On forgiveness

As someone looking to do good in the world and be a decent human being, for real, I take forgiveness seriously.

Honestly, I've always been pretty clear that all the talk about the "unforgiveable" was one long excuse for why people do not take the virtue of forgiveness seriously enough. Clearly, there are very painful and difficult traumas that people face all over the world. And forgiveness is most certainly not easy work.

But it is a central virtue in Judeo-Christian and amongst more universal moral values for a reason.

And I never understood why people who did not take such a virtue seriously thought that they should be seriously listened to on important moral matters at all.

Because the truth is that they shouldn't.

This is such a great story, in that vein, on so many different levels.

Acts of Reconciliation

"A couple of weeks ago, the 29-year-old won the top documentary prize at the Student Academy Awards in Los Angeles for "As We Forgive," her film about reconciliation in Rwanda between survivors of the 1994 genocide and its perpetrators. Previous Student Oscar winners include Trey Parker, Bob Saget and Spike Lee.

Hinson's film, begun as an MFA thesis at American University, captures victims' meetings with their freed attackers. A decade after the extermination of one in eight Rwandans, after the Hutus turned on the Tutsis and even some of their own, the two tribes had to learn to live together. (The government has released more than 60,000 convicts connected to the genocide to ease prison overcrowding, according to the BBC.)

In the film we meet Rosaria, who pulls up the hem of her dress to reveal mounds of raised scar tissue running down her legs. Hacked and beaten during the genocide, she now lives in a house built for her by Saveri, the man who killed her sister. Another survivor, Chantale, who lost 30 family members, meets John, the stooped gangly man who killed her father. He can't face her; her eyes are embers. 'Remember all your old neighbors,' she says. Yet the next day, Chantale begins working to build a house for another ex-con who confessed his crimes.

For Hinson, it was proof that the 'transcendent filters through every aspect of life' and also that the world is really messed up...

The story ultimately appealed to Hinson for its reversal of the genre's cliches. Instead of being a tale of African ruin and our reluctance to help, it was a 'tremendously hopeful' picture of people learning to forgive in circumstances, she says, in which we never could. Hinson liked to believe she herself had learned something.

Two weeks after leaving Rwanda, in August 2006, the belief was tested. Her ex-fiance called, 4 1/2 years after their breakup. 'I feel kinda crazy,' she recalls him saying. 'And I still love you.'

Tom is the guy's name. Today he says of the breakup: 'I was just terrified of that level of commitment. I had come from a family that had kind of a bad marriage.'

He reconsiders.

'Ninety percent of it was me just being a very lame guy. A child in a man's body. Just a guy with a lot to learn.'

He visited her a month later. He had gone to a nondenominational seminary in those silent intervening years, studied to become a priest and all the while 'worked with a lot of trauma victims, a lot of people who were recovering from some pretty hard stuff, rape victims.'

'I dealt a lot in the language of forgiveness,' he adds.

Tom had kept the first ring all that time. 'I couldn't get rid of it. It was that weird kind of remote possibility sense that maybe if I ever get my act together...'

He gave it to her, and a second one. He bent down on one knee in the old-fashioned way and asked the question. Not of nuptials, not at first. There was a more pressing matter.

'I said, 'Laura, do you forgive me?' And she said, 'Yes.' And getting married was almost the denouement, the anticlimax.'

Today Tom Hinson and Laura Waters Hinson live in the District, where several documentary companies are based and where he pastors at two Anglican churches. Laura graduated from American last year, and the Student Oscar got her thinking about moving to Los Angeles. 'It depends on what Laura wants to do in her career,' says the man who gave and took away and gave again.

'Our marriage,' she says, 'is built on forgiveness.'"

Desmond Tutu is actually the person who helped me see this more clearly. His work on truth and reconciliation has been so critical in his home country of South Africa, but also all over the world in places as diverse as East Timor and Iraq, to recover, as peoples and as individuals, from the most traumatic circumstances that life has to offer. In fact, such reconciliation efforts are critical to a political resolution of the most serious conflict that America faces today, our war in Iraq.

