“Who’s sorry now ?”
Posted by Big John on September 17, 2008
Of all the silly ideas that are running around at the moment, one of the daftest is that of saying that you are sorry for the deeds of your forefathers to people who are long dead.
The Pope once made a public apology for The Inquisition and the treatment of poor old Galileo. Tony Blair said sorry for the slave trade: many Christians have expressed their regrets over The Crusades, and now the Church of England, led by the Arch-Druid, Arch-dipstick Archbishop of Canterbury says sorry to Charles Darwin for giving him a hard time 150 years ago.
I wonder how long it will be before Parliament apologizes to King Charles I for making him even shorter than he was, or to Joan of Arc for not calling the fire brigade ? Blimey ! If this idea went transatlantic the Native Americans could end up by apologising to Custer, and the Mexican government might even say sorry to Davey Crocket.
I feel sure that we will see more of this nonsense in the future. It’s a bit like “grief lite”, or “mourning sickness” as it is sometimes known; where people leave floral tributes and teddy bears etc. at the site of the death of people they did not know.
It may seem strange, but Charles Darwin, the greatest of non-believers, is buried in Westminster Abbey: so I think that the next time I am in the area I will pop in to see if someone has left a …
… fluffy toy monkey on his tomb.
Clay Atlas said
That is pretty silly. I agree.
Chris said
But don’t you see John, how important it is, especially for all the various victims, to get…CLOSURE?
Maybe in a couple of hundred years Britain’s rotten utility companies might apologise for raising their prices to astronomical levels (while they and the shareholders made obscene profits) back in the Noughties. Anyone fancy giving odds on that happening?
Betty said
Apologizing to people long dead is rampant here, too. And, we go a step further by apologizing to all of their relatives who are alive, too, i.e. “Sorry we enslaved your great, great grandpa…” Here in my town, the mayor and his minions took out a full page ad apologizine for the town being racist and swearing never to do it again. And, annually, we expect and demand that the Mormons in Utah apologize for an occurrence of a century ago called the ‘Mountain Meadows Massacre”, in which a group of Mormons, disguised as indians killed all the members of a covered wagon from here, traveling through their state. One mea culpa is never enough.
Ginnie said
The only “sorry” that I want to see is from the idiots in my country who put Bush back for a 2nd term in 2004. Boy, are we paying for that now…as is the rest of the world. So, I say to you all…I’m sorrier than you’ll ever know.
frisby said
I’m sorry about hiding those fish paste sandwiches under the heater in the living room when I was four!