would think that this topic should have been settled when the last slave before the end of the Civil War ended had died. After all who are you going to repay for being a slave if no one alive has ever been a slave?
Oh, I am sure that some could argue that slavery still exists, and it does just not in the sense that the Democrats want to talk about.
The present argument is about paying the descendants of the African slaves who were brought to America before and after the American Revolutionary War.
My question would be, pay them for what? Are we paying them for being in the greatest country that the world has ever known? Are we paying them for having more opportunities to grow and prosper than they would have in any other country on earth?
There was a time when the argument for reimbursing slaves made some degree of sense. That time was right after the American Civil War and the idea was tossed around a little bit. I seem to recall that someone espoused the idea of giving every freed slave 40 acres and a mule. And if that idea made sense back then perhaps it still does. If you could some how trace the lineage of a black person back to his or her ancestors that were slaves in America, then maybe we could give them 40 acres and a mule.
Of course there would be those that would balk at that idea depending on where the 40 acres would be carved out of. I would think that it would have to be land that the United States Government owned, not some private person’s land. Well, now wait a minute, if you trace the lineage of the landowner back to ancestors that owned slaves, then perhaps taking 40 acres from them might make sense. But, what if that person doesn’t own 40 acres, then what? Maybe we could find a descendant of a slave owner that owns more than 40 acres and we could divvy that land up.
And which descendant of slaves, gets which parcel of land? Would it be fair to give some their 40 acres in Alaska and others 40 acres in New York City? Or maybe someone would get 40 acres in the Florida Everglades while someone else would get 40 acres in Southern California.
I am sure that you can see that this whole idea is becoming ludicrous. First off if we need to repay someone for being brought to this country, then that person should have to show that they were in some way harmed from coming here. The very first settlers that came to this country were brought here against their wills. Or are we forgetting that our early settlements were penal colonies.
And it wasn’t just blacks that were brought here as slaves. Many white people were brought here as indentured servants. Shouldn’t they be included in this scheme of reparation? Once you open this can of worms, be apprised that there were Irish, Chinese and other nationalities that were brought here against their will. Why even ancestors of the Pilgrims would have to be included.
So if we are agreed that before we repay someone, they should have to prove that they were in some way harmed, should be look at how they may have been helped. For instance, did any of them or their ancestors received government assistance of any form? Did they get free education, welfare, housing assistance, or free health care. If so, then should those things not be taken out of whatever payment might be agreed upon? If we did that it might well turn out that some of these folks owe our government money.
A recent poll indicated that only 27 percent of those polled believed that reparation for slavery was a good idea. So why are the Democrats so hell bent on continuing this asinine argument. Because they are pandering for every minority vote that they can get. They want to take away Trump’s advantage of being able to show that the Blacks and Hispanics in this country are better off today that at any time in their history.
Since records were kept on unemployment of minorities there has never been a time when minority unemployment was this low. If the Democrats do not deflect this truth, they stand to lose the minority vote and that would mean a Trump landslide in 2020.
musingsofababyboomer 