Recognizing this very important part of the political landscape is one of the many things that persuaded me of the importance of the arguments, coverage, and understanding of the situation by the military historian I regard as the most significant during this Iraq War, Frederick Kagan. Kagan, better than other military historians and those covering the war, understands the politics of the situation in Iraq and the United States and the role that our military efforts play in creating a more sustainable political situation and the way that the politics, in Iraq, America, and around the world, shapes the success or failure of our military efforts in that war.

To not understand the role of reconciliation after major hostilities, especially genocide and ethnic, religious, and other warfare, is to misunderstand the whole enterprise in a very serious way. Kagan's understanding of the role of this process in the situation in Iraq, in substantial ways, not just giving it lip service, was an important reason, among many, convincing me that he was one of the wisest of those offering coverage and advice of the war.

If you have not read Frederick Kagan's exceptional analysis of the situation in Iraq, I highly recommend any of his work on the Weekly Standard website.

Including his most recent piece, which affirms for me my continued commitment to John McCain in the next Presidential election, despite the doubts that have been raised in my mind by some conservatives pressing for an attack on or invasion of Iran.

Voting for Commander in Chief

Much of the problem over the course of this war that President Bush, despite many of his and his apologists' defenses to the contrary, that he misled - which I believe he did - the American people about the reasons for going to war, genuine confidence that he had and that was warranted in those reasons being evidenced and valid, and the degree of seriousness that he gave to legitimate concerns about engaging this war. The President and his apologists can play games with this matter all they might wish. It will not make these matters go away.

And the truth is that what is different about my own thinking on this matter and a substantial number of the Presidents' many detractors- 70% of the American people, by the most recent poll I saw; I really don't give two shits how you try to spin that vis a vis Congress or any or any other evidence of the lack of trust that Americans have in their President, right now, people have got to face up - is that I have forgiven the President his and his Administrations' many, many transgressions. I have not forgotten them. I have no intentions of holding them over his head or trying to nail him for them in any way, at all. In fact, I very much admire the President's commitment to seeing us through to a decent resolution of the situation in Iraq, despite his many mistakes. And I very much care substantially more about what is happening on the ground than I do in grinding any axes whatsoever.

But pretending like this has not seriously undermined our efforts to keep Americans alive, to secure Iraqis, and to promote democracy in this country, makes it more difficult to make the case to the American people that sticking with this war is the right thing to do rather than making it easier.

The President is forgiveable for his mistakes. The 70% of the American people who supported this war, up front, without debating or engaging one another, enough, about how to do it in a way that accounted for the challenges that we have faced in ways that could very well have avoided the thousands of unnecessary deaths of Americans, Iraqis, and others killed in this conflict, each one of them a tragedy, are forgiveable. And, tragically, even these butchers in Rwanda and all over the world are forgiveable for their crimes, (though justice and safety of the Rwandan people, must clearly be served, as well).

They, we, are all forgiveable, because it is the only way to see more clearly our way to a more honest understanding of this conflict and its eventual resolution and of the world and ourselves amidst the emotional clutter that bitterness and petty and even not-so-petty grudges bring. Unresolved feelings, in this vein, do not just plague us with misery until they are resolved. They also blind our vision, as we try to see past the pain in our own hearts that we refuse to acknowledge and make peace with.

The failure to forgive and let go of such pain has been, along with the repressive and brutal activities and policies of those who hang onto such bitterness, the bane of humanity's long history. All of the most remarkable ugliness and evil in the world has been rationalized on this premise. And our way forward, in this war, in policy matters, generally, and in the world at large is and always has been premised on the emotional and intellectual freedom that genuine and honest forgiveness and observations of the world, at large, offers.

The denial of that fact does not make the failures of understanding or choices we make out of that failure of understanding go way. It does not make the tragedies we are responsible for go away. It does not make any of the pain we experience or inflict go way. It only makes us blind to them.

And for that fact - our own blindness to the realities of an often painful and scary world; seeing shadows instead of sunlight, as Plato once wrote - we can and must, as a matter of necessity, be forgiven.

