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:
Answering those who ask "why can't you just get over it?"
Answering those who ask "why can't you just get over it?"
"Hang on while I log in to the James Webb telescope to search the known universe for who the fuck asked you." -- James Fell
Re: Answering those who ask "why can't you just get over it?
Brilliant, eloquent, to the point.
It is important to keep faith with history and tell the truth.
Yrs,
Rubato
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?
Well said.
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg, paraphrasing Sarah Moore Grimké
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Re: Answering those who ask "why can't you just get over it?
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
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
Last edited by MajGenl.Meade on Mon Apr 03, 2017 11:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts
Re: Answering those who ask "why can't you just get over it?
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!
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan
~ Carl Sagan