Act now, make apologies later

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Mary Fan

Congress votes to confer the Congressional Medal of Honor, the United States' highest civilian honor, on Rosa Parks, known the nation over for refusing to move to the back of the bus because of her black skin.

Former perpetrators of the crime of killing indigenous culture by forcing Native Americans into federal boarding schools finally admit to that great wrong amidst a media blitz of examination decades too late.

The deed is done, the culture is bled out, the generation that could not sit nor live side by side with blacks or Native Americans are edged out of power by advancing age. So the apologies can finally come, after the fact.

Maybe reality is thus. The people that strike out kicking and torching the first unlovely, uncouth thing they perceive do the deeds and move history along in the constant fit-and-start of heading forward at high speed. Only there is no forward and no backward. It's classic chaos and energy theory - the amount of pig-headedness, power and submission and petty hatreds remains constant. They just take different forms.

Increasing enlightenment and learning from history's lessons, are worse than clichés, they are fibs. So one may indeed say black is beautiful and the Native American culture is the most precious poetry that must be preserved, but it's gays and Muslims now, not that I have a problem with them, but they just weird me out, and I'd much rather see them sterilized on Will and Grace and The Simpsons then have one sidle alongside me at the supermarket.

Maybe the above is not immediately apparent to you. And I wouldn't blame you or me because, what's medal ceremonies and apologies and other outer trappings of consciousness if not to mask the fact that the level of wrong hasn't changed?

So ask yourself, on the bus in high school, or on Sun Tran today, just watching the people flash past on the streets, how often do you see that man in his coke-bottle glasses clutching his sign saying gays are an abomination? Yelling it to the passersby so used to him now they barely gawk. I will tell you now that if the man was holding a sign saying blacks and whites and Asians living side by side was an abomination to God and all that's wholesome and good, those coke-bottle glasses would long be splattered with rotten tomatoes and eggs, or maybe a rock. And you know, I, fervent free speech lover that I am, wouldn't mind casting the first rotten projectile. Though in the purely Biblical sense, I wouldn't be worthy nor would any of you good folks who'd do the same, because every time I drive down Central Avenue in Phoenix I see the man still standing there screaming against gays, untouched, and maybe feeling just that much more righteous because of that.

Only you and I know it's not God's angel that folded his wings over him, it's just that the sign is anti-gay, and not anti-Jew or anti-black, or even, in this border state where folks revealingly are in favor of beefed-up border patrols, anti-Hispanic.

So again, you have to ask, what really has changed?

Of course this question is meant to be examined in the long run. For in the short run, people, being brave and lovable and fiercely loving of life and liberty and such, will fight outmatched though they are, for that apology after the deed is done.

And ever obliging, the government and the formerly benighted people oblige. Like the savvy strangler, well-coached by his lawyer and gunning for life instead of the death penalty, gunning for a way to go on, we issue that formal apology. Checking, first, of course, to be sure all the cameras are on and the reporters scribbling. Which is still better, one supposes, then the hangdog villain who stands and says nothing at all.

But does it mean any more?