Legislation for the Future, Not PR Apology for the Past
By Marion Edwyn Harrison (03/15/07)
The late industrialist W. Clement Stone was famous for his repeated invocation of that undeniably true, if self-evident, expression: "The future lies ahead." "He who ignores the errors of history is destined to re-live them" often is attributed to George Santayana. Regardless of who first said what, it is obvious that the duty of Congress is, or ought to be, legislating for the future. There is nothing in the writings of the Founding Fathers, much less in the Constitution, suggesting a Congressional role in apologizing for any of the innumerable errors and sins of the past.
However, modern public relations has its practitioners. Congress undeniably is inundated with difficult problems within its jurisdiction. Some of the more obvious include expenditures essentially out of control, a Social Security system headed in measurable time for the functional equivalent of bankruptcy, sick Medicare, rampant unlawful immigration, loss of jobs to foreign competition, a growing energy shortage, a retrogressively more complicated tax structure, more and more metropolitan-area traffic jams with less and less alleviating light-rail under construction, so on.
In the face of the foregoing, and of much more not enumerated, several Members of Congress are in the apologizing business. In this column of February 15, 2007, reprinted herewith, we wrote of one such absurdity. There now are at least two more - not as egregious in that they do not ask a friendly foreign government, but rather our Congress, to apologize for gross historical misconduct.
A distinguished United States Senator, on the fringes of running for President, wants Congress to apologize for mistreatment of Indians. A freshman Member of the House of Representatives, of the other party, representing a heavily Black constituency, wants Congress to apologize for mistreatment of Blacks. There are a few precedents for the apologizing business but they are minimal and unconvincing - e.g., in the 109th Congress the Senate passed a resolution apologizing for failure some 70 years ago to pass an anti-lynching bill. (One co-sponsor, a Republican, was defeated for re-election in 2006; the other, a Democrat, apparently faces a difficult race in 2008. So much for PR value.)
Some apologist proponents cite 1988 legislation, signed by President Ronald W. Reagan, to compensate and apologize to Americans of Japanese ancestry who were detained during World War II. Regardless of one’s opinion of that enactment it clearly is distinguishable. Further, it was legislation, not mere resolution.
Surely the stronger argument is that Congress should devote itself to its legislative functions, inundated as it is with real work, and forget about PR-type apologies. Furthermore, when one combines heritage and arithmetic, all of us undoubtedly have ancestors who committed or participated in what, notwithstanding a then prevailing Zeitgeist, we evaluate as atrocities. Using the generally accepted measure of a generation as 25 years, bearing in mind the ancestor-count in each generation doubles, each of us arithmetically has 512 ancestors from the nine generations since the American Revolution. Undoubtedly not all were angels.
Marion Edwyn Harrison, Esq., is President of, and Counsel to, the Free Congress Foundation.
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