Every single one of us, all of us — excepting none — walks upon the bones of the conquered, the tortured, the raped, the exterminated, the pillaged. All of us are descended from murderers, rapists, pedophiles and warmongers. Trace each and every one of us back far enough, and there will be ancestors who did things so horrific that there aren't words in any language to describe what they did. NONE of us is immune.
Knowing this, admitting this, we must all conclude that — regardless of whether there's a Nazi near-ancestor who gassed Jews, a distant American colonial settler who pushed an Indian tribe off her ancestral land, a Chinese father who raped his daughters, an Arab warrior who enslaved Africans or something else more horrible — we must not wander the halls of our homes wailing in agony over the sins of our ancestors BUT strive to be better than them. That is the lesson from history that all of us have to learn.
We can hold grudges against every grave offense and peccadillo, or we can leg go of a better past and work on making something better for our children.
--Dan Holliday