Everybody has a sad story.

 https://www.google.com/search?q=casablanca&es_sm=91&biw=1781&bih=1233&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAWoVChMIr9_RpKe_yAIVg6w-Ch27HArv#imgrc=1w1MCHKDnkN2xM%3A

That's what Rick told Ilsa in "Casablanca."  And it's the point I made 11 years ago in an op-ed published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press at one of those times when some African-American organizations were making their periodic plea for reparations for slavery.
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=574537 
The Jews have their Holocaust, the Cambodians their Killing Fields, the Russians their Gulags.  The Armenians can point a finger at the Turks.  Japanese-Americans can blame Earl Warren for their ancestors' internment during WWII; after all, he was the California governor who signed the order.  Should we, therefore, expunge Warren's name from our history books?

Of course, no one would suggest that.  It seems silly.  But a growing number of people don't seem to find it silly when, each October 12th, there are cries to tear down statues of Christopher Columbus... as if he were the equivalent of Stalin or Hitler.

The genocide of Native Americans is a tragedy and a crime.  No fair white man can deny that.  It is, as I suggest above, one of many notable tragedies in the tragic-comic history of the human race.

Rick, though he was referring to prostitutes, was right in a much broader sense.  Everybody has a sad story.  My father, whose birthday also fell in early October, was one of 16 children of Italian immigrants.  Only seven ever grew to adulthood.  What killed them?  I could name Spanish Flu and whooping cough and other maladies.  Or I can sum it up in a word: poverty.  That was my Old Man's sad story.  But he never dwelled on it.  He looked to the future and his hopes for his own two sons.  I like to think my brother Leo, a bank VP, and I have in our way fulfilled his dreams.

So... for those who want to expunge American history of Columbus and pay reparations to the descendants Indians and Africans, I say, let's get past these divisive notions.  Let's look to the future and try together to take on its daunting challenges.  If our country was built on blood, it was also built on rights and hopes and dreams.  Nursing history's sore teeth serves neither our nation nor ourselves.

Just get over it.