If you do that, you are letting that bad event rule your life – even if you spend your life beating up people you blame for what happened to you. Another way is to sweep everything away under the carpet – but we have seen how all the stuff we swept under the carpet since 1980 has festered and broken out again.
So why not try facing our memories? Admit they happened and recognise that we can repair some of the damage. Nobody, not even a visiting Nigerian 'miracle' preacher, can give you back a murdered husband or a hand that was chopped off, but we can work together to create something a bit better than the mess we are in now.
That means we admit what happened and we admit who was responsible.
That won't help much if we can't forgive the perpetrators, and we can't do that unless they give some sign of acknowledging their guilt and wanting to repair the damage they did. That may not be so easy with our tangled history.
If your parents were farm workers who were driven away from the only home they knew in 2000 and were told to go back to 'their' country, which they had never seen, but after the 'war veterans' who did that had struggled to produce a decent crop, Mr. Justice X or retired Colonel Y was given the farm and threw all of them out, penniless on the roadside, who can compensate you now?
Fortunately, most people will not insist, like Shakespeare's Shylock, on getting their full pound of flesh. Most of us are able to accept when somebody is really trying to make amends. Nearly everyone is able to see that many of those who were bribed into acts of violence are also victims of the system, whether they were bribed with promises of land or with just enough intoxicants to make them forget ordinary human sympathy.
If the cold calculating men (and women) who sent them on the rampage and never got a drop of blood or even farmyard dirt on their own hands were to appear before us, we would demand more because their offence is greater and their power to put it right is greater.
Unfortunately, if we ever get a Truth and Reconciliation Commission those people will be safely in hiding, hopefully somewhere uncomfortable like North Korea, but they'll be out of our reach. Still, if we can reach out and forgive those who acted as their hands and their weapons, we can be assured that the big villains don't have the weapons to hurt us again.
When we have heard the stories of those who are ready to reconcile, we might even discover that guilt is very widely shared and none of us are entirely innocent.
Post published in: Opinions & Analysis