Well, okay, jp, I'm glad my interpretation of your poem is okay! Oh, that sign you wondered about is a smiley face, meaning the person is being friendly and nice, or joking, when he says something cyberly. Sometimes it's hard to tell otherwise.
Reparations? I think all aboriginal peoples--Native Americans, Maoris, Hawaiians, and all huge groups of peoples that have been abused or enslaved need some healing process to take place. Sometimes that can be grants of money and education funds and other stuff to give them a chance to catch up, and a huge SORRY!!! WE WERE WRONG!!!! I think unless you do that, there is so much residual anger that it eats away at the wronged group. I think you need to give them their stuff back, like this sorry mess with the Nazi gold in Switzerland and other European countries. With aboriginal peoples, their land is their sacred church, usually, also, the center of their religious beliefs, so you have to give them some land that will always be theirs, desirable land, not some desert somewhere that they have no identity with. And I think the new government needs to keep promises and treaties. But I don't believe in welfare, and I think the goal is to rapidly make people self-sufficient and proud again, not to enable them to feel sorry for themselves and helpless.
If all of that is NOT done, there will always be so much anger and divisiveness that no one feels very good, in my opinion. I know I feel a lot of guilt just about being a European American!!!! I am not proud at all of the way we came here and conquered the Native Americans, and enslaved the blacks. I know other people feel very differently.
The riots after the Rodney King fiasco are sort of an example of what I am talking about, unhealed anger and resentment. That does not excuse taking advantage of the situation to get a new TV, but somehow we have to heal some of these wounds, or the society will fracture. It's very complicated. What do you think?? |
