you MUST go to Quebec City, specifically Old Quebec. there’s the castle, the dining, the view! and there’s a church there, in a square about halfway up the hill, where the iconic finale to Catch Me If You Can was filmed, and it looks even more beautiful in person! and when you go to that church, a ways from it is a very famous mural painted by my great great aunt depicting famous French Canadians in Quebec’s history. it’s gorgeous! well worth the trip! to say nothing of the countryside, the people, all of it!

and by all means, talk to someone about these thoughts. the more you try and repress them out of shame, the worse they intrude, and that isn’t healthy for anyone. it’s better to voice them and accept that they are an unwelcome occurrence then to bury them until you can’t think of anything else.

twice!

good point about the slaves themselves not being complicit; it was implied, but i did not make that clear. and by no means am i attempting to spread the blame so as to dampen the severity of the atrocity; every willing participant is just as guilty and should be just as judged to the same standard, and harshly, because we are discussing the buying and selling of human beings.

consider also; the destruction of artifacts and historical sites in Iraq during the invasion by ISIS. so much lost, perhaps forever, and these artifacts and sites resided in a region of relative instability in the world. they would be arguably safer in a european or american museum. this was of such concern in the early stages of the War in Iraq (2003) that entire platoons were dispatched alongside archeologists to try and recover some priceless pieces of history from destruction in the at-risk national museum in Baghdad, and the movie Monuments Men was made regarding this practice in WW2.
so… i believe, wholeheartedly, that the nation of origin should have say, ownership, and control over the artifacts. but… it’s complicated and imperfect. would such a well-intentioned policy result in the destruction of artifacts? or is that a risk worth taking?

my second point is stability; many of the nations that such artifacts are pulled from don’t have museums, or are so unstable due to war or natural disasters that these artifacts, as well as what can be gleaned from them, could be lost forever. an example here; a nearly full fossilized skeleton of the Spinosaurus existed in a German museum in Munich, until WW2… and was so utterly destroyed by bombing, along with all records of its discovery, what information was pulled from it, it’s restoration, etc. and that was one specific incident in German that almost erased one of the most interesting extinct species form record forever.

ahhh, gotcha. i thought it looked like Maslow’s pyramid but i didn’t know if it was referencing a specific epic dude/dudette.

i’ve seen this guys twitter, he comes off as an aggressively self-hating pushover. kinda sad, tbh.