Answering those who ask "why can't you just get over it?"
Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 10:06 pm
by Scooter
Senator Murray Sinclair, who chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Aboriginal residential schools, had this to say about those who asked why Aboriginal people didn't just "get over" the abuse and the legacy that residential schools represented for them. His words would be similarly applicable to those who claim that people should "get over" slavery or segregation or other systematic discrimination visited upon other targeted populations:
Re: Answering those who ask "why can't you just get over it?
Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 10:16 pm
by rubato
Brilliant, eloquent, to the point.
It is important to keep faith with history and tell the truth.
Yrs,
Rubato
Re: Answering those who ask "why can't you just get over it?
Posted: Sun Apr 02, 2017 11:18 pm
by Guinevere
Well said.
Re: Answering those who ask "why can't you just get over it?
Posted: Mon Apr 03, 2017 6:16 am
by MajGenl.Meade
For the present time and some time to come, he speaks very clearly and accurately.
Several hundred years from now, people will be "over it", just as my own parents had fully recovered from the Saxon invasions of Britain and I've managed to get over that Norman business.
But what he's addressing is too recent and too "continuing" in its downstream effects on real people for "get over it already" to be anything other than condescending and wrong.
Recently, Helen Zille (Mayor of Cape Town) tweeted to the effect that is not correct to assert that ONLY NEGATIVE things came out of colonialism. There are after all systems of jurisprudence and education. She might as well have added roads and aqueducts. Although it MAY be factually correct that many positive things MAY be a legacy of Europeans having been here, it is remarkably (and fatally in the political arena) insensitive to poke a stick into that wasp nest at this time.
Hundreds of thousands Millions of people in South Africa lived through the "legacy" - which for them was no roads, no education, no justice, injustice, cruelty, deprivation...... etc. Now is not the time for cold-blooded historical perspective. These here are damaged people, not uni-students seeking a subject for a thesis.
PS Politicians should be banned from tweeting. Only twats tweet
edit FTFM
Re: Answering those who ask "why can't you just get over it?
Posted: Mon Apr 03, 2017 7:37 am
by BoSoxGal
That's wonderful! I'll be bookmarking and using it in future when I see some idiot posting 'just get over it' crap online. Thanks for sharing!