[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 97 (Monday, July 24, 2000)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1307-E1308]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  HOW FORGIVENESS CAN SHAPE OUR FUTURE

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. LOIS CAPPS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                         Monday, July 24, 2000

  Mrs. CAPPS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to a valued 
mentor, a key advisor, and dear friend who recently wrote an article 
which appeared in the Santa Barbara News-Press, entitled ``How 
Forgiveness Can Shape Our Future.''
  In addition to being one of Santa Barbara's outstanding public 
citizens, Mr. Frank K. Kelly has been a journalist, a speech writer for 
President Truman, Assistant to the Senate Majority Leader, Vice 
President of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, and 
Vice President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
  Mr. Speaker, I commend the following article to my colleagues and ask 
them to join me in honoring the career and contributions of Mr. Frank 
K. Kelly.

                  How Forgiveness Can Shape Our Future

                             Frank K. Kelly

       Human beings have tremendous capacities to be creative and 
     compassionate, cooperative and generous--and shocking 
     abilities to inflict terrible pain upon one another.
       Is it possible for us to face the monstrous atrocities in 
     the human record and yet to participate in the process of 
     reconciliation, to accept the awful truth about ourselves and 
     others and still move into the future with strong hope?
       In a heart-wrenching report recently published, the man who 
     headed South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission 
     wrestles with these questions and offers us reasons for 
     continuing to believe in the possibilities of spiritual 
     growth for the human family. Archbishop Desmond Tutu regards 
     the transformation of South Africa from a state of oppression 
     to a state of cooperation as an amazing example of human 
     potentiality responding to a surge of God's grace.
       In his new book, Tutu says: ``South Africans managed an 
     extraordinary, reasonably peaceful transition from the 
     awfulness of oppression to the relative stability of 
     democracy. They confounded everyone by their novel manner of 
     dealing with a horrendous past.''
       Many people had expected a blood bath involving the deaths 
     of thousands of human beings would occur when Nelson Mandela 
     took office as the first black president of South Africa. But 
     that had not happened.
       ``There was this remarkable Truth and Reconciliation 
     Commission to which victims expressed their willingness to 
     forgive and perpetrators told their stories of sordid 
     atrocities while also asking for forgiveness from those they 
     had wronged so grievously,'' Tutu declares. ``The world could 
     not quite believe what it was seeing.''
       Tutu was asked to speak in Ireland in 1998, to explain in a 
     strife-torn country how South Africa had become a peaceful 
     country without bursts of revengeful violence. The South 
     African experience had indicated that ``almost no situation 
     could be said to be devoid of hope.''
       Describing what had happened in his country, Tutu urged the 
     Irish not to become despondent over the obstacles which were 
     preventing the implementation of the agreement reached by the 
     competing factions.
       ``In South Africa it had often felt as if we were on a 
     roller-coaster ride,'' Tutu said. ``At one moment we would 
     experience the most wonderful joy, euphoria even, at some new 
     and crucial initiative. We would see the promised land of 
     peace and justice around the corner. Then, just when we 
     thought we had entered the last lap, something ghastly would 
     happen--a massacre, a deadlock, brinkmanship of some kind--
     and we would be scraping the bottom of despair and 
     despondency. I told them this was normal.''
       In addition to offering encouragement to the peacemakers in 
     Ireland, Tutu has

[[Page E1308]]

