Researchers in Iowa subjected children to emotional abuse in the 1930s, in an attempt to prove a theory about stuttering. Almost seventy years later, the “children” sued. Surely, the state would be acting properly to voluntarily compensate the victims in some way. But a lawsuit seventy years later, when almost all the perpetrators and many of the victims are dead?
On a separate note, it looks like much of the money will go to the estates of some of the victims. This sort of thing always strikes me as odd; but for whatever experiences the victims had, good, bad, or indifferent, their children would have never existed. I’m sorry my ancestors were oppressed by the czars, but from a purely personal point of view, I benefited. It’s not simply that I got to grow up in the United States instead of Eastern Europe, is that I exist at all! Even though three of my grandparents lived under the czars’ rule, I would think it just about as strange to get a reparations check from the Russian government as from the Italians (for oppressing my ancestors 2,000 years ago) or the Egyptians (1,400 or so years before that).