The thing is anger is a healthy emotion. Suppression is not. If I go out and saw some scumbag call my mother a b--- or if I had a little daughter and someone slapped her, guess what? I'd go berserk.
Take this to the nth extreme when some dogs come to your house rapes your family, your mother, your daughter, your child and brutally executes them one by one in front of your very own eyes like little dogs if you had any freewill to do anything you want - sorry if I am getting graphic- but you'd take a 9inch rough serrated blade and skin them and peel their layers off like Anthony Bourdain doing artistry on an apple and you know what?... you'd even relish each and every moment and enjoy to know Cosmic Justice or God is not blind. That there is balance and order in the universe. And you won't feel remorseful damn bit.
THAT'S natural. To pretend to go on as if nothing happened or to maintain straight face and pretend everyone is healed is not. Heck if you are emotionless and stoic when someone murders your own family and butchers them in front of your house and you spiritually bypass this **** and purport and trumpet to preach forgiveness and compassion THEN YOU ARE THE SCOUNDREL!!
There is something wrong with YOU!!!
And the thing is I wasn't even alive when this happened. But when I read about genocide or for that matter how those WHITE scoundrels strapped black people against tractor wheels and rode them over or nullified existence of black people by dehumanizing them either in South African apartheid or in Holocaust stripping Jews naked.... it STILL makes my blood boil.
As it should. Naturally.
I am not a psycho.
That was the point I was coming at. We should have a healthy outlet. We need to sit either face-to-face with perpetrators or in a therapeutic setting and really ask ourselves how do we really feel about it. I know media and movies have lampooned this concept to the death: "How do you feel? I mean
really feel...", but in a proper setting when we do ask this and give them FULL PERMISSION to express themselves -be it to let their inner thoughts of revenge and retribution bubble and surface to the top- that we will get a shed of light and inkling of feeling on what it finally feels like to be liberated.
And then who knows - maybe just like
Amish forgiveness or like
Immaculée Ilibagiza or
Munyarangabo, maybe...just maybe we will at least have some closure.
And that... THAT will ultimately must emanate from a place of serenity, inner balance and STRENGTH and STRONGHOLD.
Compassion and forgiveness ain't cheap moth---------.
But what happens is that we are still at a place of victim hood. We are seething in revenge, hatred, deep seated anguish, depression, PAIN, rage and bloodlust.
And that's ENTIRELY okay, natural and perfectly and completely normal. What's not is pretending to go ahead that everything is okay which inevitably manifests via "rokte rangano" "lashe bhora" "deho deho...." images of bitter resentment and TO DENY the fact that if, should and had every chance you get that you WOULD NOT take revenge in a heartbeat - which every natural healthy individual would -is criminal.
Because then normal, Buddhahood not. If you are falsely stoic in a pretense of denial spouting forgiveness and compassion then there is something seriously and completely wrong with you if not utterly disingenuous like some liberal hippies or for that matter when Richard Gere said "We should be more forgiving and compassionate to the perpetrators of 9/11." (Then again I don't know Richard Gere. If he is genuinely strong enough to mean it instead of denial and spiritual bypassing then more power to him.)
Finally, even if Pakistanis apologized for their actions doesn't mean THEN we should forgive in an smarmy, atelmarka "acha acha" bhaab. Because then it STILL is gratifying your EGO and you are acting out of SPITE. The implications are as if since the perpetrators are masochistically writhing in pain and abusing themselves to 'make up for their actions' - metaphorically speaking- THEN you have stroked my ego and palated and satiated my thirst for revenge, THUS I forgive you. (Kinda what Democrats do when they FORCE people to show remorse and SHAME perpetrators so that they writhe in GUILT and SHAME. Actually the Democrats are more wily and surreptitious whose sentiments tend to have "yeah-I-know-you-made-mistake-but-since-we-are-such-a-saint-we-will-forgive-you-but-only-and-only-if-you-strip-naked-and-feel-completely-and-utterly-debased-see-how-good-we-are" mindset but I am way, way, wayyy off tangent and digress....)
This is
still ego gratification and egoic game at play. If not utterly, entirely and absolutely stupid. Case in point - regardless of political parties- Abu Ghraib where those bastards enjoyed Muslims piling on top of each other all naked begging for pity and mercy so that the army could bask in glee.
Abused...has become the abuser.