South vs. North?

[SWTXBelle]

Ivyspice, it is possible to remember the mistakes of the past without having to celebrate them. You don't get on the phone and call everyone in your family when your child loses a soccer game or gets a bad grade, do you? But you do when they do something worthy of celebration. So too with a society's history. While you want to remember and learn from mistakes, it is the acomplishments which should be the primary focus. Should MLK be remembered as a great leader, or an adulterous plagerist? According to you, we should focus just as much on his faults as his acomplishments. I have to ask - why? He was a man, and as such, imperfect. But his ideas are how he distinguished himself -and so I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it is his ideas and acomplishments which should be remembered on his holiday, not his failings.
As far as history goes, the sanitizing often conisists of the victors totally demonizing the enemy, instead of objectively studying what led to the conflict and trying to learn from it. This is true for just about any war, including dare I say the current conflict.
Most people who want me to feel guilty for slavery don't have a clue as to the actual history of the pre-War U.S.A. I do, and I don't have any reason to feel guilty. My ancestors owned slaves at a time when it was an accepted practice. Slavery was wrong, it was abolished, and that's that. More important than trying to make me feel guilty about the way society was 150 years ago is to focus on what can be done TODAY.
Instead of castigating me for the institutuion of slavery, how about focusing that energy on anger at the way the largely black population of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast have been treated by the Federal government? You want to tell me that had a similar tragedy happened in, oh, New York, we would have the same shameful treatment?That same Federal government that my ancestors thought were overstepping their bounds - near as I can tell, they were right to be worried then, and I'm worried now!