Of course slavery can be redeemed-- all the things that happened were being redeemed, in a fashion, by the Black is Beautuful movement, by all involved in the civil rights movment, by whites who work on their own internalized racism.... redeeming those hurts is all you CAN do, since you can't forget them, can't ignore them, and so forth. You take the bad things and you make good things out of what went into them, you transform things... you shift the energy in a positive direction and reinforce the positive results. Anytime someone thinks differently about a thing, it's in the process of being redeemed.

Sheesh, Guest (and would you PLEASE take a name), I dunno what YOU think redemption means, but all bad things can be redeemed, and it is part of human nature to do so as much as it is to turn good things to a negative direction.

Sorry if this is a mystery to anyone else, and I am sure I am not articulating it effectively, but it isn't a mystery to me, it's part of how I live my life. I could give lots of examples of it in my life and those around me.

How about I give you one. It's an image I have in my mind of a recent experience. A black woman sitting among a sea of white faces, there because a friend she trusts brought her to one of our services. She happened to be there when I had a certain item planned. I thought for about a nanosecond about doing another number instead. (We swap stuff around all the time, for instance if dear old Mrs. Smith comes in we might swap in one of her special favorites.) I decided, just as fast, HELL, NO, or this IS a big fat lie we are doing here.

So picture this lady, hearing my introduction of an item such as I desribed. Beaming from ear to ear with tears in her eyes, to hear a white person tell the truth without her having to educate me about it, and loving the music for what it held for her, and loving being with us because we dared to bring up the topic and KNEW HOW TO DO IT.

It CAN be done. You wanna whine that it can't, instead of learn how. OK, you can stick with that, and you will be left behind with the PC brigade while I and others move forward into a higher way of dealing with this ugly stuff. What you been doing is good. There is MORE that can be done. You just are not seeing it. Lay back a little and watch the discussion for a bit and I bet you might see it. Or troll away, if that's your goal, but the rest of us mean serious business in our discussion, and it's already done a world of good that we had even this tiny amount of it.

~Susan