Moving On, While Not Forgetting.

A reader sent this post in response to my post on Holder and race below. As always I enjoy receiving comments, thoughts, and posts - if you have something to say on (nearly) anything please send it along. John@liberalrapture.com

Moving On, While Not Forgetting.

By Roberta


I think you bring up many excellent and pertinent points in your Better Things to Do, post, J-SOM.

Slavery and racism are a part of America's history. That sin will be a blot on our history forever. It is also a blot on many civilization's and many country's histories. The history of mankind is rife with man's inhumanity to man.

But in defense of America, and as far as I know, we are the only nation that was born with the proposition that,"All men are created equal." And our history since then has been a movement to try and reach that ideal. And since man is a fallen angel, or is imperfect, sometimes that movement has been slow, plodding, and imperfect.

But hot-damn, many, if not most people in America, have tried, especially since the sixties and Martin Luther King to judge people, not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. And we have moved in that direction and have made many strides.

In the sixties and seventies when I marched and worked for equality (racism and sexism) I thought we made progress, even though more remained to be done. As one example, I never, ever thought then that I would live to see the day that an all white jury in Texas would find three white men guilty of murdering a black man as happened in the eighties or nineties. But I did.

Now I feel that a lot of that progress has been obliterated.

I believe that Obama's entire campaign, and now Holder's comments, have set race relations back fifty years in this nation. That saddens me. But mostly it angers me.

I grew up in an alcoholic family. Both of my parents were alcoholics. To say that my childhood was filled with upheaval and abuse does not begin to describe. As an adult I could have gone in several directions given that background. And I did some counseling and joined Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOH). But after about six months with ACOH I left.

I left because too many of the people there wanted to live in the past and nurse their grievances about their parents and their past. That was all they wanted to talk about. They were fixated on it. They could not get past it. I did not want to live that way. I wanted to, not forget the past, but to move beyond it, and more importantly, rise above it. I did not want to change the past. I wanted to make my future different and better.

We have to put the past behind us and move on. For our own and our nation’s health and sanity we need to shed the victim mentality and forge ahead.

We are all one. E pluribus Unum. Out of many one.

If the greatest experiment in self-government ever in world history is to survive it is imperative that we all learn from the past, but move forward as well.