Image supplied by Sausage, age 4
I woke up today to a marvellous spring day. Birds were singing. Bees were copulating. Could today get any better? Indeed it could. I had been nominated for the Beautiful Bloggers Competition.
I was in esteemed company. I was cheek by jowl next to the rather debonair devil who writes devil's kitchen
.
It was a lively evening of judging and I ended up third in a rather compromising position on top of the rather attractive New Romantic Mr Debonair who came forth (actually some guy called Tom Reynolds got in between us so our relationship remains unconsummated).
For reasons best known to nurse/lavatory plunger fetishists, this lady came in second:
To get onto an altogether different subject, I want to talk about people saying sorry.
Last week the Australian government said sorry to the "stolen generation", the thousands of mixed-race indigenous children in Australia forcibly removed from their families under a government-sanctioned policy of white assimilation.
This is quite a contentious subject. What I would say is, this is all well and good but what about improving the aboriginals lot now? Isn't this apology just a token gesture that will not improve the lives of Aborigines who still live on the margins of Australian society in communities blighted by alcohol, violence and poor health?
Sorry For Lynching
In 2005 the Senate formally apologized for having rejected decades of pleas to make lynching a federal crime as scores of victims’ descendants watched from the chamber’s gallery.
On a voice vote and without opposition, the Senate passed a resolution expressing its regrets to the relatives as well as to the nearly 5,000 Americans who were documented as having been lynched from 1880 to 1960.
These deaths occurred without trials, mostly in the South, often with the knowledge of local officials who allowed mob lynchings to become picture-taking, public spectacles.
Okay, again, maybe this sorry had a point, maybe not, because its not going to bring anyone back. But, in any case, shame on the twenty Senators who would not sponsor this. What was going through their minds: oh, lynching wasn't so bad, was it?
One bit of fairly funny sorry saying was when Gordon Brown said, sorry for mislaying the details of 25 million people.
I am just wondering what you think about Goverments saying sorry? Does it just get rid of their guilt or does it help heal wounds?
Or who are you waiting for an apology from?
Monday, February 18, 2008
Beautiful Bloggers
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15 comments:
Shouldnt both those sorries involve some form of government compensation to the victims' families?
It sometimes beggars belief what governments have been allowed to get away with historically in relation to human rights.
I certainly hope that I will be compensated should someone be in possession of my details via the missing Child Benefit records and start playing fast and loose with my credit rating. But, in the meantime, I shall go spend the extra £1.15 per week increase that Ive just been informed of.
Emma, you're a babe, but the fairest lady blogger I've yet seen put up her picture in this post. I don't think people should apologise for things they didn't do - it's better just to acknowledge that certain past actions occurred and were wrong.
Braun and his poof tart government have lost much, much more than they would readily admit to. Its been coming out of the woodwork for months now, they are doing it on purpose so they can have a weak excuse to ID card everyone and put everybody on a national DNA database starting with the little schoolchildren. Brave bastards, this government.
After Kevin Rudd said sorry during his appology speech, he then went on to say that improving the aboriginals lot in life would be better than just giving compo.
He has pledged a shitload of money (I think $30mil but don't quote me) to improving their health and general quality of life.
Whilst I applaud Rudd for saying sorry, the whole thing did smack of tokenism. Like that old saying 'a smile costs nothing but gives so much'.
If I was hungry I think I'd rather have a burger off a sneering bigot that a smile off a smarmy apologist...
I think a government apologising is a huge gesture of acknowledgement and the beginning of any true healing. Maybe the Australians will have inspired the UK :-)
This apology thing is a nonsense. About a year ago the British government were pressed to apologise for the slave trade. What does it change?
Bad things were done by bad people. But these bad people are long gone. All you can do is try and right the wrongs now by treating people equally and acknowleging that what was done in the past was wrong, and never letting it happen ever again.
I also don't believe in compensation for heinous acts generations ago....you do people no favours by giving them a whole heap of cash and no direction. I think it's insulting to them, actually.
