This has always bugged me...

[Sindertone]

QUOTE (DonKarnage @ Jul 13 2011, 05:21 PM) lol loss? Looks more like an upgrade from what I see. Their ancestors may have suffered (as did mine), but now the new generations are living it up, having never experienced the @#(! their ancestors had to go through.

You're dense as a $#@!ing brick. And twice as ignorant.
Here, let me help.
Now go read a book.

[Sindertone]

OK, since you can't be bothered to read a book or look it up you self, here's a little tiny dose of why there are reparations to be made:


"The European and Asian lifestyle included a long history of sharing close quarters with domesticated animals such as cows, pigs, sheep, goats, horses, and various domesticated fowl, which had resulted in epidemic diseases unknown in the Americas. Thus the large-scale contact with Europeans after 1492 introduced novel germs to the indigenous people of the Americas. Epidemics of smallpox (1518, 1521, 1525, 1558, 1589), typhus (1546), influenza (1558), diphtheria (1614) and measles (1618) swept ahead of initial European contact,[15][16] killing between 10 million and 20 million[17] people, up to 95% of the indigenous population of the Americas.[18][19][20] The cultural and political instability attending these losses appears to have been of substantial aid in the efforts of various colonists to seize the great wealth in land and resources of which indigenous societies had customarily made use.[21]

Such diseases yielded human mortality of an unquestionably enormous gravity and scale – and this has profoundly confused efforts to determine its full extent with any true precision. Estimates of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas vary tremendously."
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_c ... ation_loss

[HJ_KG]

,

[Vanaka]

QUOTE (DonKarnage @ Jul 13 2011, 02:07 PM) I get treated like a second class citizen off the reservation too.
My family has to work for absolutely everything, we get no handouts or freebies whatsoever anywhere. What we do get is constant harassment from people who make it their business to be in ours.

Also, the taxes my family pays goes into paying for all those handouts and grants the Indians get. Why are we paying for their 'nation'?

Why? Because the in U.S., despite being a Rome wannabe (our government is ripped off from Rome more than anywhere else), imperialism and conquest have almost always been politically incorrect, as such since it is at least perceived that we "conquered" (read: $#@!ed) the NA Indians it the pervading thought that we have to "make up for it." This isn't necessarily true, but what happened with the Native Americans that created today's situation with the reserves is a very complex subject that ranges from paleo-anthropology, history, geography, and medicine. Yes, medicine, and probably a few others.

You'll understand it better once you get into some college history/social sciences (politics), because high school is crap when it comes to teaching those sort of things.

[Bunnywabbit]

And they get free blankets too!!

[Adept]

QUOTE (Sindertone @ Jul 14 2011, 01:12 AM) You're dense as a $#@!ing brick. And twice as ignorant.
Here, let me help.
Now go read a book.

What sinder said.

Karnage, please don't talk of this again before you've given it a serious re-think... and preferrebly never. Christ on a bike!

[DonKarnage]

Oh, a thousand apologies, I'm clearly flawed in my train of thought that it's unfair that they get everything, and my family who has been here for 5-6 generations get's squat.
But, you know, I've heard so much pro-native american talk that it really just gets tiring, and naturally, anyone who objects to it causes an immediate uproar from people who probably aren't any better educated on the matter either.

Why do I need to take a college class to understand why they're still getting handouts because of some disease-ridden blankets that got passed out several hundred years ago?
They're welcome to join the rest of society and make themselves productive citizens, but many just prefer to sit out on the Rez and get along not having to do anything at all, and are often just as well off or better than those who chose to make something of their lives the hard way.

Sorry to sound so insensitive, but none of the current native descendants have suffered much of anything, they basically take these reparations for granted from what I saw on a day by day basis.
For many, they had a "I don't really care what happened, lol, I'm just glad to be getting free money and tax breaks" state of mind.

Again, so terribly sorry for being dense and ignorant as $#@!, I guess it runs in the family

[Adept]

You took their $#@!ing land, you killed them and destroyed their culture. You stuffed them in crappy wasteland that nobody wanted and called them "reservations".

Then the US became the most powerful and rich nation on the planet, and you threw a few bread crumbs their way. They are still utterly $#@!ed, and trying to salvage some bits of their culture.

And this is your take on it? Jesus wept.

[Raveen]

QUOTE (Adept @ Jul 14 2011, 12:27 PM) You took their $#@!ing land, you killed them and destroyed their culture. You stuffed them in crappy wasteland that nobody wanted and called them "reservations".

Then the US became the most powerful and rich nation on the planet, and you threw a few bread crumbs their way. They are still utterly $#@!ed, and trying to salvage some bits of their culture.

And this is your take on it? Jesus wept.

In fairness it's not all that different to how the US seems to treat all it's poorest citizens. DK has a point that social policies should be egalitarian where possible and making whole communities dependant on handouts is not terribly productive (see Wales for examples, at least until we threw them a bone and allowed them to make Doctor Who). It's also not fair on people who are in no better situation themselves but don't get the handouts.

Essentially DK the problem is (entirely justified) white man's guilt + a bizarre loathing of socialist programs.

[Bunnywabbit]

Honestly, disregarding the crack about the blankets, I can kind of see where you're coming from. It's a fascinating dilemma.

Being from a country with a colonial past, which has also made about a gazillion bucks in the - ahem - African Labour business, we carry a lot of moral debt around. On the one hand, we as a society still reap the profits from those crimes - our ancestors bought a lot of cool stuff with it that we still have and show to tourists in return for money. On the other, as you mentioned, you don't throw a son in jail for the crimes of his father. But you do make him pay his dad's debts if he accepts his inheritance, and you know what: I did accept the inheritance.

Meanwhile it can be a huge series of facepalms to see goverments handle a budget that's too big for them. Yeah, people are stupid, goverments are mostly stupid, and people and governments with too much cash on hand have their stupidity unchecked by financial realities. I have no trouble at all imagining the kind of idiocy governments and municipalities can come up with, when they have an oversized budget due to reparations that are in themselves, ethically necessary. But I'm sure it can be painful to watch up close.

However, if you get hit by a car, and succesfully sue the driver for a 100k, you are morally entitled to that money, even if you decide to blow it all on cocaine and underage prostitutes. How you spend the cash doesn't change the fact that you're entitled to it. Nor are you required to forgive the driver, or be grateful for the money. You can be a total son of a bitch to him for the rest of your life, and he still has to pay you.

On the other hand, while I guess laptops are a bit over the top, what struck me isn't the extreme luxury of the accomodations. I think that having a nice school bus is a pretty good idea. Shouldn't state of the art equiptment be standard throughout the US? Also, having free school supplies and lunches makes sense to me; especially given the kind of crap kids get sent from home with these days. Free ambulances sound good and proper to me too - part of any decent health care system.

I can get that you felt discriminated against, but i can see the sense of excluding you. Otherwise the reservation would be overrun by Americans hoping to lead the good life there, and how would that be for a double $#@! you!

Also, how pathetic is it that that is something that would probably happen. I can't think of a better reason to overcome your aversion to socialism and re-evaluate the US education and healthcare system. But that is perhaps for another day.

Meanwhile, congratulations. You are one of the few white, male, able-bodied (assumably) heterosexuals (probably) who have been afforded the life deepening experience of having been discriminated against. Lucky you.

You could turn that into a sense of victimization ('yeah, well I've been discriminated against too, so $#@! everybody else') or you could turn the experience into a deepened empathy with those who can't escape bigotry by driving across a reservation border.