I want to declare myself as belonging to the European Union. This isn’t a strategy of me-too-ism, or to slag the US or anything, but because I want to leave all the lights on in the house all night, just like in Lithuania.

For various reasons I’ve been thinking about forgiveness lately.

My mom, you see, started up this program at her church, where mentally-challenged folks can come and hang out once a week, and their caretakers can go do things as if they had a normal life. And part of what they’re doing is to teach these folks about theology. It’d make an interesting doctoral thesis to analyze what they’ve been able to teach and how and why and so forth, but I won’t go into my observations about that here.

The point is is that she asked me in an email: How do you teach someone who is deficient in ‘theory of mind’ to forgive other people? ‘Theory of mind’ is the ability to imagine what’s on someone else’s mind, or what emotional state they might be in, so if you lack it, you’re going to have a hard time understanding that someone who was just mean to you is now sorry and wants to make friends.

For various and sundry reasons, she asked me about this in terms of Buddhism. I gave a typically pretensious non-answer:

Buddhism says that true enlightenment comes through compassion, which by definition can’t hold one person above another. That *could* take the form of forgiveness, though there’s a certain hint of arrogance to forgiveness, where your needs are more important than another’s, and you’re forgiving *their* transgression, rather than seeing your own inflexibility. So the real task is to focus on one’s love for the world and one’s love for the other person, and move forward into the present and future. If you need to forgive, then do that, but do it with humility.

But I got to thinking about it (one might say I perseverated on it for a while), and the next day came up with this:

I was thinking that in terms of autism, forgiveness might be approached as an outcome rather than an ideal. More like a skill than a way of being. More concrete, less abstract.

The skill of forgiveness yields an outcome of a renewal of a relationship (in the best case). My relationship with someone who has slighted me might change for the better if I forgive them, right?

So if forgiveness is a skill, then it’s also a performance. It’s something you have to do. You can’t simply decide that you’ve forgiven someone without telling them, or the relationship won’t be changed.

I think the difficulties presented by disabilities would be the communication aspect, and also being able to imagine a better future relationship. Or being able to handle the uncertainty of the *possiblity* of a renewed relationship, without knowing what it will be. I think a big part of autism is inflexibility, where a rejected forgiveness would end up being a risk not worth having taken.

So to teach it you’d have to show that relationships could change, and that if you feel slighted by someone but still wanted to be their friend, you could forgive them. That’s a lot, actually. Not many non-autistics seem to have figured it out, either.

Another problem is that for lower functioning autistics, it might be that lots of work has gone into teaching the person that there are things that are simply wrong, and that it might be better to not forgive some people who are actually bad. Someone in that position might not be able to understand that there are times when forgiveness is appropriate and there are times when it’s better to avoid bad people. The obvious hypothetical that pops into my mind is someone who has been abused, where it might be better to teach them the simple equation of avoiding abuse than the complicated one of how to forgive while still protecting themselves.

So all this is a roundabout way to ask readers to offer their opinion on forgiveness. Are there things that are unforgiveable? Have you ever felt like a small, small person because you didn’t forgive someone? Have you forgiven someone who didn’t ultimately deserve it?

Any comment appreciated, considered ones doubly so.

1. find your 23rd blog ever posted.
2. find the 5th sentence (or closest to it).
3. post it here with these instructions.

“…that would ruin the suspense.”

The third attempt was actually mean. I said things like, “Is this more like ‘Eliza‘ than ‘LivePeople?’” Just then the ‘Earthlink representative’ answered the phone and I wasn’t on hold any more, so I closed the window reflexively before I took a screen shot.

For two months they’ve been billing me for an account I closed. They suck.

Regular readers of my ‘blog know that I perform a valuable public service. This service takes the form of reminding you it’s spring by posting close-up pictures of flowers.

This one opened up yesterday during the hailstorm, which makes it extra special cool.

One of the rose bushes in the front yard didn’t fare so well during the storm. It had been blown around enough that it’s probably damaged around the root ball. Poor kid. Other than that, no damage.

Billmon has this great entry comparing US occupation of Iraq to Japanese occupation of Manchuko (Manchuria) in the early ’30s. The Japanese even changed the flag to include a yellow stripe.

