Laugh till you cry wrote on Nov 19
th, 2013 at 11:05am:
The need for an apology is widely accepted.
I think apologies are just a current fashion statement.
That isn't to say that the ways Aborigines were treated back in the early days of our history weren't appalling. They were.
I've read some of the accounts and people were often brutal and inhumane.
Conditions even now are not good, but a lot of the problem has(I believe) to do with generational poverty and many of the next generation of children with damaged brains due to foetal alcohol syndrome. Just throwing a bucket of money at it won't fix it. Apologies won't fix it.
If someone does something wrong, they should apologise.
But those who did the most wrong in the past are long dead and you know what, I bet they went to their graves not sorry about a thing. We can't apologise for them. We shouldn't.
And the people who had the most wrong done to them, most of them are dead too, so it is too late.
We can have the govt say they are sorry those things happened, and that has been said.
But times were different, they were brutal times. I think we are trying to judge people from the past by today's standards and it is just we have a different mind set.
I wonder what, in 50 or 100 or 200 years time, people will look back at in our present society and wonder how on earth we didn't notice it or do something about it.