The following.. is disjointed, sorry.

Is slavery bad? Yes. Is it a sad chapter of this country? Yes. Is it only in this country that slavery existed? No.

I wonder how many people can really say they are the descendants of slaves -- I mean "pure" desendants. How do you handle things if one parent (well great, great, great -- is three greats enough??) was a slave and no one else in the family tree is? Do they get some fraction of the reparations?

Heck, my family comes from largely English and German descent, I'll wager that someone in my family tree was a slave to someone else -- probably the Romans. Do I get something from Rome? What about all the Jews, they were slaves for years and years.

Should the son of the person who murdered my father, but was never arrested.. should this innocent son be put in jail for a crime his father committed? Should I seek vengence on him? No. It's absurd.

To be honest.. the notion of reparations when no one left alive who was a slave or who had slaves (as far as I know) smacks me of.. entitlement thinking. People want something for nothing. They want to say way back when someone in my family was wronged and someone today needs to make "make me whole" for it. To me, this is a pure logically fallacy. The person harmed is dead.. the person doing the harm is dead. They say what was done 100 years ago holds me back now.

I say, the problem is your thinking and you don't get a damn thing you don't go out and earn. Our history is rife with people born into abject poverty but end up rich.

It's now widely acknowledged that a large part of the Kenndy family fortune was gotten from illicent trade.. should they be stripped of all their money?

Oh... one more thing to think about -- who sold the slaves to the slavers? That's right.. other Africans sold the "slaves" to folks who shipped them across the ocean. No one much wants to talk about that...

If we are going to give reparations -- don't you think the folks torutred and killed by the Spanish Inquisition (well their families) deserve something? The families of the women burned at the stake or drownd in Salem?

Do you go back in time and try to "right" every wrong with money? In fact... how does money even factor into this?! How much money is a life worth? Are you sure we want to be putting a dollar value on life?