New Year. New Deal!
I wrote a blog posting on the New Deal, once - way back in 2011. You can click this link to review it. That blog posting centered on the idea that Roosevelt's New Deal represented "debt forgiveness, American style." I think we need another round of that!
I have been thinking quite a bit about various varieties of "forgiveness," and the place of forgiveness in politics, and this being a Sunday, I thought it might be good to refer you to Luke 23:34. I guess that reference provides a kind of extreme example of forgiveness, since Jesus clearly thought that forgiveness could be extended to just about the worst thing you might ever conjure or contemplate doing. If you are not already familiar with the verse I have mentioned, that is the verse that quotes Jesus saying, "Father, forgive them; they know not what they do," just as the Romans were getting ready to drive those great big nails right through his hands and feet.
What Jesus called for could be a pretty good model. That's what I have been thinking.
After our president oversaw the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, in order to bring him to the United States to face what might be a pretty well-justified criminal prosecution, a good friend and I started talking about forgiveness, and apology, and what role they should play in politics.
A pretty big role, is what we concluded. Not only do we all make mistakes (big ones; really significant ones), we also do bad things which really can't be called "mistakes." Sometimes, we do bad things intentionally!
During World War II, for instance, the United States government rounded up thousands of Japanese-American citizens and put them in concentration camps. Those who were rounded up weren't drug dealers or criminals, either, and it was that guy Roosevelt who did it. The Supreme Court signed off on the legality of doing that, too, with Justice William O. Douglas writing the opinion.
In this case, the United States Government did, later on, provide an official national apology to those impacted, and who were still alive at the time the government got around to that apology. That is the only example my friend and I could immediately think of in which the U.S. Government apologized, and took some remedial action, after realizing that it had acted badly. There may be other examples, too, but we weren't able to bring them to mind.
Might be a good precedent for the future, though! That's what we concluded.
We do make mistakes, and we do intentionally undertake actions that are just plain wrong, and we do these things both as individuals, and and collectively through our government. If we have been adversely affected by such an action, do we want to double down on recrimination and hatred and decide to hurt those who have hurt us? Some mode of forgiveness might be better.
You know, singing with those "better angels."
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