The discusting issue to get over is "Civil War" re-enactments. Every so often I drive past "Oak Ridge" estates and see confederate and union uniforms moving in and out of the woods. As slavery is a heavy burdon on our past, so is the Civil War. A war which was faught over the separation of the United States. Thank God we never became a North and South Korea or a North and South Vietnam.
Thank God for President Lincoln that he was smart enough to find a moral issue to fight over to prevent the dividing of this country. Moral issues such as slavery will always get ones blood boiling. Thank God for a president that was smart enough to stop 2 injustcies with 1 war.
So in reality as much as I hated slavery and the imprisonment of other humans for no reason other then laziness, cheap labor and power over other humans, I must thank and apologize for slavery of the past. But today I must still apologize for the "NEW" slavery being practised in certain areas of the United States.
What really has to be gotten over, is the Superiorty thinking of some people. 

The Great Emancipator?  As a state legislator, and even after 1863, he believed strongly in the deportation of Blacks. He wasn't too crazy about Mexicans either. The Emancipation Proclamation, forced on him by abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and others, did nothing to abandon Lincoln's own belief in white supremacy and civil rights for Whites only.  In the end, we should thank Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists, who should be called the Great Emancipators.

for the history lesson,but if you read my posting I never said anything about Lincoln's feelings toward blacks. All I said was he used the slavery issue to get others to back him in the War to keep the Nation one Nation. It is quite evident after this statement at his inaugural:

Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you.... You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it."

Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to defend Federal law and the Union. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on the states for 75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy but four remained within the Union. The Civil War had begun.

My statement "thereby solving 2 issues" may have confused you.

I am personally ashamed that such Hargrove bigotry has reared its ugly head --again. 

Closer to home (mine) there's a pathetic letter to the editor today in the Roanoke Times

Said the letter writer:

I learned as a child that when someone digs up a dead dog, it stinks. Let's enjoy the history of Jamestown 2007 without an exhumation of any dead dogs.

Unbelievable!  I guess the letter writer subscribes to a sanitized version of our history, perhaps a Disney-like cartoon.  Revisionism strikes another blow. 

Without ensuring that our collective memory remembers, we (collectively speaking) are doomed to repeat old travesties. 

I messed up and left off the end blockquote above, thus including my comment (from "Unbelievable ....").  The comment should have read:

I am personally ashamed that such Hargrove bigotry has reared its ugly head --again.

Closer to home (mine) there's a pathetic letter to the editor today in the Roanoke Times

Said the letter writer:

Unbelievable!  I guess the letter writer subscribes to a sanitized version of our history, perhaps a Disney-like cartoon.  Revisionism strikes another blow.

Unbelievable!  I guess the letter writer subscribes to a sanitized version of our history, perhaps a Disney-like cartoon.  Revisionism strikes another blow.

Without ensuring that our collective memory remembers, we (collectively speaking) are doomed to repeat old travesties. 

Yikes!  Lowell, if you have the power ("of the powerful"), as I think you do, to delete a comment, please delete away at the last two comments I made here on this story.

I messed up, not once but TWICE, thus including my comment (from "Unbelievable ....")as if it were from the letter writer.  One last time:

My words: I am personally ashamed that such Hargrove bigotry has reared its ugly head --again.

Closer to home (mine) there's a pathetic letter to the editor today in the Roanoke Times

Said the letter writer to the Roanoke Times,
"I learned as a child that when someone digs up a dead dog, it stinks. Let's enjoy the history of Jamestown 2007 without an exhumation of any dead dogs."

My words again:
Unbelievable!  I guess the letter writer subscribes to a sanitized version of our history, perhaps a Disney-like cartoon.  Revisionism strikes another blow.

Without ensuring that our collective memory remembers, we (collectively speaking) are doomed to repeat old travesties.

 

which would mean the corrective comment(s) appended thereto would also disappear.

I use to have that power when I was an administrator, no longer do.

Peace

Hargrove argued that "not a soul in this legislature" had anything to do with slavery.  This argument is seductive and needs to be refuted.  The fact is that we as a people belong to states, churches, companies, etc. that have existences spanning generations; and we identify with, and take pride in, those entities' past accomplishments.  Thus, on every 4th of July, we celebrate, the accomplishments of our American Revolution forefathers even though we as individuals had nothing to do
with their actions. 

If we are to show pride in the accomplishments of our forefathers, we must, by the same token, be willing to express shame for their past wrongs. It is this logic of intergenerational continuity that led to many recent apologies for past wrongs, such as the Holy See's 1998 apology for an earlier generation of Catholics' passivity in the face of the Nazis' genocidal treatment of Jews.  Such owning up to past wrongs is important for the moral health of a people, a fact of life that Mr. Hargrove is, sadly, oblivious to.

Thanks!

JLK, your comments about the melding of the good and the bad in our history is really important.  We can't carry with us only our accomplishments as a nation.  We must also carry on and try to right the wrongs of the past.  In fact that's what human life is about.  We continue to try to do better.  But how can we continue to do better if there comes a point where no one even recognizes our own history?

and so do I. That's why I posted the copy of the purchase document on my great-great grandmother. That's what I meant in my post about looking at property records to find my ancestors.

Yes, slavery was a long time ago. But as Kaine said in his speech here in Norfolk on MLK Day (also on my blog), it's not just about slavery - it is about the systematic way in which Virginia denied basic rights to its black citizens after slavery was abolished.

People like Hargrove don't understand White Privilege and how, to this day, it affects out economic system.

Jesus didn't "get over it."  He observed Passover, commemorating the Jews' release from bondage.