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Before I explain why an apology to our country's Native Americans would be useful, let me offer some praise to Sen. Sam Brownback, who has sponsored this effort in the U.S. Senate. I agree with him about precious little, but I give him credit for making persistent (and apparently genuine) efforts at racial reconciliation. Credit where credit is due.

I'm always a little surprised that very often, the same people who exhort us to take pride in our national history and heritage -- the folks who talk about the Founders most often -- are often (but not always) the same folks who tend to shun such efforts at apologies and reconciliation.

Once, a conservative friend of mine (a lawyer) and I were talking about the possibility of a national apology for slavery and Jim Crow. He wasn't a fan of the idea. "I didn't do anything" to apologize for he said, and it's true. But he was a big patriotic fan of Independence Day, and he didn't kick the British out of the colonies, either.

In a just world, I think, communal pride and communal responsibility are flip sides of the same coin. Not because we want to teach our to "hate America" or that "America is always wrong," because it isn't. But it is important to teach them that America isn't always right, either.

Why? Because we're sometimes blinded by what we see as our own good intentions. We end up taking actions around the world that might be tempered if we had a more complex, more tragic sense of our own history and its possibilities.

Apologies, as our Reznet friend above remninds us, can't undo some of the wrongs that earlier generations of Americans have committed. But a genuine apology isn't made only for the benefit of the recipient; it should mark the apologizer, as well, with a humility and desire to do better in the future.