(04-16-2020, 02:16 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(04-15-2020, 12:29 PM)David Horn Wrote: Here's a thought exercise. Society acts to disadvantage a group of people, and it does that over several generations. The disadvantaged group is now much poorer, less healthy and less able to change either of those conditions relative to the majority who weren't disadvantaged. They got where they are through no fault of their own, or the fault of their forebears either. What does society owe for the screwing they've gotten? Would you feel the same if you and yours were in that group?
I don't owe them anything. I didn't screw them. My ancestors won the war that freed them and me parents supported the party that ended Jim Crow. The Democrat party probably owe them something. So, how much of the wealth associated with your social security and medicare and your wife income and retirement do you want us to give them? You're on the side with all the guilt. The black folks on our side don't want it and oppose it. That's progress.
The Democratic Party isn't quite the same one of sixty years ago, especially in the South. The agrarian racists have basically gone to the Republican Party.
By the way -- I have just as much claim as you do to glory in the Civil War for freeing the slaves -- none. I had a great-great grandfather who got as far south as Chattanooga and died of measles, one who got as far south as Corinth, Mississippi and got disabled from dysentery, and three brothers of a great-great grandfather who all served in the Civil War and perished in it. That glory is not mine. Those people are in my genealogical files, and I no more own their honor than I own the land that their families owned.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.