“You have to forgive people,” a friend of mine told me not long ago.
I took issue.
You don’t have to forgive anyone.
At no point, no matter what happens, are you required to forgive someone for what they’ve done.
I had literally just wrote that sentiment in a bit of trivial fiction, and I had meant it.
We got into it, and what they meant of course was that redemption has to be possible, and that is perhaps true.
If redemption isn’t possible, offered another friend, then people may as well commit suicide after their offense or faux pas: there is no incentive to change.
This isn’t wrong.
It has to be possible to forgive someone, but there is the key word: “possible.”
You can forgive people for any offense, but nobody is entitled to that forgiveness.
The Christian pastor Billy Graham died this past week, and while many American Christians remember him fondly, many in the LGBT+ community aren’t willing to forget his despicable claims that HIV/AIDS was divine punishment brought down on the gay community.
A claim that is utterly wretched.
Believing that people deserve to die because they’re LGBT+ is simply evil, and this is only the tip of a horrible homophobic iceberg when it comes to Billy Graham.
Someone told me he recanted the HIV/AIDS claim later, but I couldn’t find any evidence of that.
More to the point, I do not care if he did.
It doesn’t change the fact that for years Billy Graham used his pulpit, his fame, and national attention to advocate that gay people deserve to die.
We are still living in the fallout of this rhetoric, and likely will be for generations still.
Nobody has to forgive that.
Period.
Maybe (just maybe) if we could wind back the clocks and redo the last half of Billy Graham’s life, and say he spontaneously realized what exactly he was saying and spent just as much time championing LGBT rights as he had previously advocating death, maybe I could see my way to forgive him.
But even if that could happen, it would never completely erase the harm he did.
Even if I could forgive him in this miraculous 45 year do-over, I could never demand that others do the same.
Because (and say this with me now), “THAT IS NOT HOW FORGIVENESS WORKS.”
Forgiveness can’t be mandatory.
It’s not magical points you earn.
People chose to give it, or they don’t, and you have to live with that.
Fred Hesser 
One Star Soup Kitchen
I saw a one star review of a soup kitchen.
The existence of such a review says so much before I even read the content.
I didn’t question why the review existed, because of course it did. It is everything late capitalism promises in a nutshell. If everything is dialog between provider and consumer then naturally you can leave a review of a place like a soup kitchen.
My coworker, reading over my shoulder, chuckled and scoffed, “Can you believe that?”
I knew at once that he wasn’t laughing at the absurdity that you can leave a review of a soup kitchen, because (again) of course you can. He wasn’t remarking at the rating service, rather his incredulity was at the one star rating.
More capitalist thinking at play.
In context, the logic even seems sound. They’re poor, therefore they have nothing. They are availing themselves of social program, therefore my taxes are paying for it. They are eating on my dime, therefore they should be grateful for what they get.
My kneejerk reaction was to agree. Afterall, if you are in need of a soup kitchen to feed yourself or your family, surely it is better than the alternative by default.
This too is rooted in a capitalist line of thought.
If you can’t afford quality, you don’t deserve it.
The whole thing, from service to rating to my reaction, was within this tiny cross space in the Venn diagram of late stage capitalist thinking.
The modern American worldview in microcosm: a one star review of a soup kitchen.
I clicked on the review.
“My whole family got food poisoning. Go someplace else.”