Anna Carroll's Blog
The AmericanWay? / Apr 8, 09:23 AM
The night before I left for spring break we had training. We watched a video about a town in the US where years ago all the African Americans were forced to leave overnight. Their land and property were basically stolen by the white people who took over. The video/documentary followed the family of one man who lost land in that town. The family was trying to figure out how the land was transferred to someone else and to see who owns it now. After watching that movie and discussing other issues of race and racism in our country I was also thinking about what should be done in situations like that. The rightful owner is dead and so is the actual person who stole it but their families are living. Do you make the current “owners” leave so the descendants of the original owner can have the land? I’m not sure. But the next morning I was flying home and reading the AmericanWay magazine and found a story about a man and his role in WWII. This man was a part of a team who worked to find stolen art work (usually stolen from Jewish families by Nazi soldiers) and return it to the rightful owner. The same idea as in the video, but this one was a little less life-disrupting to reconcile. What I want to share from all of this is a quote by the man in the article. He said, “the spoils of war do not belong to the victors.” As I was getting closer to my home I thought about how that is easy to say and do when we are talking about a painting that was stolen by and from people an ocean away. But what would it mean if our country truly believed this and took action on it like the team of Monuments Men from WWII? And how can I, as one person, respond in a godly way to the injustice of the legacy in our country of the spoils of war going to the victors?
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