This is one of the most pressing issues of our times, for it applies not only to the recent quasi-scandals and Freudian slips of the tongue but to the need for individuals to accept the apologies of, and to forgive, those who abused them in childhood, and the need for victims of genocide and centuries of racism to move beyond the need for more than apology, the need for reparation and, sometimes, revenge.
Of course, there must be an apology, there must be repentance. The Catholic Church was right (it sometimes is) to insist that one must resolve to sin no more in order to have absolution. I once heard a priest say, in a sermon, that God’s grace was like a time-release capsule; it keeps absolving us, forgiving us, as we go on sinning and sinning. This seems to me not quite good enough. To accept an apology is not only to say I am willing to forget the past, but to say I trust you not to do this again in the future.
And if there is that apology, surely some important step forward has been made for all of us, a move that may short-circuit the chain-reaction of violence that the Greek tragedians knew so much about. Reparation here is as much a symbol as a real recompense: where property has been stolen fairly recently, as in the case of the Holocaust, reparation to the immediate heirs makes sense, but there is no adequate reparation for murder, or for ancient crimes. No amount of apologies or money can restore justice to the heirs of the slaves who died in torment in the plantations, or those Native Americans who lost not only their lands but the very basis of their lives. The reparation of affirmative action makes good sense for the sake of the future, but for the sake of the past it is far too little, far too late, and often serves to dull the edge of conscience.
The ever-present memory of past victimization poisons the minds of the victimizers as well as the victims, even when it is not used, as it is in Palestine, for instance, to justify the actions of past victims in victimizing others. To put it more positively, forgiveness is good both for those who have made serious mistakes in the past--Don Imus, Paul Wolfowitz, the Pope, and all the others, guilty of far more serious sins-- and for those who have bear the scars of those mistakes. Forgiveness is, like Shakespeare's idea of mercy, twice-blessed; it blesseth him (and her) that gives and him (and her) that takes. It is good for us to accept the apologies of public figures—oh, would that we had accepted Bill Clinton’s!
Someone (it sounds like Robert Frost but apparently it isn’t; Carl Sandburg, perhaps?) once said that it pays to have a good forgettery. Yes.
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