“Can’t we agree that it is in our own interest to improve their outlook, their preparation, their life chances – spending whatever it takes in money and human effort?”
I’m all for that–provided that effort is color-blind. Provided that those children included are black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Indian or whatever.
december knew who I was talking to. Didn’t you, december?
**I’ve answered your question to the best of my ability. **
Well then you’ve got a piss-poor ability. Because a simple yes or no would have been sufficient and I didn’t even get that.
The internment of Japanese Americans was legal, Squish. They received monies not because it was illegal, but because it was ethically and morally wrong that innocents were kept in concentration camps.
Someone said it earlier in the other thread, but the fact that something was legal doesn’t make it immune to allegations of crimes against humanity. Example: the Nazis got into serious shit after the war, even though killing Jews wasn’t illegal in their political paradigm.
I don’t know if it’s silly. I believe it’s unfortunate that this dialogue wasn’t started in the 1900s, when there were plenty of former slaves still living, and it’s just now that the descendents of slaves have a strong enough political voice to get people to hear them. Silly it isn’t. But again, you comparing what happened to Irish Americans or Mongols or whatever has no bearing on slave reparations. This is a subject with its own set of issues and problems. Bringing in irrevalent things is an attempt to obsure the issue and to divert the conversation into a debate on who is the most oppressed.
What perspective? That they didn’t do anything? How could we discard this perspective when you keep emphasizing it, even though it’s a ludicrous argument as I’ve told you a thousand times.
“Ellis Island children” can go back wherever their parents came from if they don’t want to pay for their American citizenship. And the next time they visit the nation’s capitol they should shield their eyes against the White House. We don’t want those wonderful innocents burning their eyes looking at what those wretched slaves built.
Since they didn’t have anything to do with it, after all.
Sorry, folks, but this thread is WAAAAY too long…and in the wrong forum, as well. How about starting up a new one, with a link to this thread, in Great Debates?
Lynn