And beautiful blogger? I've heard it all now. (Goes off to upload naked pictures of herself in order to win)
One of my friends from S. Dakota worked with the Oglala Sioux, and after a year spilled the beans that it was his great-granddad who had extradited hundreds of Sioux children from reservations to Indian schools. He expected to apologize upon telling them, but he was told by the elders that it didn't matter, only his actions now and in the future mattered. That seemed to me the most sensible way of dealing with sins of the past, put it behind and deal with the now and future.
It's hard to get rid of the guilt without acknowledging it. How can people feel guilty if they don't want to admit its mistake? So saying sorry is sort of functioning both ways. It is remedy for both.
congrats for being nominated as beautiful bloggers competition
sorry sorry sorry. but really i didn't mean it. isn't that our government?
I think what Helen said is probably how most people think in this day and age. They hate what happened years ago but why dwell on it now? It is only the present and future actions that count and the history lesson learned so hopefully it will never be repeated again.
Governments saying sorry is the slipery slope.
Next is compen-say-shun ...
Next is minorities wielding power over everyone else because of special status.
We can't judge governments of yesterday by today's standards.
More so - will the Aborigines (for example) be rejecting the benefits of medicine, modern farming and transport etc ?
They should be thanking God it was us that colonised them and not the Japanese, Germans or Spanish.
To think that they would have been left alone is nonsense. SOMEONE would have colonised them.
Oh such seriousness.
BTW Emma - you have a lovely voice and a cracking pair of legs.
The government apology opens the door, legally, for compensation.
Without it, it's harder for aboriginal groups to seek out money to rectify the damage caused by the "long ago" but still actively destructive decisions --to take children away from their families in order to wipe out their culture (and by extension, the entire people); or to admit that lynching was wrong or even took place.
The issue is money, not regret. In Canada, where I live, it took a great deal of time and money to try to get the government here to make up for treaty violations, stealing aboriginal children, and for doing things like trying to "extinguish" First Nations. Saying "sorry" here was too hard, because compensation is unquestionably due. So there are "partial" apologies being offered, instead; with small compensation to specific people in these First Nations groups. The same thing happened with the government here when they were forced to admit they wrongly imprisoned Japanese Canadians during WWII (so they could take their lands and property outright). When they finally apologized for that, Japanese-Canadian families had to be "paid" for what they'd lost through the theft, and a few received a token compensation.
In the US right now, the topic of compensation for slavery is still too hot, financially, to discuss...which gives you an idea why 20 senators would elect not to apologize for lynching. If you think of the economic foundation slavery created, and the extent to which that free labour created a very powerful USA...it's difficult not to see how much compensation would cost.
My suspicion is that both these governments (and I'm going to say the Australian government you mention, as well) are finding it easier to say "sorry" right now since they're bankrupting public coffers paying for a highly (personally) profitable war in Iraq and Afghanistan...making the whole notion of legal grounds for compensation for these wrongs irrelevant. After all, you can only be forced to pay out IF you've got the money to pay. If you don't, it will cost you nothing to apologize.
aurumgirl...you are very well informed on this and make some good points and I agree that people maybe should get compensation is some situations especially the Aborigines who had kids taken from them.
Regarding slavery, yes it did build America's wealth. But so did the colonies build Britain's wealth. Is it realistic, even if one had the money, to compensate every single person who has ever been mistreated or exploited?
I'm an indigenous Australian and I was truly moved by Rudd's apology. I think it was a great day. I wept with both sorrow and relief as did my family and so many people I know.
People forget that words are important. To those who question why bother with an apology because words are meaningless I ask why do you bother blogging? Or writing in your diary? Why do you read? Why does some song always speak to you when you hear it? Because words have power - and Rudd got it so right. There was understanding and there was true sorrow. The Oppostition leader displayed none of that.
At a very basic level, take a relationship that has soured. Is there relief when someone has acknowledged that they wronged you? Is there relief when someone has expressed their sorrow for their wrongs? Is their relief when they have made reparations and attempted to ease your pain? Of course there is. The pain may always be there but at least you can move on.
It's only the start of repairing the relationship. But thank god, we finally got to this starting point.
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