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Occasionally vesting ourselves in garments of sackcloth and ashes for various moments of apology has its merit. There is nothing adverse in reiterating that the country has failed over time in some of its tumults and torments. As is natural with every evolving society, some periods laboured under a darkness and ignorance that has thankfully been dissipated. But darkness and ignorance is not a full remission for faults and crimes past. But all was not dark; nor everyone ignorant — there was always a tendency towards the light. How else did we get here?

Under the cascade of things done wrong, may we not ask were there not things done well, were there not acts of decency, kindliness and exceptional charity? Were there not those opposed to the mores of the day, leaders who wished better than was done and whose ideas outlived the days of prejudice and misery? If there were not, where would we find the Canada of today? So let us celebrate the good and kind with the same tenor of zeal we seem to be apologizing for when, in accident or by design, we wandered or fell from our better ways.

It would be well, too, not to take too much of a sense of superiority for our “now” to their “then.” Had we lived under the same past spirit there is no easy conclusion that we would have acted differently than those we now so suffusingly deplore. We are, in many cases better simply because it is “now.” Our now will have its own sins, count on it.

There were always more good than the bad, more better than worse, otherwise … ask again, how did we get here?

National Post