Seems like the Obama vs McCain post was a side show for a debate on compensation for slavery. In an ideal world, compensation for atrocities seems like a good idea. The problem with compensation, is always just how much, and how far you go back? How can you place a yard stick on something as amorphous as human suffering? One danger is that by paying too little you inflame rather than appease. Another fact that needs to be born in mind is that slave trading started long before it happened in the US. Research show that Muslims were buying Africa slaves as early as 900 AD. The Portuguese as sometimes cited as having started the European slave trade, and the importing of slaves to American continent was before it even became a de facto sovereign state. So who then becomes responsible?
That the slave trade was (and lest we forget, continues to be) one of the worst and most humiliating forms of subjugation by one set of humans over another, is more a testimony to the human condition …our dark side. Fortunately, part of the human condition is also the ability to recognize mistakes and correct them. So compensation is fine is things are clear cut, but get rocky when things aren’t. If compensation is to be paid, I think the best form it can take is to vote a for President who has an unambiguous historical link to the times in question. That leads neatly onto the Obama vs McCain topic.
One theory suggests that it’s not really about who is going to be the next president, and whether their policies are going to be any better than their predecessors. It’s about the turgidity of Washington itself, and how to break the age old mold that has firmly embedded itself in the system. My feeling is that Obama represents a kind of subconscious desire of many Americans to overturn or ‘change’ that status quo and inertia, and it’s as if his background offers some kind of guarantee of that. Shaking up Washington wouldn’t do any harm, but it must be remembered that the Clinton era aligned itself with the financial services industry, which carries a lot of clout, and even Obama was heavily funded by Citadel.
I think where the two fundamentally differ is on foreign policy, and I am interested to see how Obama’s immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq plays out.
