Kirk Douglas Apologises For Slavery

Kirk Douglas has apologised for slavery on his MySpace page. The page is, essentially, one big ad for his book Let's Face It - he even manages to plug the title into the apology - so I'm just going to quote him here. Any reactions in the comments section would be read with interest.

Let's face it -- the world is in a mess! The younger generation will inherit that mess, what can we do to help them? At 90 years of age, I'm living on "the house's money" and I don't intend to buy "green bananas." But what about the kids who will replace us? What can we do to help them?

I wrote a book that I dedicated to my grandchildren and the younger generation. They must know now that our country needs to take inventory. What causes suicide bombers, corruption in our top business officials, inefficient bureaucrats that can't deal with Katrina, deficits, schools, border patrols? Lots of problems.

I don't have any easy solutions to offer but I can suggest the goal that we must strive to reach -- a strong nation filled with caring citizens. Let's not try to spread democracy by military might, but by a good example.

Let's start by apologizing for our mistakes. First, we need an apology for slavery. Recently, the Jews celebrated the holiday, Passover. That commemorates the time when we were slaves in Egypt -- over 3,000 years ago.

It was a much shorter time ago that human beings were wrenched from their families and their lands, put into the hold of a ship and carried to a far off country to become slaves. Thousands of young Americans were killed in a war to end slavery, but did the Civil War end it? Cruelty and discrimination existed long after the war. The examples are too numerous to mention. It is less now, but it still exists.

I suggest that our offspring work to reach a national apology with that heinous error. The apology should be accompanied by a "Marshall Plan" in Africa. Let's try to help eliminate the poverty, starvation, genocide, AIDS that plagues the country where we captured our slaves.

Let the world see that we really care about others and have the courage to admit our mistakes.

I am encouraged to see that North Carolina is leading this apology. The State Senate expressed "regret for the practice of slavery and apologized for promoting legalized discrimination." Larry Shaw told his fellow senators, "When you dehumanize a human being it's one of the worst things you can do."

I hope our future citizens will follow up and lead to a national apology for all African-Americans. There must be a national museum of that period to remind the world of man's inhumanity to man.

Maybe 3,000 years from now, the African-Americans will celebrate a holiday, like Passover, to remind them that they were once slaves and their Moses, Martin Luther King Jr. helped to free them.