Apologies All Around

Virginia’s General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution expressing “profound regret” for the state’s role in slavery. The measure also expressed regret for "the exploitation of Native Americans."

The resolution admits that government-sanctioned slavery "ranks as the most horrendous of all depredations of human rights and violations of our founding ideals in our nation's history, and the abolition of slavery was followed by systematic discrimination, enforced segregation, and other insidious institutions and practices toward Americans of African descent that were rooted in racism, racial bias, and racial misunderstanding."

Now let’s see. An apology is a recognition that the circumstance being apologized for was one that should not have occurred and the one apologizing—or in this case their ancestors—acknowledges their responsibility for that wrong. So Virginia, a leader of the Confederate states that seceded and prosecuted the Civil war mainly[1] to protect their “peculiar institution” now says in effect, “we’re sorry we were wrong.”

Think about this a minute. All that suffering, all that injustice need never have come to pass. The key question is why they couldn’t see this truth THEN. We might say that their self-interest, their very society, was so dependant on slave labor that they just couldn’t see beyond that to the wrong they were perpetuating (even though it surely wasn’t as if there weren’t others who tried mightily to convert them).

Of greater importance are two aspects of apologies in general and this one in particular. First, what TODAY might we be doing for which our descendants will offer apologies years hence? Could be things not on anybody’s radar though, given the abolitionists in slavery’s day, today’s potential wrongs surely have their canary-in-the-mineshaft minions. Thus, maybe it is our aggressive consumption of the earth’s resources or perhaps a zealous quest for security that wreaks havoc in lands far from our shores.

Second, we must recognize that such apologies, coming long after an occurrence that cannot be re-visited, are convenient and easy. We can’t go back and as much as today’s Virginians express regret they can’t go back either. Apologies in such circumstances are therefore meaningless UNLESS the confessor pursues a course of concrete actions that are consistent with the professed change of heart.

The Virginia apology would thus be meaningless unless accompanied with a plan today for correcting the sins of yesterday. Such steps might include renewed vigor in affirmative action, early childhood education and guaranteed college tuition for minorities among other ideas.

But Virginia’s isn’t the only apology being floated around. With the 2008 Presidential race upon us we see candidate John Edwards with an apology of his own over his Senate vote to allow the war in Iraq. Just recently he said, "I just wanted to make sure anyone who hadn't heard me say it, knows that that's my position (that he apologizes for his vote on the Iraq war). On that issue and everything else, I want to make it absolutely clear to voters in New Hampshire where I stand.”

But such an apology is easy now. The war is going horribly, most Americans are now opposed to it and he’s a presidential candidate. His apology is empty unless it is also accompanied with a concrete plan that is consistent with his now held view that the war was wrong to begin with. This plan should therefore include:

1) A call for an admission of error by the one who prosecuted it, President Bush, and failing that a commencement of Impeachment hearings against him and Dick Cheney;

2) A call for a drastic withdrawal of troops from Iraq and decreased funding for the war. He has so far safely hid behind the Iraq Study Group’s skirt by parroting their recommendation of a 100,000 troop cap, but if the war was wrong in his new opinion, why is he not more forcefully advocating a corrective course that would include Senate impeachment hearings, and multi-party dialogue as part of an all-out effort to end our military aggression and seek reconciliation;

3) A strong denial that we can weapon our way to long term security. He should immediately call for a reduction of our military budget and evince an equally strong preference for multi-lateral co-operation with the states of the world;

4) A plan for what he would he do in the future to make the right decisions and correctly interpret the intelligence. As it stands now his past decision to support the war seems way too motivated by the then existing political winds, which strongly favored his pro-war vote, than his feigned dependance on flawed intelligence for which there was ample refutation.

Apologies are good, but actions speak louder than words.


[1] Yes, volumes are still written about how slavery was not the reason for Southern secession and the resultant war that, it is argued, was more about states’ rights and protection of their home turf. But there can be no doubt that slavery was the driving issue about which the Confederate states claimed those states’ rights to begin with.