Forgiveness
Forgiveness is a concept not really amendable to any tidy little wrapped up conclusion, at least for me. We can easily be backed into a corner on this one. Recently, when a young white man murdered 8 blacks in a black church, some relatives and friends of the victims in court publicly forgave the young man for what he did. But is it anyone’s else’s prerogative to forgive except a victim? And what does forgiving really mean? Most people realize that the young man was more upset about what he was not getting out of life and was blaming what he was not getting on blacks getting more rights, more opportunities, and more consideration than he felt he was getting. Of course he is not the only one resenting what others get that they are not getting. This is happening all over. In some states, the fact that many union workers get good wages, good pensions, good health care, good number of vacation days, reasonable work hour weeks, etc has people voting to take all this away so the union workers can be brought down to the level of job insecurity, poor benefits, and poor salaries which more and more people are being reduced to. There was a time when the whole purpose of unions was to bring up the working conditions for workers.
But back to forgiveness. When John Gacy or any of the other mass murderers repent for what they did, or even if they don’t, should they be forgiven for their misguided acts of murder? Richard Speck could have, at some time found God, been saved, and consequently still gotten to Heaven. Really? What about a particular victim whose life had been such up to their death that they were heading straight to hell. Perhaps they too would have straightened out their lives, found God, been saved, and then gone up to Heaven. But Speck took that scenario away from them. So there we have it—Speck in Heaven, but a victim in Hell. That seems a tad strange.
We also realize that forgiving is a healthy mental exercise in a lot of cases. Failure to forgive others, in many cases, is just a drag on our own state of contentment. Tit for tat has on-going perpetual pitfalls. A life of revenge for all the negative tats we get in life ensures we are going to live an angry life. That seems a poor path to choose. So forgiveness has a genuine plus side.
Then there is this aspect: Doesn’t forgiveness for a major wrong sort of lessen how wrong the act was? Don’t we sometimes do things we shouldn’t because we realize, that with time, we will be forgiven by our parents, or a spouse or a friend or a jury? I doubt we would have broken curfew when young if we really thought we would be permanently out on the street on our own. Already we are all tangled up with this forgiveness concept.
When one spouse or lover of some sort has sex on the side with someone else, how does forgiveness fit into the picture? I suppose if it is the bozos next door that is their problem, who cares?But maybe it is our state senator or our minister, or the office secretary, or our President. And suppose the President did it right in the Oval Office while talking on the phone with a member of Congress? ‘Who cares is more difficult to apply here. So we end up, for all practical purposes, applying forgiveness depending on what is done and by whom. Nothing is simple or straightforward about forgiveness. I have known couples regarding which I kind of hope that some poor soul of the two is cheating on the side for their sake. That would seem to be the only saving perk for such a relationship.
We kind of feel real love is the basis for sex. But what about when some sexy young gal marries a middle-aged well-heeled fat cat? Is that just worth a chuckle, a wink, and a nod? Should there be a law against marrying for money or lifestyle? Does marrying for these reasons break the ‘sanctity of marriage’. Of course none of us has the vaguest idea of what sanctity of marriage really is or maybe a vague idea is all we have. If one can legally marry for money why can’t one legally have sex for money? Oops, we can, we can just marry the object of our sexual inclinations. Now I have lost track of who we are forgiving for what.
One thing favors forgiveness: time. As time passes we often have less harsh feelings about whatever the transgression was, at least if the person is disliked only for that particular transgression. Honschnivel is a good guy, he just murdered little Martha in a moment of insanity. He has paid his dues, let’s move on. That is another problem with this forgiveness concept. Good guys sometimes do bad things not just bad guys do bad things. I probably haven’t shot anyone only because until recently I was not permitted to pack a gun in public. Maybe some day in the future a chip can be implanted in our brain so that when a certain rage level is reached, the chip is activated and activates some kind of center so that instead of killing the person we compulsively make love to them. Oops, now what is the spouse suppose to do? In public no less. What the hell, it would make good theatre and prevent a murder.
