Apology not necessary for slavery
Just a few weeks ago, the General Assembly of North Carolina voted to apologize for their part in slavery. Since then, many people have called upon other former slave-holding states, including Georgia, to follow North Carolina in apologizing. I believe it would be a critical error for Georgia to apologize.
Don’t get the wrong idea. I don’t support slavery. I don’t even particularly like the Confederate flag. In fact, it’s because I don’t support slavery that I am opposed to this apology being brought up. The historical definition of an apology is that when you do something wrong, you say you’re sorry to whom you wronged, and then you change your ways. By the Georgia Representatives apologizing, they would be saying “sorry” for something they never did. Where will this stop? Will there be a proposal next week to apologize to Great Britain for the Boston Tea Party?
Besides creating a slippery-slope of apologies, this will cause other problems for our state. Slavery was a terrible lifestyle. I would be hard-pressed to think of a single institution that is as awful and terrifying as that was. Is it even possible for a simple apology written on paper and voted by a handful of officials to make up for the tragedy that slaves had to face?
In essence, an apology would be meaningless because there are no former slaves or slave-owners still living, and even then, an apology would be too little to make up for the horrors that the slaves had to face. So why do politicians even consider bringing it up? I believe the answer is that they want votes. Nearly every person in America believes that slavery is a God-awful institution that should never return. Some politicians have noticed this and see a perfect way to get votes. By proposing an apology for slavery, the politicians look better to their constituents while in reality they aren’t doing a darn thing to actually end the current world-wide slave trade. In short, some politicians are putting their political ambitions so high that they are willing to belittle the horrors of slavery so they can get a few more votes in the next election.
Instead of wasting time on meaningless apologies that not a single former slave will read, our representatives should be passing laws and providing aid to help end the current global slave trade. There are more than 24 million slaves in the world today, the most at anytime in world history. These slaves are every color and come from almost every continent including Europe, Africa, Asia and even the Americas. Most of these slaves are children and many of them are sold for the purpose of being sex-slaves. I encourage the Georgia Assembly to spend their time figuring out solutions to this current slave trade.
But what can we do as individuals? There are numerous charities you can support that are devoted to ending the global slave trade such as Polaris Project, Free the Slaves, and the Break the Chain Campaign. As for political measures, we should inform our representatives it is more productive to solve problems for the present, rather than dwell on divisive issues of the past. Georgia has a bad history when it comes to slavery, but our generation has been given a chance to fully stop it once and for all. Let’s not waste it.
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Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Apr 13 2007. Filed under Opinion.
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