The Past Needs To Stay In The Past

I will apologize in advance for this post being a bit of a venting/ranting session, but it is something that has bothered me for years and is being brought up in this class by many of us.  People of all races and cultures, but mostly minorities, seem to love to bring up the past and how it affects them now.  For instance, about 5 years ago I remember watching a talk show about how a group of African Americans wanted the government, or present day ancestors of slave owners, to pay them reparation money because their ancestors were slaves.  This absolutely blew my mind, so to clarify that thought to myself I summarized it as, a group of people wants to claim that something they never went through personally and that never affected them in any justifiable way, should be made up to them?  Something doesn’t add up with that idea to me at all, but before I go on I should point out that I am in no way racist, I would say the same thing to anyone with such a ludacris thought.  To me this is like me wanting to be able to beat up the bully that threw me to the ground in kindergarten because now I’m bigger than him and can do it.  Why do we never hear from the Jewish ancestors of victims of the holocaust, that German ancestors should be paying them for their ancestor's deeds.  This alone would open up a huge can of worms for anyone who has ever been wronged, past, present, or future to take revenge or profit financially from it.  The same thought can be applied to certain Native American’s who still believe that the government of the United States should hand them out anything they need because of atrocities committed in the past.  I will be the first to admit that many minorities were treated horribly in the past, many by white Americans and the United States government, but every culture has been treated wrongly at some point or another in history.  My point to this whole rant is that everyone needs to leave the past in the past.  We definitely need to learn from the past and use it for education purposes, but no one should be trying to prosper material wise for something that never hurt them personally.  I could go on and on about this for pages, but for my personal sanity and the well being of others, I will end my rant here before I go off the deep end.

This cartoon hits the nail on the head for why reparations from past misfortune make no sense.