Politicians and sport stars are the easiest to forgive over time. If we liked the politician or sport star we kind of want to go back to the good feelings we used to have about the person. It was more rewarding to personally like them than to personally refuse to forgive them. Favre is a perfect example. We were all led to believe he was such perfect role model in every respect. Media figures like Peter King of Sports Illustrated wrote article after article about what a perfect quarterback and person he really was. Well, he got the quarterback part right. Then came the retirement debacle and a different person emerged from the shadows and ole Brett had no reservations whatsoever about doing everything he could to teach the Packer organization and fans a lesson. He had zero loyalty to the fans or his former teammates. He was hell bent on playing for a rival team so he could maximally hurt the entire Packer world, including the fans who had been so loyal to him for so many years and an organization that had paid him millions upon millions of dollars for so many years. If that wasn’t enough the guy then exhibited rather startling behavior, including sending pics of his private part to some gal he wanted to sex. Of the many strategies to coax someone into bed with us, sending a picture of our private part seems a tad over the top unless it is part of a Laurel and Hardy sketch. Perhaps I am just annoyed no one sends me those kind of pics. Of course the sad reality is that most of us, when the big moment came for sex, would more likely say, “Do you mind if we turn the light off first?” The internet is not only a source of vast information, but also a vast number of naked bodies that look a lot sexier than ours does. At any rate, over time, most Packer fans forgave, and that forgiveness has little to do with what he knowingly did to them, but really their need to feel good about him once again. This is no minor point, we don’t, in many cases, forgive the person so much as we want to rid ourselves of feeling angry. We want the whole damn matter out of our memory pool, or at least push it to the shallow end.
Religious people have additional conundrums with forgiveness. In most religions those who do good things in life go to Heaven and those who do bad things in life go to Hell. It is assumed that God decides who goes to Heaven and who goes to Hell. So what good does it do a young man who kills someone, let’s say during a robbery, to be forgiven by relatives of the person killed? If something is wrong because of some passage in a religious scripture who does the penalizing? Before slavery was abolished by the Civil War, one side said scripture condoned slavery and the other side claimed scripture said slavery was wrong. That doesn’t say much for scripture as the measure of right and wrong. It is human nature to read into lengthy scriptures just about anything we want to believe. This is only an impression, but it does seem that hard core religious followers of any faith have a harder time forgiving others than those less faith-based in their religious beliefs.
Forgiveness is a way for us to move on, to rid ourselves of one more thing that spoils our contentment level. How can we be at a satisfactory contentment level if our bag of things not to forgive is too full? Forgiving is just another way to lower our own personal pain level. Fortunately for me, I have a peculiar advantage here. I forget a lot of things. So I am more likely to forget the past than to have any great need to forgive a past transgression. Maybe that is the best thing to do, forget about some past transgression but not forgive somebody for it. Favre was a great quarterback and I would not vote against him being in the Hall of Fame. But honor him as an exceptional person? That is a bit disingenuous. Then I would have to forgive myself for being so disingenuous. As a person he was a bit full of himself. Then again, were he not so full of himself, how far would he have gone as a football player? This ethics stuff can get really complicated.
Will Rodgers once said that if you shot 10 people in NYC at random, probably 8 out of ten deserved to be shot for something. This observation about people deserving to be shot may well apply to all of us when it comes to just how much contentment any of us have earned by the time we reach our terminational years. I know my own degree of contentment in my terminational years is tempered by an acute awareness that there were times in my life when I could have done more to help someone who needed someone to defend or help them; but instead, at some point I let go, and the person faltered and eventually failed. The truth is, there were times in my life where if someone had not stuck with me through a rough period, I might have faltered and eventually failed. Like anyone else, I bask in whatever modest successes I have had in life, and have been a survivor. Yet had I been a little stronger, a little braver, a little less self serving, there are others out there who maybe could have had been more successful and a survivor too. But they are dead now and never got where they were going. Thus, along with any personal successes, due in part to the help of others, I also failed by not helping enough, long enough, others who needed help. Contentment is not just based on personal success but also on to what extent we helped others achieve some success, especially those least fortunate. In the last analysis, this is ethics as the human species is capable of practicing. All humans have this trait to varying degrees, just as any other trait varies. It is good for us to forget the sins of others and move on, let it pass, etc., but humility demands we never forget that we haven’t always done enough sometimes to help others who needed our assistance, defense, or support at crucial times in their lives and we, for varied reasons, failed them. For all the good things in life we may have done, there will be enough things we failed to do for others to make us far less than the image we construct about our good things we did.
