I would like nothing more than to find common ground with my fellow Americans so that we can actually roll up our sleeves and together attack the problems that ail our nation. However when inhuman remarks sputter from the underinformed lips of the likes of Medved and Coulter sometimes I just have to throw up my hands.
In Medved's column, "Six Inconvenient Truths About the U.S. and Slavery," this man actually says, in subtext that would be crystal clear to even non-native English speakers, that the enslavement of Africans in the United States wasn't really quite as bad as liberals would lead us to believe.
Of course he later tried to backpedal and said on his radio show, "I never defended slavery."
Mr. Medved is lying.
What he wrote was this: "Unfortunately, the current mania for exaggerating America's culpability for the horrors of slavery bears no more connection to reality than, the old, discredited tendency to deny that the U.S. bore any blame at all."
"Current mania?" Did I miss something? Is Roots being aired non-stop across every channel on cable? And what old tendency was there in America to deny that the U.S. bore any blame at all? He is spewing illogical nonsense on a par with Ahmadinejad braying that there are two sides to this whole holocaust thing.
For me, a necessary prerequisite for entry into the family of man is the belief that the enslavement, incineration or systematic degradation of our fellow man is never acceptable.
Instead Mr. Medved argues that slavery has ancient roots and others in both the New World and Arab traders in east Africa also practiced it. And, sir, your point is? Is the horror of the Hutu genocide of perhaps a million Tutsi in Rwanda "exaggerated" because Germany did it first? What the hell is the matter with you? Is it because we are coming up on Halloween? Is that why you are so ghoulish?
Midd
Believe it or not, it gets worse. Although he admits that "millions of slaves perished over the course of 300 years during the rigors of the Middle Passage," he tries to make the distinction that you can't call it genocide because only live slaves had value on the other end. Twenty million were kidnapped from their villages, ten million of them died before ever reaching the coast, millions died during the Middle Passage and those that arrive were beaten, whipped, forced to work for free forever, deliver their children into perpetual servitude as well, only to have them ripped from their arms and sold off to who knows where when the master felt like downsizing.
Who the hell cares what you call it?
Here Mr. Medved is touching upon the decades-old and sickeningly inane argument between some blacks and some Jews over who's been mistreated the worst by the white man. For me, Mr. Medved is the saddest representation of a "slave" or victim mentality in recent memory.
Sickeningly, he uses the word "rigors," in the passage above as if the Africans, my ancestors, branded and shackled to each other, naked and piled on top of each other, up to 400 to a cargo hold, were subjected to something "rigorous." Mr. Medved they weren't training for the triple jump. They were being subjected to one of the largest scale degradations of fellow human beings every perpetrated in the history of the globe.
And as for your point #6 Mr. Medved, that we African-Americans are lucky to be here instead of starving back in Africa, it is a lot more complicated than your junior-high school, armchair analysis. May I suggest you read Walter Rodney's, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa to see that Africa was irreparably changed after the slave trade and then European colonization. I'm sure you've seen the same Star Trek episodes as I have. If you go back in time and change something, that always has drastic effects on the future.
The saddest part is not that Mr. Medved is dragging out shopworn, apologist arguments that the Klan and other white supremacists have been re-packaging since before the North won the war (and passing them off as if they were his own). The saddest part to me is that he, like Coulter, feel the need to rabidly counter everything that they perceive to be coming from the left of them, regardless of its merits. When presented with scientific fact, like global warming or the theory of evolution, or, in this case, the notion that slavery sucked, just because the left said it first they feel zealously compelled to argue the other side.
Open your mind, Mr. Medved. And until you do...shut your trap.
