Making Good on Our High Moral Values

Re “History in Your Face” (Feb. 9) (about Brian Breye’s Museum in Black, exhibiting slave shackles and other memorabilia of slavery and racism) and the numerous articles about the impeachment of the president:

One of the major rallying cries of the Republican Congress was that to leave the president in office would somehow take away from this country’s “high moral values.” My question is: Where can we point in the past to find these “high moral values?” Surely not to the founding fathers, who for more than 200 years owned other human beings and amassed great fortunes from their enslavement.

Nor can we cite the great western expansion/Manifest Destiny when our official government policy was genocide of the American Indian.

I love my country but I’m not a hypocrite. I’m a white man who would like to see an official apology by our government to our fellow citizens who are Native Americans and to those of African descent. I also would like to see Mr. Breye’s museum expanded a thousandfold and put on the mall next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Then our claims of “high moral ground” will have some basis in fact.

DOUG EDGE

Pacific Palisades