Reconciliation Week...

So this week, Australia has been celebrating a thing known as "Reconciliation Week"; a week-long commemoration of all the bad things that our ancestors have ever done to the Aboriginal people past and present of Australia, essentially culminating in the total acceptance that although the majority of Caucasian people living in Australia had nothing to do with any mistreating of any Aboriginal still alive, it is still just as much our fault.
Now, I'm very intolerant as a person; I would never be a good teacher or educator. However I think the entire racism thing is more about decency and having a slight apathetic opinion, rather than tolerance.
Tolerance implies in most forms, that although you don't really agree/accept a certain situation, you still live with it, or "tolerate" it. Which I think is almost as bad as all-out racial supremacy. To be apathetic towards another person, regardless of their race or gender, is to truly treat them the exact same as you would everyone else, and at the end of the day the eradication of racism should be the ignorance of our differences and only really concentrating on the fact that we're all sentient beings living on this planet, and we all collectively refer to ourselves as human. To highlight other's differences and then say you "tolerate" or "accept" them is to say that they're not the same as you, which is then to imply exclusion, if not inferiority.

But I really can't understand the logical idea behind reconciliation week as not only an event, but an entire week.
I can see the politically correct nature of the government, and I can see that things like the stolen generation, the treating of Aboriginals as animals, the "Terra Nullius" name of Australia, and the idea of out-breeding Aboriginal genes in an effort to eradicate the "species" in only about four or five generations, is very wrong.
And I don't  doubt that. And this is why I fully supported and respected Kevin Rudd and his efforts to apologize to the victims of such efforts at the hands of our ancestors, when he made the thirty or so minute "sorry" speech back in 2008. It really did seem like a turning point for Australia, considering John Howard's "10 Point Plan" (which, and although I'm not complaining, really was a "deal with it" approach to the situation) and its connotations.

Now although I fully supported the sorry speech, and I fully respect Kevin Rudd for making it, I don't believe at all that it should be a recurring event in our national calendar.
This isn't the best metaphor, but it fits the job in as good a way as I could think of.
Think, if I had a friend who's name is Lance. Now when Lance and I were 20, I stole a considerable amount of money from him. Although his money was taken and never returned, and he suffered many years of hardship because of which, he eventually continued with his life, and had a wife and children. After a while, when the damage has been done and Lance is a progressive member of society, I apologize to him sincerely.
Now imagine if every year, I explained to Lance and his family about that time I stole a considerable sum of money from him, and then express my pseudo-apology for it, making my own family participate in the apology, even though they weren't in my life at the time of the incident, while emphasizing the act more than the resolution at every instance.
The only logical thing I can think of is that Lance will never truly be allowed to forget that event. His wife and their children, who weren't present during the event, will grow up with the belief that me and my family aren't to be trusted, because if they could be, why would they be apologizing about something as serious as theft?

Now the plot holes in that are huge, but still in keeping with the original story. Quite literally, Caucasian Australians would go into Aboriginal villages/homes/settlements and abduct children. They'd take them to church-run education precincts where they'd be taught English, given a new name and a new identity, and forced to forget about their previous life and their family.

And this is exactly why I don't agree with re-hashing this and having a constant need to have the nation, or at least the nation's leaders on behalf of the nation, apologize. I can imagine thirty or forty years down the line, still having the reconciliation week in full effect; even though all the people who have been directly affected by the stolen generation and similar crimes of human indecency, have passed away; similarly, those who committed the crimes have themselves passed away.
It will be bringing up a new generation of Aboriginal people who (and this is a general assumption, and I in no way make this out to be fact) although could achieve great things, are instead too preoccupied with what happened to their ancestors decades ago, and drawing links between their ancestors and what happened to them, and why they live the way they do now.

It's not right, and it's not fair.
As Morgan Freeman said in his role of Nelson Mandela: "Reconciliation starts here. Forgiveness starts here too."

"Sneaky Relationships" As Recommended By My Girlfriend

Alright, so I got asked to write an article first on homosexuality, then on "sneaky relationships".
That's pretty vague but I'm going to have a crack at a relationship, probably a teenage or pre-age of majority relationship, which involves the parents of one or both parties being oblivious to the relationship.
Why parents? Because by the time you get to an age where you think relationships are important (or worthwhile at all), you should have no problems with telling people about who you're being sexually frustrated with. Right?

Anyway, once the topic was explained as "hiding it from everyone", I excluded the word "everyone" and replaced it with "their parents", because if you're afraid of what your friends think about your choice in women, kill yourself.

After much consideration absolutely no time or preparation at all, I decided that I didn't want to talk about the relationships as much as I wanted to talk about parents who indoctrinate their children, and deny any sort of social maturity until their age of majority (and in some cases, until they move out of home and can support themselves).
Their argument is "while you live under this roof", or "it's my house, it's my rules". But we're not talking about a fucking house; we're talking about an imperative part of social growth and maturity within humans. The entire argument that you must obey the parent because you happen to live with them is fair in some aspects (especially when it comes to things such as drug abuse and underage drinking/smoking), but totally ludicrous in this context.

Now yeah, some parents know better than their children, and I agree that it is important to instill important life lessons into your children at an early age, but sheltering them is just going to make them crash socially once they're not "under your wing". This entire idea of "not allowing your kids to progress socially because you're afraid they'll make mistakes" card is overdone and outdated; after all, if you haven't taught your teenager about safe sex, appropriate alcohol consumption, and that DRUGS ARE BAD LOL, then by the time they're 16 and legally allowed to have sex (by Australian federal law), you're never going to teach them.
As for relationships: why does it have to be sexual? How can the parents fully and aptly assume that if they start holding hands, it means that he's sticking it in? And more importantly, how have we gotten to a stage in our society where we'll let 13 year old kids watch R rated movies with horrific violence, but shudder in fear at the slightest idea of a natural human physical and biological interaction?