Is it healthy, though, for societies to apologize for things that were done in different centuries and under different sets of beliefs? Politicians and others have been quick to make all sorts of apologies, even when it is difficult to see why they need feel any responsibility—or what good an apology would do. Pope John Paul II|The Pope apologized for the Crusades. The daughter of the United Kingdom|British Poets|poet John Betjeman apologized to a town near London for a line in one of his poems which read, “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough / It isn’t fit for humans now.” In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton apologized for Slavery in the United States|slavery and Tony Blair for the Irish potato famine. A descendant of the famous Elizabethan era|Elizabethan Piracy|freebooter and Atlantic slave trade|slaver Sir John Hawkins wore a T-shirt reading “so sorry” while he knelt in front of a crowd of locals in Gambia.