Forgiving in Today's World

Hello, and welcome back. For those of you who are new to the campus, welcome for the first time. I hope all had a wonderful summer filled with joy and learning. My own summer was filled with some joy but also a lot of learning and reflection.

Welcome back from a summer, which I hope found you well rested in that hibernation state called "the pool." Or perhaps from the respite of the mountains. Maybe you found time to build a sand castle at the beach, or bury an unruly brother in the sand. I imagine some of you flew in planes, had family gatherings, attended church potlucks. Others of you probably smoked pot, drank, had a less "socially acceptable" summer, but one of clear joy and relaxation for you. Equally as important, even if not as traditional.

Summer in the academic world is a time of rest, or at least a homework hiatus. How you do that varies but is as important regardless of how others view your methods. As a person who enjoys the use of my mind, I spent this summer finding myself thinking even if I wanted to rest my mind. Granted, I was not doing calculus but paying attention to the news. It was a rough summer. Many people died naturally and unnaturally. There were conflicts in Israel Proper, The Gaza Strip, The West Bank and Lebanon which hounded the news. There were conflicts in Sudan and Nigeria which were less widely reported.There is injustice all over.

There are injustices perpetrated every day by each of us which go unreported for our societally unimportant existences. Religious hatred against minority sexual orientations, personal hatred against those who have wronged us or who we have perceived to have wronged us. Political hatred against other ethnicities, highlighted perhaps best by Virginia's hopefully soon-to-be-ousted bigot Senator George Allen. And now I have done it myself, allowed my distaste for a person's revolting actions and words to create ill will in me.

By no means is this the first or greatest of my personal errors in the area, only my most recent. By the time you have completed this article I am sure one of the two of us will have felt some form of ill will towards another. It is clearly natural. How do we deal with it? This seems a subjective issue and one I do not have the final answer on. It does seem to me there is an element of something greater than forgiveness is required.

In the wake of 9/11 we hear a term "Forgive but never forget" which most likely derived from the John F. Kennedy quote: "Forgive your enemies but never forget their names." The idea of forgive but never forget itself begets a problem of vengeance. As long as you have a name, or the son of a name to place your pain you do not have to move beyond it. There must instead be a form of forgiving which does forget the name but doesn't forget the action. Forgiveness, true forgiveness, is the opening up of oneself to a similar level of vulnerability which had been exploited before.

Is this wise? Not when looked at on the surface. In today's context we just passed more American Deaths in Iraq than died in 9/11 has the traditional forgive-but-never-forget-their-names-and-blow-up-their-homes-in-retaliation-method-worked? (As of Sep. 9, 2006, 3,015 Americans have died in Iraq while high ends of inconclusive 9/11 figures report around 3,000) I'm not saying a less retributive method works better. I'm asking if 6,000+ Americans and tens of thousands of dead Iraqi and Afghani citizens in a more unstable world is better than 3,000 dead Americans, with a more stable solution to ideological differences, all without the war. Maybe you can't talk to "terrorists" like humans, but I'd bet you can talk to "humans" like "humans," even if you want to call them "terrorists," like I want to call Allen "bigot."