     brought messages of hope to other areas of the world torn by 
     violence. He has reminded people of what has to be done:
       ``At the end of their conflicts, the warring groups in 
     Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the Middle East, Sri Lanka, 
     Burma, Afghanistan, Angola, the Sudan, the two Congos, and 
     elsewhere are going to have to sit down together to determine 
     just how they will be able to live together amicably, how 
     they might have a shared future devoid of strife, given the 
     bloody past that they have recently lived through.''
       Based on the experience of South Africa, Tutu is convinced 
     that forgiveness is a key element in creating a lasting peace 
     and releasing the positive energy necessary to build a better 
     future for humanity. He believes that true reconciliation of 
     enemies is impossible without the new perspectives brought 
     about by deep forgiveness.
       ``Forgiving and being reconciled are not about pretending 
     that things are other than they are,'' Tutu acknowledges. 
     ``True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the 
     pain, the degradation . . . It is a risky undertaking but in 
     the end it is worthwhile, because in the end dealing with the 
     real situation helps to bring real healing.''
       With the other members of the South African commission, 
     Tutu was frequently astonished at ``the extraordinary 
     magnanimity that so many of the victims exhibited.'' There 
     were some persons who admitted that they could not forgive 
     the hardships inflicted on them, which demonstrated the fact 
     that ``forgiveness was neither cheap nor easy.''
       ``In forgiving, people are not being asked to forget,'' 
     Tutu declares. ``On the contrary, it is important to 
     remember, so that we should not let such atrocities happen 
     again. Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done 
     . . . It involves trying to understand the perpetrators and 
     so have empathy, to try to stand in their shoes and 
     appreciate the sort of pressures and influences that might 
     have conditioned them.''
       Tutu points out. ``In the act of forgiveness, we are 
     declaring our faith in the future of a relationship and in 
     the capacity of the wrongdoer to make a new beginning on a 
     course that will be different from the one that caused us the 
     wrong . . . It is an act of faith that the wrongdoer can 
     change.''
       Tutu acknowledges that he and others in the commission were 
     strongly affected by their religious faith. But he expresses 
     the conviction that all human beings will ``always need a 
     process of forgiveness and reconciliation to deal with those 
     unfortunate yet all too human breaches in human 
     relationships. They are an inescapable characteristic of the 
     human condition.''
       Archbishop Tutu sums up his conclusions in the title of his 
     book--``No Future Without Forgiveness.'' Whether human beings 
     like it or not, we will have to forgive one another in order 
     to survive.
       In my own life, I have found it extremely hard to forgive 
     people who have treated me with cruelty or contempt. I have 
     also found it hard to forgive myself for the severity with 
     which I treated my sons when they were children. I convinced 
     myself that I punished them for their own benefit, to make 
     sure they followed the right path, but I later realized I had 
     harmed them by my angry words and outbursts of rage. I had 
     suffered often from the punishing behavior of my own father 
     and it took me years to forgive him. My own sons have 
     forgiven me more readily than I forgave him. The whole 
     process has been painful but cleansing in the end.
       When I wrote speeches for Harry Truman in the 1948 
     presidential campaign I used harsh words to describe the 
     actions taken by the Republican leaders in the Congress. I 
     was not ready to forgive them and I hoped that my fellow 
     citizens would punish them in the election that year. I was 
     exhilarated when Truman triumphed and the Republicans lost 
     their majority in the Congress. It seemed to me I had taken 
     part in a righteous cause--and I still believe that. Yet the 
     hot words of that campaign produced bitter feelings among the 
     losers and a hostile atmosphere which made it almost 
     impossible for Mr. Truman to get his proposals enacted. He 
     forgave nearly all of the leaders who had attacked him, but 
     some of those leaders would not forgive him for the charges 
     he had made against them.
       In all of the election campaigns that have occurred since 
     the United States was founded, injuries have been inflicted--
     injuries that might have been healed by a better 
     understanding of the power of forgiveness. If we are going to 
     solve the tremendous problems we face now and in the future, 
     we must learn from the South African experience that facing 
     the truth and engaging in continuous efforts for 
     reconciliation are essential for all of us.
       It is not easy to uncover the full truth about any 
     situation. In the decades I have lived since I was born in 
     1914, I have been searching for the truth about many of the 
     events which have affected my life--and I now realize that 
     the process of seeking and discovering what really happened 
     to me and millions of others in those crowded years may go on 
     forever. I now try to base my comprehension on the French 
     saying: ``To understand all is to forgive all.''
       For many years I placed the blame for the two World Wars of 
     the 20th century principally on the Germans--and I could not 
     forgive them for the tremendous devastation I believed they 
     had caused in the world. Under the Kaiser, they had been 
     belligerent and savage; under Hitler, they had tortured and 
     murdered millions of people. Perhaps God could forgive them 
     for what they had done in that century. I couldn't.
       Perhaps my enduring rage against the Germans was partly due 
     to the disfiguring wounds that had been inflicted on my 
     father in World War I. He came home from that war with a hole 
     in his neck and a twisted face that frightened me. In my 
     childhood I had to awaken him from nightmares in which he was 
     fighting with Germans who were trying to kill him with trench 
     knives and bayonets. He had engaged in hand-to-hand, face-to-
     face, combat in the trenches in France--and he never got over 
     it. His screams will echo always in my mind. He had killed 
     enemies with his own bayonet but they were always coming back 
     at him in nights of horror.
       While I can never condone the atrocities committed by some 
     Germans under the Kaiser and under Hitler, I have learned 
     enough about the history of Germany and the history of other 
     nations to understand why those atrocities occurred. When I 
     was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, I heard a former chancellor 
     of the German Democratic Republic, Heinrich Bruning, describe 
     how Count von Papen and other German aristocrats tricked 
     President Paul von Hindenburg into appointing Hitler as 
     chancellor of Germany. Hitler had been defeated by Hindenburg 
     in the German election of 1932, but he was placed in power 
     later by plotters who thought they could control him. The 
     monstrous rise of Nazism was due to the errors of arrogant 
     men. Such errors have been crucial factors in the history of 
     many nations.
       My father participated voluntarily in World War I, 
     answering Woodrow Wilson's call to serve in ``a war to end a 
     war'' and ``to make the world safe for democracy.'' But many 
     of the Germans who fought in that bloody struggle believed 
     that God was on their side and they were justified in what 
     they did. In the light of history, I realized that many of 
     their men who fought in the trenches suffered from ghastly 
     nightmares similar to those which afflicted my father. War 
     itself was an encompassing evil which brought evil effects to 
     many generations of human beings.
       Desmond Tutu's harrowing book, which links truth and 
     reconciliation to the power of forgiveness, offers ways to 
     enable future generations to end the savage cycles of war and 
     revenge. Let us hope that people all over this bleeding world 
     will read it and learn from it. It sheds a great light on 
     what needs to be done.

     

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