Forgiveness has become a kind of civic reflex, too often seen as a moral virtue, a necessary closure that allows societies and individuals to move forward. But what if forgiveness is a mechanism of erasure? What if, in rushing to forgive, we diminish the gravity of past atrocities and silence the lingering echoes of their consequences? Too often, forgiveness functions not as a pathway to healing but as a means of marginalizing memory, demeaning history’s weight, and excusing those who should remain accountable.
A recent New York Times article, No Use for Hatred, explored the generational forgetting of the My Lai massacre – a horrific episode of the Vietnam War in which American soldiers slaughtered hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians. The piece suggests that subsequent generations no longer feel the poison of its horror, nor do they fully grasp the casual cruelty with which it was enacted. This erosion of memory is, in part, the effect of a culture that encourages closure over confrontation, amnesia over accountability.
When we forgive too readily, we tacitly permit a kind of historical diminishment. Forgiveness often acts as an anesthetic, dulling the rawness of old wounds, making them easier to ignore or minimize. In this way, atrocities are softened, their urgency lost to time. Consider the broader cultural impulse to forgive—whether for colonial violence, racial injustices, or acts of genocide. The pressure to forgive often comes not from the victims but from those who wish to move past discomfort, to smooth over history’s jagged edges.
Forgiveness frequently serves the oppressor more than the oppressed. The expectation that victims should forgive – whether survivors of war crimes, systemic discrimination, or personal violence – places the burden of reconciliation on those most harmed. Meanwhile, perpetrators enjoy the privilege of unburdened conscience—freed from the reckoning that might otherwise demand justice.
Memory is a form of resistance. To refuse forgiveness is to insist that an atrocity remains alive in historical consciousness – unresolved, demanding accountability. This is not a plea for bitterness, but a defense of the ethical act of remembering. If you live in a country built on both dream and denial, then memory is your inheritance. What you choose to do with it defines what kind of citizen you are—what kind of future you’re willing to accept.
The horror of My Lai – and countless other moments of sanctioned cruelty – must not be reduced to an unfortunate historical footnote. We must reject the seductive call to forgive and forget. Instead, commit to remembering, to bearing witness, and to ensuring such crimes are neither diminished nor repeated.
An elderly friend once shared with me that forgetfulness as he aged (and the attendant clichés around it) wasn’t what caused him the most pain – it was remembering. Recollections of past traumas, mistakes, missed opportunities, youthful explorations, and friendships with those now gone evoked a bittersweet ache. In The New York Times article, children happily play on grounds that once held riddled bodies – bodies shot in the fog of war, casualties without mindful explanation, mere human beings caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. The past lingers beneath the surface, even as it is paved over with new narratives, softened by time but never truly erased.
The normalization of ugliness and injustice compels us to relinquish our rightful anger. Today, “normalization” has become a political buzzword – often an indictment of journalistic complacency and the detachment it fosters. The term, seemingly reborn, spread rapidly in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Two words dominated the discourse: the verb “normalize” and its noun counterpart, “normalization.”
Forgiveness has become another form of normalization, echoing the same passive logic as excuses like “Boys will be boys” or “Elections have consequences.” While these phrases contain a kernel of truth, they serve to stifle justified anger, urging resignation over resistance. These grotesque aphorisms imply our outrage is futile, that we must accept injustice as inevitable. Beneath this reasoning lies an insidious subtext: let go of your anger, lest you become the monster you despise. This is often the response given to abuse survivors seeking justice – a demand to relinquish their pain in favor of some imagined moral high ground.
In his book Another Country, James Baldwin wrote, “We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them—to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it. That way, you can begin to forgive yourself.” Baldwin’s wisdom does not advocate forgetting but carrying the past’s ugliness alongside us, allowing it to shape us. Forgiveness is not erasure but reckoning. Children may laugh, unaware of what lies beneath their feet – but history is rooted in the ground they walk on, an architecture that must be preserved rather than abandoned to the fog of forgetfulness.
When I hear a television pundit use the word “normalize,” I disengage. I ask whether I should pour a drink or buy a flamethrower. I do neither. But the question matters, as does my rage. In another time, the punk band The Clash posed the musical question:
When they kick at your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun?
We cannot afford to be conned into passivity. Let the blood boil and propel. This is not a call for reckless retribution, but neither is it a plea for docile acceptance. Cultural amnesia and enforced forgetfulness are not precursors to genuine reconciliation. Closure is a dirty lie. It foregoes the promise of understanding the totality of our shared history. That is the foundation of Critical Race Theory – the promise of a more inclusive society in government, education, business, and community life. Without this progress – without a willingness to confront the past truthfully – forgiveness remains unearned. A delusion, not a resolution.
The real question remains: how complicit are we willing to be in our own erasure?