Watched a good documentary on PBS, about the Weather Underground. The turmoil in the late 60s is a sort of forgotten history at this point, just under 40 years later, so it was good to see.

I’ve never considered myself a radical. I was at a bookstore the other day and it just so happened that there was an author talking about the Iraq war, being very critical of it. It wasn’t news to me, but there were people listening with rapt attention. There was some representation from the socialists, handing out some indy press they had made, and one of these folks started talking to me.

Eventually, I had to tell him: I don’t want your paper. I’m more evolutionary than revolutionary. His reply was: “Yeah, but evolution takes too much time.” I had to shrug. Maybe it does, but I don’t think this guy and his friends are going to be able to last long enough.

But the whole narrative about the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers and all those radicals is really interesting to me. COINTELPRO and Nixon and Vietnam and Charlie Manson and the whole thing. A total freakshow no matter where you stood or where you were looking, and all the good done since then is being unraveled before our eyes.

And… Once upon a time, there were low-power radio stations where angry black men would talk about killing The Man, and then those black men would end up in jail. Now, however, if you’re angry and white and have a radio show or a book deal and you talk about killing Muslims or harassing liberals, your contract is renewed because it’s good for ratings.

We had actual weather today in Seattle. A big hailstorm with thunder and lightning and high winds. It was pretty cool.

Knocked out the internet connection a few times, but whatcha gonna do?

For a while I stood out on the front porch-y thing while the hail rained down, sipping coffee, watching the rosebushes bend and threaten to break. The sky was a harsh gray, and I was worried there might be a funnel cloud or tornado or something. It turns out there was, technically, a tornado to the north in Whatcom county, and it took the roof off a barn.

It reminded me of hurricane season on the gulf coast. No doubt some dead trees got knocked down today, and the Seattle mushroom people all freaked out like it was the end of the world, but me? Ain’t nothin’. I’m from the Texas Gulf coast. *pose*

Ok, so we know who designed the new Iraqi flag (artist Rifaat al-Shadershi), and we know that it comes from a contest within the Iraqi Governing Council, but what I want to know is: Where did the order for a new flag come from? They don’t even have a new government, and already someone’s imposing a new flag on them. Who? Why? Why wasn’t the new independent government allowed this task as a symbol of its new independence? What designs were rejected?

All the reportage has been about how the Iraqis hate it. And can you blame them? (“By the way, the stars and stripes are no longer your flag. Now it’s a big green field with a blue line down the center representing the Mississippi River. Enjoy or die.”) No reportage (that I can see) on the process by which this happened.

(And the funniest thing about all the reportage is that it talks about ‘unveiling’ the new flag. Unveiling. A flag.)

Wanted to mention some movies I rented the other night. ‘Matrix: Revolutions,’ which was more entertaining than in the theater, though the detail of the visual spectacle was lost on the tiny screen. ‘Punch Drunk Love’ which I’ve reviewed here before, and which I really should just go ahead and buy, because it’s so good.

And ‘About Schmitt.’ Overall it’s a thumbs-up, mostly because it’s about issues of conformity and retirement and growing old and the death of a spouse. There aren’t enough movies about that kind of stuff. And Jack Nicholson is simply great, and his iconoclastic image is bounced nintey degrees in this movie to good effect. However, for all the interesting issues this movie tries to juggle, it ends up never really saying much of anything about them. It plays its hand close to the vest, leading to a lot of anticipation about how Schmitt’s depression and grief over his deceased wife will resolve itself. There’s some catharsis, and then …. there’s the second half of the movie when Schmitt ends up in Denver for his daughter’s wedding. Here the film loses all the self-control that made the first half so interesting, and we end up with predictable gags about the hippie in-laws.

This change in tone reminded me of ‘Flirting With Disaster,’ where the subdued and quirky turns to screwball when we meet Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin (as a couple who make LSD in their basement), except there’s a satisfyingly wacky end. In ‘About Schmitt,’ however, there’s only a manipulative tug on the heartstrings. This is one of those movies it’ll be nice to see on TV sometime when there’s nothing better to do.