Because it is the only honest way forward.

And the honest way forward is the only direction that we, humanity, will or can ever accept.

What it looks like when everything goes right

Something to celebrate this Independence Day.



This is the way it should work. We do our best. It doesn't always work out this way.

But this is what we shoot for, when we're honest in our work.

In a world of dishonest politics, warfare, counterterrorism, and just life, here's to playing honestly and keeping people alive.

Happy Independence Day.

Jesse Helms (1921-2008)

The Wall Street Journal has the most poignant and magnanimous of the obituaries I have read for the late Jesse Helms.

Jesse Helms

"Since he had to go sometime, Jesse Helms would have liked the idea of dying on July 4. The main cause of his life was defending liberty, especially against Soviet Communism, and so we wouldn't be surprised if he held out to make it to the early hours of our national holiday before dying yesterday at age 86.

Helms was best known as the five-term North Carolina Senator who drove liberals crazy before his retirement in 2002. But his most important role in history arguably took place in 1976, when he and political ally Tom Ellis helped to resurrect Ronald Reagan's fading run for President...

As a Senator, Helms was a forceful anti-Communist, resisting Nixon's detente of the 1970s and promoting U.S. support for dissidents behind the Iron Curtain and freedom fighters in Central America. In one episode in 1985, a 22-year-old Ukrainian sailor in the Soviet merchant marine jumped ship near New Orleans and tried to defect. In a shameful moment, the Reagan Administration returned him to Soviet control days before a U.S.-Soviet summit. Helms took up Miroslav Medvid's cause, and the Ukrainian became a priest after the fall of the Soviet empire. On a visit to the Senator's office 16 years later, Father Medvid credited Helms's public agitation with saving him from KGB retribution...

Helms was a conservative populist, and his campaigns were not above demagoguery. He was a protectionist, reflecting the textile interests in his state. He sometimes abused the Senate's advice and consent power against Presidential nominees – a habit the left has now adopted. His critics have a point that he sometimes exploited racial tensions in the post-1960s South, but Helms himself was no racist and his famous TV spot opposing racial preferences in employment in 1990 barely ran in North Carolina.

Like the political shift across the South and West in the last decades of the 20th century, Helms's political rise was a reaction to the collapse of liberal governance. He sought to reassert traditional American values, and above all to defend U.S. freedom against Soviet tyranny. Like Reagan, he saw more clearly than liberals the moral dimension of the Cold War. Like Reagan, he was a hero of that war."

Wonkette remembers Jesse Helms less generously than I might.

Jesse Helms Finally Dead

"We interrupt your Fourth of July with some Breaking News: Jesse Helms was apparently still alive, and now he’s dead, hooray! He was a sour troll and a bigot, and it’s a testament to every rotten thing about this country that for a quarter century, he was one of the most powerful people in American politics."

Here's the full obituary by Wonkette editor, Ken Layne.

Jesse Helms: American Garbage

And this from the Economist:

Jesse Helms

"JESSE HELMS, the former senator from North Carolina, died today, aged 86. Many will not miss the cantankerous, obstructionist and generally racist Mr Helms. He supported segregationist policies throughout his career, worked against civil rights legislation, filibustered a bill to mark Martin Luther King day as a holiday, was a leading supporter of South Africa's apartheid regime, and ran one of the more racially divisive campaign ads in political history. Yet he claimed not to be racist.

When Bill Clinton nominated an openly homosexual woman as assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1993, Mr Helms recoiled. 'I'm not going to put a lesbian in a position like that,' he said. 'If you want to call me a bigot, fine.' He was a bigot...

It's a shame Fox News wasn't around in his prime. His opposition to communism was also of the "with us or against us variety" that has defined policy in the war on terror. In 2005, Jerry Falwell's Liberty University opened the Jesse Helms School of Government. There, at least, he will be remembered fondly."

But this?

'It's just incredible that he would die on July 4th, the same day of the Declaration of Independence and the same day that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, and he certainly is a patriot in the mold of those great men,' said former North Carolina GOP Rep. Bill Cobey."

