A recent letter in the PDN listed several circumstances in which our ancestors came to America: seeking freedom from peasantry, serfdom and slavery, arriving here as slaves from Africa, escaping famine and religious persecution and the Holocaust.
To borrow the classic phrase from Sesame Street, “One of these things is not like the others.”
Which one would you choose as not like the others?
Is it the one in which people did not come voluntarily?
Or is it the one in which people came not fleeing oppression but rather were brought to a country in which they would be oppressed for generations?
Or is it the one in which personal and economic freedom and the vote would be denied for centuries?
Or is it the circumstance that you would not choose for your own family?
Oh, wait, all of these choices only describe one circumstance, being brought here as slaves, the circumstance that the letter writer oh so casually slipped into the list, the circumstance that is not like the others.
There may be good reasons to oppose reparations, but to base one’s argument on a clearly false equivalency is neither clever nor persuasive.
Letter writer, surely you can come up with something better.
Elaine Baker
Port Angeles