Thank you, Rome

With damning talk of imperialists and stiff-collared Brits, I think it amiss if we forget to give credit where credit is due - however, I must leave that to those more learned than I in history's battles and imperialism and culture sharing and stiff-collared Brits. What I do recognize, though, without knowing much of the names or instances of imperialism gone good, is that it can go good: spreading the culture of one people group to the land of another is beneficial to the colonized if the introduced ideas improve the colonized peoples' lives. In short, rather I have a window than a hole of broken branches in my kitchen wall, and rather a kitchen than a fire pit!

People of Africa, India, Britain, and the Vatican City are united in that they are people, and consequently must solve the problems that naturally arise to people - for example, the problems of nourishing our bodies and finding protection against adverse weather. It is conceivable and even obvious that certain solutions to our human problems of nourishment and not having fur are better than other solutions - let the man living in a shack made of metal shingles say otherwise when winter comes. Thus, the culture that best answers those problems - that best provides warmth and health - is better, in this sense, than the one without the means to stay warm and sate hunger. When culture A shares its ideas and technology to a relatively less developed culture B, culture B benefits; when Britain develops the infrastructure and promotes liberal education in India, India benefits.

Whether such was the aim of Britain - to teach kids of Plato and Aristotle - when she went diamond-eyed atop the Arabian Sea is another matter and, as I prefaced, the dinner time speculations of another breed. However, years from now, a thousand years from now, will we still sigh of injustice in English colonies? I hear no such sighs from England against her former colonizer, Rome, but I do see many folded hands, many steeples, and hear many church bells.

And these affirm - thank you, Rome.