Whatever.

What I remember most about Jesse Helms, growing up as a young liberal, was that he was a bigot, on matters of race, homosexuality, AIDS, and all things that challenged his generally narrow worldview. He talked a big talk about freedom, but delivered much bitter, petty rhetoric and policy. Hardly the stuff of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

Jesse Helms was also a committed anti-Communist, a public U.N. skeptic, and sought some level of absolution from his vile past, I think, with his laudable, later-life efforts to raise money to alleviate the plague of AIDS in Africa.

Jesse and I shared a commitment to freedom, anti-Communism, and American sovereignty.

He also was the public figure in American political life that I most despised for much of my youth. Robert Byrd is a somewhat comparable figure on the left (with more notable ties to the Ku Klux Klan). But I' not sure anyone really matches the dubious stature of Jesse Helms. The idea that a man of Richard Lugar's integrity and thoughtfulness would have to play second-fiddle to someone like Jesse Helms on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has always seemed one of life's crueler ironies to me.

Jesse Helms was also a human being. A deeply flawed, mean-spirited, bigoted, bitter, petty human being. But a human being nonetheless. And someone who made some endeavors to make some amends in the final years of his life. He never said he was sorry. But he did try to make amends.

And, in the meantime, he is a man with friends and family and a man, like every man, who will be missed by those who loved him.

I have to say that the columns I have read that laud Helms' many accomplishments have seriously endeared me to him and his worthy causes, especially his stands for freedom and against Soviet Communism. I remember, as a young liberal, being very heartened and emailing many friends and family when I read that Jesse Helms had written a Washington Post editorial advocating a tripling of the budget to combat AIDS in Africa (a skepticism of which policy I understand better, today, sharing his ultimate compassion for such folks and believing in pragmatic government efforts to deal with a serious health crisis, but also wanting more of that money to come from private sources rather than forever from necessarily limited government coffers).

I was always someone who wanted to like and respect, Jesse Helms, even as I despised him, in my youth. The bigger-hearted reflections on the life and legacy of Jesse Helms have humbled me and my one-time contempt for this bigger-than-life American politician.

Rest in peace, Jesse Helms. You will be missed, all and all. May God and all of us have mercy on your soul.

And now for something completely different

And an oldie but a goodie.



Some fine reminders that Independence Day and the Declaration of Independence were about freedom, not power.

One day, I hope, I can share with my kids that America has, largely, lived up to her reason for being.

Freedom on the Fourth of July

If you have not read the Declaration of Independence, I recommend it.

The Declaration of Independence

We've read it in class several times, now. We talk about what it means. And despite my kids' limited interest and, more often than not, limited developed reading and academic abilities, I hope they recognize, at least someday, the courage that it took for a rag-tag bunch of colonials to take on the most powerful government and military in the world, to assert their right to govern themselves and their own lives.

Freedom is a precious thing. Even as we all take it for granted and romanticize power and countries and cultures that don't have the kind of freedom we enjoy in America. It is fundamental to everything we have and are, today. Even as we behave like it is responsible for all of our bad behavior and our misery. What freedom offers us, better, is the honest opportunity for us to be responsible for ourselves and our own behavior, good and bad. Even as we, like all peoples since the beginning of time, would often prefer to shirk such responsibility.

Independence. Of thought and conscience. Of expression and action. The freedom to govern ourselves and the direction of our lives.

That is what I celebrate today. And the first nation on earth to be conceived on the principles of freedom and democracy.

Ours' is a nation nor a people conceived in perfection, or on claims to that mantle. Ours' is a nation conceived on the premise of independence and self-governance, and the ability to improve with that commitment over time.

This is a day to reflect on those principles and to reflect on the liberal democratic values that make possible everything that we cherish, even as we persistently take them and their fruits for granted.

Today should be a day to remember that freedom is not something to be afraid of or treated as an afterthought. Freedom is fundamental to virtually everything good that free peoples lay claim to.

Today is a day to embrace that.