The Ultimate Safety Net

I am super fascinated with prison documentaries. Something about how a human mind can exist under those circumstances all those days in a row, one to the next, busy with living and either denying or facing your crime. I've seen a bunch of those episodes where a predator of some sort meets face to face with the person they hurt so badly or the family of that person. I always thought it was so selfish for the criminal to ask for forgiveness from the person they wronged, and never quite understood where the victim's head was at. I always figured they were just so fucking shot out by the devastation left in the wake of the crime that they just grasped on to any possibility of making sense if it like grabbing on to a life raft. Often, the victim would offer the predator forgiveness. I always figured that to be bullshit wishful thinking toward the impossible.

Sometimes you find that you have the opportunity for vengeance when someone has done you wrong. Sometimes you think about it for years and cry and yell and scream trying to make sense of the wrong that was done to you. You lean on friends and all the love that's been given you sometimes collects. All the compassion that's been shown to you over the years hasn't been worn away by all the judgement and it actually collects. Suddenly you are face to face with your eye for an eye, and like a hippie, your heart sticks a daisy in the barrel of that rifle and you forgive.

You forgive and you become as big and open as anything ever was. You forgive and you feel so solid and so strong when you say, "You don't scare me anymore, even though I still have nightmares. The worst thing you could ever do to me you've already done, and you know what, I'm here, and my life is beautiful. We're good."

Which makes me think of the Pope, who kindly suggested recently that being good to each other is the ultimate safely net and all the great revolutionaries such as Jesus, who showed us through how they lived that the way to freedom is through kindness. They forgave the people who abused them, and then kicked some ass, and had compassion to spare.

Every smile matters, it turns out. Every time you hold open a door for someone, or stop to pet a dog, all those times you smile at the person who got assigned the seat next to you in the totally sold out airplane, it all collects, all the judgment and meanness in the world can't wear it out, and it makes warriors out of victims.