When I was little a kid said to me, "Don't say sorry, just don't do it again."
How right he was. Saying "Sorry" is actually a pretty cheap thing most of the time. When I was teaching some 'students' would turn up late for lessons and mumble a "Sorry I'm late" as they sauntered to their seat. They weren't sorry at all: it was just something you said to acknowledge their tardiness, and guess what? Yes, they'd be late the next time too and once more they would 'apologise' and carry on as if nothing had happened.
Because, to be honest, nothing had happened.
"But I said I'm sorry," the gormless 'student' would complain if I pointed out it wasn't a real heartfelt, 'I won't do it again' statement. It was a gesture, that was all, and having gestured they could get on with doing bugger-all in the lesson.
So the word sorry is devalued by overuse. We have people emerging from courts, for example, moaning that the person in the dock didn't say sorry for something they did when they shouldn't. The words were missing when the perp was sent down, and annoyance has to be vented. "if only he had said he was sorry!"
Well, a few idle words won't make anything right that has been wronged. A few words, soon said, quickly forgotten. I would rather a perp didn't do it again than just say sorry as if that magically makes it all okay.
Though we live in an age of many things, interestingly it is an age dominated by apologies. We apologise, or expected to say sorry, for things either real or imagined. We may have to apologise for that which was not anything to do with us. Our forebears did it, so let's say sorry. We are expected to weep with sorrow at what our ancestors did and perhaps never actually did. However Once It Has Been Decided It Was So then apologies must flow.
And yet, the funny thing is the apologies don't actually seem to make one iota of difference. You can say sorry until you are blue in the face and things broken aren't fixed. It's something to do with actions and not words, however impressive or heartfelt they may sound.
But the worst thing about this is... It doesn't really matter.
All sorts of peoples and nations have apologised for some war or 'crime' that happened years before, but that isn't the end of it. The reaction of those thus apologised to is to go on being angry or dissatisfied.
"I wanted an apology and it isn't enough!" Seems to be the reaction.
Take slavery. Utterly reprehensible it may be, but sadly it happened. It happened in a different age and was done by people long since dead, who were duly stopped by legislation passed by white governments. You would think therefore it time to move on. But there are people who demand an apology for events of two hundred years before, say, and then are still unhappy.
"We need to put right that all slavery and the white slavers did wrong," comes the cry from the ancestors of the slaves having listened to the apologies. But it often turns out, those apologies that they demanded and got apparently didn't soothe the fevered brow. The fact that white people said sorry for enslaving black people (or rather, buying slaves from black and brown people who made black people slaves in the first place) was of no value.
The apologies from whites was pointless because there are some blacks who still aren't happy about the whole thing.
Anyway, nothing can be done and sorry I raised this point. I promise I won't do it again.
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