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OK, I'll admit that this isn't the first film one would necessarily go to to analyze life's lessons, but seriously, it is a good movie, and as it started, I was struck by the sheer precision of it. The presentation of images as the movie opens of the burning playgrounds is just devastatingly well done.

It's in times like these that I have a hard time just sitting in my chair. I see these great things that other people have created, and want desperately to create something myself. I want to put together something that didn't exist before I got here, and that will survive long after I'm gone. I want to do things that help all of us get to whatever our next level is. I want to move forward.

And that, class, brings us to the topic of today's lecture. Put simply, while I, and I think most people, want to simply move forward with their lives, the reparations movement is based on the opposite principle. It wishes to move backwards, dig out ancient problems that, at their core, deal with people who are long dead, and try to keep the argument going.

I've had a few people write to me so far about the questions that I've posed to them about how reparations, in their ideal plan, would work. I've meant to post them and will try to get to them sometime. However, one thing stands out about the responses I've gotten to date.

The very last question asks whether or not reparations payment will be a one-time event, or if this might recur in the future. So far, no one has given me a straight answer on this. This is telling because, in my opinion, this is the most important question on that page. It asks what I'm asking now.

It asks when this will be over. It asks when it is that there will no longer be any "debt" that anyone will try to claim. It asks when it is that we will be able to say that this is all finally over, we can consider the matter closed and we can all ... move forward.

I abhor fighting, but I also recognize that disagreement is a good and necessary thing. It's when we successfully work our way through them that we get to a lot of the really good things in life. So I'm all for sitting down with someone and saying "Hey: we can't get to something or somewhere until we work out this issue. Let's do that now."

With any sensible disagreement like this, there is a desire, and there is something that clearly interferes with it. The goal of the discussion then is to show this causal link, and figure out how to get past it. This is why, at least until this issue came along, people generally picked fights with people who were still alive, since it's rather difficult to get the dead to conform to your wishes.

Most importantly, because there is a goal to any disagreement, there is a concept that once that goal is reached, the disagreement is over with. That is why I ask the question that I do, and it's because I have yet to get an answer to it that I have to do this site.

The name of this web site is We Won't Pay, and I stand by that pledge. There is, however, one and only one possibility that I would entertain as being worthy to change my stance. It is this:

Come up with a dollar figure: almost anything payable will do. Then once payment is made, that's it. No more affirmative action. No more quotas. No more unequal admission policies, no more corporate shakedowns because some company doesn't have "enough" minorities. No more. After that point, as far as the federal government is concerned, racial problems in America are officially over.

If such a plan were suggested, and there were no loopholes, then I might, just might, consider changing my stance on this. Because in that case, there would be an end in sight.

But I honestly don't see that happening. In fact, I even read recently one column from someone who opposed reparations because he feared this very possibility ending, that an "obligation" would be ended. Well I have to apologize, but an ending is exactly what I seek here. I don't want this going on forever. I have other things that I want to be doing instead.

Yet if reparations are not opposed this will never end, and in fact I've seen it expressed that reparations are merely a "first step". Skipping the fact that such a statement ignores the social programs of the last 39 years, it makes me ask the question: "If this is the first step, what is the last?" What exactly will end this? After all, if 137 years passing since the end of slavery doesn't end this, what else could?

And that is why even if such a plan were devised that I probably wouldn't go for it anyway. Yes, it would be the end of that issue. But at the same time, if we open up one dead issue and try to assign blame over it, then we'll never turn back, at least not until something very seriously breaks. We'll continue to find past wrongs, try to find some ancestor to blame for it, some ancestor to call the "victim", and start an argument over who owes what to whom.

That is moving backwards, and that's not what I want out of life.

Mistakes are made by the score every single day, by everyone, affecting everyone. We generate more than enough problems to deal with in the present due to our own actions. There is simply no room to add to that errors of centuries gone by. They cannot be fixed beyond learning from their mistakes and not making them ourselves, and attempting to only gets us stuck in the past.

That's not where I want to be. I want to write new stories, invent new ideas, listen to new music ... I want to move forward. That's what I get enjoyment out of. This web site I'll get that kind of enjoyment out of if it gets us to the point where we realize the value of letting go of what we don't need.

In the meantime, please don't be under any impression that I'm doing this because I like it. I do this only because I've seen no evidence that this is going to end until someone stands up and says that it will. If I would just hear from anyone pushing for reparations who also understands that this cannot go on forever, then we'll have some hope of working this all out.