Apologize For Slavey Poem by David Welch

I saw a man the other day
while I was watching my TV,
he angrily proclaimed we should,
"Apologize for slavery! "
Now this struck me as quite bizarre,
for we did this long, long ago,
we fought a war to kill that sin,
the evil of it all do know.
But somehow his words made me think,
though not along with his intentions,
other peoples' have not said, "Sorry, "
they should not go without mention.

The Muslim world, the most of all
has much to apologize for,
a million Europeans they
seized as slaves from ships and the shore.
Bad as that is, what is worse yet
was the Trans-Saharan slave trade,
one hundred twenty million souls
were scooped up by Arab slave raids.
To put this into perspective,
in the deep southern USA,
four hundred thousand slaves came in
during the colonial days.
Now there's black skin in America,
but not much in the Middle East,
since they castrated all the males,
and took off more than just testes…
nine out of ten would bleed to death,
but the slavers didn't much care,
Africa was full of infidels,
there would always be more flesh there.
Eighty percent of slaves taken
didn't last through the desert sands,
and two-thirds of them were women,
sold as concubines to any man.
And the Muslims kept doing this
for about fourteen hundred years,
it was only for two centuries
that Europe's interest did appear.
Now the west admits to all of this,
expresses regret all the time,
but rarely do you see such thoughts
arise from devout Muslim minds.
The Saudis only banned the trade
in the god-damned nineteen sixties!
In Sudan, Libya, Isis lands,
the practice exists presently!
It's not something the lefty types
want most people to realize,
yet why has nobody ever asked
the Muslim world to apologize?

But the problem with apologies
is where exactly do we start?
The Aztecs took thousands of slaves,
and ‘praised their gods' but cutting out hearts.
The Indians enslaved each other,
and settlers in the many wars,
but the Spanish enslaved them,
equal opportunity horror.
And the British enslaved the Irish,
three hundred thousand sent across seas,
often used when black slaves were not,
since they were comparably cheap.
The black slaves people had to buy
from squabbling African kings,
raided their foes for human cargo,
they profited off the damn thing!
China had slaves, and India too,
Ancient Romans, Egyptians, and Greece…
But of all these civilizations
which one set out to make it cease?

It wasn't the great peoples of the past
that fought hard to end this great pain,
the western word drove slavery's end,
no other cultures can make that claim.
Folks today have no perspective
of the evil we put in the dirt,
slavery was no exception,
it was long the norm on this earth.
And now, instead of celebrate
this huge and moral achievement,
we're demonized because back then
we had not yet set the precedent?
We're told we have to give folks cash,
that it is all ‘stolen money, '
when most of this country's great wealth
was born in states where labor was free?
Look at the south and at the north
way back during the civil war,
the slave states starved in slow collapse,
the free state out-built them and more.
When less than two percent of folks
ever claimed that they owned a slave,
to blame us all is asinine,
dishonors those who died to save
the country from this age-old sin,
those who ought to try a new path,
and insults all those alive right now
who think slavery worth our wrath.
But if you still want apologies
look at every one close to you,
their ancestors were slave-owners,
and guess what? Yours owned them too.