The heart of progress...

Jon Alterman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, writes a really wonderful piece on the future of the Middle East in yesterday's Washington Post that I think gets to the heart of the current moment in Lebanon and Israel and how it figures in the larger vision of peace in the region...

Monumental Hope and Grinding Despair...The Washington Post...August 3, 2006

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/02/AR2006080200720.html

What becomes totally clear to me as I read this piece and as Melissa and I watched a Dateline NBC story on a remorseful murderer meeting the unforgiving sister of the man he murdered...

Is that forgiveness is the heart of progress...it defines it...it is a commitment to a brighter future...and a willingness to live in the moment, with the commitment to the future, and a coming to terms with the past...

Forgiveness is the heart of progress, democracy, freedom, humanity...all of our highest ideals...

Democracy, at its heart, is a classically liberal idea -- a governing idea based around individual freedom -- built on a foundation of forgiveness and looking forward to a brighter future...democracy never supposed that people would stop doing bad things to one another...democracy just assumes that people can resolve their issues with one another peacefully, with decency and humanity...in its' highest realization, all individuals, no matter who they are and no matter what they've done, are treated with decency and humanity and with a look toward their and our future...that is the long and proud tradition of democracies...a commitment to being more decent to all people, no matter how unpopular or unappreciated...it's ideals seem to forever leave its citizens disillusioned as we fail to realize them and we fail to come to terms with that perpetual reality of democracy and humanity...

But it is its ideals that animate it and keep its flame alive and efforts to realize them dynamic and thriving...and, as a consequence, the human spirit animated, alive, dynamic, and thriving...

And during this very dark time for democracies and non-democracies, alike, I become clearer about why I identify as a democrat and a classical liberal, drawing from the best ideas of liberals and conservatives to build a more thoughtful, constructive future built upon what is best of those ideas towards a future where the liberal democratic world only recognizes these partisan differences in the same way that it recognizes, today, the differences among religious partisans...different paths toward a better future built on universal values that can be better understood in the context of a broad commitment to a classically liberal democratic world...it is moderate in a classical sense...as Aeschylus wrote in Agamemnon:

"Zeus, who guided mortals to be wise,
has established his fixed law—
wisdom comes through suffering.
Trouble, with its memories of pain,
drips in our hearts as we try to sleep,
so men against their will
learn to practice moderation.
Favours come to us from gods
seated on their solemn thrones—
such grace is harsh and violent"

Or as Bobby Kennedy paraphrased in his impromtu eulogy for the Reverend Martin Luther King...

"Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God... Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."

What perpetually undermines progress in the Middle East and in the world, now and always, is people lost in the past...lost in history...lost in recrimination...

The reason why the greatest leaders in the world -- Jesus, Buddha, Ghandi, King, Desmond Tutu, and others -- have all taught forgiveness...is because only with a heart of forgiveness can people come to terms with the past...including the awful and bloody pasts in the Middle East...and see clear to a future not blinded by their recrimination...by the beams in their own eyes, as Jesus would say...

The reason why forgiveness is central to morality and humanity and to a truth and reconciliation process which is the future of settling age old and even recent and often beyond tragic wounds is because it is the only way out...is is the essence of progress...the ability to see light when darkness looms...the ability to come to terms with past injustices, forgive them, and build futures from visions of a world based on a common and bright future rather than a divided and painful past...

And the saddest, most tragic legacy of all for us to forgive...is how our own choices to stay stuck in our pain and fear and hate and recrimination...leads to so many of the world's most awful injustices...

Genocide, terrorism, imperialism and wars of aggression, civil war, Holocaust, murder...

Our worst legacies are typically a function of hearts that could not forgive...

And oppression, repression, aggression, control and our other legacies to follow those terrible crimes against humanity, as Desmond Tutu and Pablo Freire write so eloquently about...are all functions of our failures to forgive...

The genocide and repression and murder of one group justifies the Holocaust and oppression and aggression of another...

If that cycle is to end...it can only end with forgiveness...and letting go of the pain...for real...

That kind of courage is the only real progress that humanity can experience...because it is the essence of progress...everything else is living in the pain of the past...

Love,
Ben