Hey Chagur,
Nice to hear from you. As usual, you've made a good point.
I once played rugby with a kid from South Africa. As an eighteen year old, meeting this Afrikaner actually "broadened" my world-view. You see, I don't remember ever hearing my father call a black man anything other than a "nigger". However, the Afrikaner kid was generous in his use of this word; Indians, Blacks, Arabs, ... , the entire lot of them were "niggers" to him. If nothing else, I thought him remarkably even-handed in his characterizations.
Obviously, both my father and my Afrikaner teammate expressed views that any civilized man today would consider repugnant. Furthermore, I've no doubt our European ancestors exploited the people and resources across the continent of Africa. Shame on Cecil Rhodes, shame on them all.
Yet having said as much, how many of those that decried apartheid are heard today speaking out against the situation in Zimbabwe; where white farmers are beaten and in some cases killed by mobs of blacks. Imagine the outcry if it were whites forcing black families off their land? I despise such hypocrisy.
However, as evil as apartheid was, and as reprehensible as the mobs that do the bidding of "His Excellency" Robert Mugabe are, the death and degradations inflicted by black Africans upon black Africans today are more significant by some orders of magnitude.
I actually wish that whites
were responsible for the problems facing blacks today in Africa. Since we whites are hyper-sensitive to the charge of racist; a deafening cry would rise among us forthright to correct the situation.
Though admittedly anecdotal evidence, I heard a story on the radio last year that a black girl was shot and killed while walking across a field owned by a white South African farmer. The radio reported that the farmer was a known "nut" case. He was duely arrested and charged with murder. The report went on to say that a number of Black-American activists flew to South Africa to be present at the trial of this crazy farmer. That these Black-American civil rights activists would go to such lengths to express their outrage, in selecting
this single tragedy among the
massive daily carnage in Africa, spoke volumes to me.
Blacks are responsible for the current horrors in Africa; the butchery, the slavery, ... , the misery. And as such, neither indignant activists nor the Western press are beating a path to Africa's door. Hopefully Chagur, I've better explained my lament that not many of us seem to care about the current plight of Africa.
To right the problems of the world might not be within the West's power. I also understand that our past attempts at
social-engineering have landed us in hot water. Perhaps we would be idiots for trying to help Africa. My argument is that we might indeed
be idiots, but we'd be
compassionate idiots nonetheless.
My beloved Thomas Jefferson once advised a friend in a letter; "An honest heart being the first blessing, a knowing head is the second."
Michael