The futility of guilt

There is nothing quite so frustrating as talking to a guilty white liberal. I was at a dinner party recently. Our hostess, an attractive, smart, middle-aged divorcee, lived in an extremely upscale neighborhood in a 5,000+ square foot house complete with swimming pool and a view to die for. As these affairs are wont to do, the conversation among the guests turned to issues affecting society and on the top of our hostess’s list was the issue of native peoples.

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“I feel so badly for what we did to aboriginal people,” our hostess said. “And that we are continuing to treat them badly. It’s a travesty that we’ve shunted them off to reservations and deprived them of their way of life.” I asked if she had personally deprived the aboriginals in question of their traditional way of life in hopes of helping her to see the folly of her emotions, but didn’t get very far. There appears to be a place within the liberal brain that’s reserved for feeling guilt. It’s what causes some politicians to apologize to black people for slavery, even though that practice has been abolished in the West for over 150 years. Ditto for the people of Japanese descent who were interned during World War II when Japan entered the war. The problem is that no amount of agonized apologizing will ever change history and no amount of guilty hand wringing will make anyone whose ancestors were wronged feel better. I believe that guilty white liberals use the historical abuse of minorities as an emotional flagellant to bolster their self-esteem. It’s as if to say, “See how virtuous I am? I suffer for the sins of my forebears.” But I suspect that this pathology runs much deeper than the mere assuaging of superficial guilt over acts committed during others’ lifetimes. It is reflective of a deep inner feeling of unworthiness, an apology for one’s own good fortune and an acknowledgement that maybe that good fortune is undeserved. Personally, I find the practice of feeling personal guilt over wrongs perpetrated upon minorities decades or centuries ago embarrassing. What’s more. that guilt does a disservice to the descendants of those minorities in that assigning special consideration or treatment to them is still a form of isolation from the mainstream of current society. It’s one of the reason I have a huge problem with the Department of Indian Affairs, or whatever its current nom du jour may be. By doling out oodles of cash and special treatment to our aboriginal people we aren’t really helping them. On the contrary, we are making them dependent on sustenance from the nanny state’s teats. There’s no doubt that many of our aboriginal people live in complete squalor on remote reservations where items such as clean water are considered a luxury. But it isn’t for lack of trying that conditions are as bad as they are. Considering that the government of Canada doles out close to $10 billion per year to just under one million aboriginals, one would think that conditions on reservations would be better than they are. White liberal guilt has created the situation currently playing itself out in Caledonia, Ontario, where aboriginals are entering their third year of illegally occupying a real estate development, despite numerous court orders to have the lands cleared of protesters. We are encouraging them to break the law by not enforcing the law. White liberal guilt is probably the single biggest contributor to Toronto’s gun crime problem, as city politicians turn themselves into pretzels attempting to put the blame anywhere but on the young black males who are responsible for the majority of those crimes. White liberal guilt is responsible for political correctness and its destructive force on our society, as our affluent elites maintain that all cultures are the moral equivalent of our own. Dr. Dwayne Dyer, self-help guru and author of the best-selling book Your Erroneous Zones, maintains that feeling guilt is one of the most useless and destructive emotions we can have. An extra-strength version of that useless and destructive emotion is common among white liberals.