Imagine the following scenario: You are born and you grow up in a wonderful country, which you love. You love the wide open spaces and the smiling children you meet in play parks and the zoo you visit regularly with your parents. You thoroughly enjoy your early years at primary school and you make many friends, of all races and nationalities. When you get a bit older, you find out that the world is not always a friendly place. Each time you have a history lesson, you hear about how badly your ancestors, the hill people, treated the original inhabitants of the country, the valley people. Wow, you think, that really is terrible and I am glad we don't live in those days now.
After one of the lessons one morning, where you are taught about genocide and blatant discrimination and what some of your ancestors did to the valley people, you see a few children gathered in a huddle on the playground. You see they are your classmates, who happen to all be a group of valley people, but you think nothing further of this, until, as you walk past, you see a horrible smirk dance across the face of one of the children, and suddenly you are sprawling in the dirt, tripped by an unseen foot. The boy bends down and hisses in your ear, see how you like being treated badly, smarty pants, you deserve it, because look at what you hill people did to us valley people. My dad warned me about you guys. We will never forgive you for what you did; you are all the same.
This scenario happens again and again. When you tell one of your teachers you are being bullied and it's because valley people are targeting you, she sighs and says, unfortunately that's because of past history and you have to live with it, and, she muses, hill people should have thought of the consequences before they treated valley people like they did, and most people think they deserve what they get now. But it's wrong for them to treat me like that, you sob, as tears begin to fall. And, you wail, one of the valley people boys only moved to live in this country a few years ago and I was born here! You land up in detention when you continue to insist that the group of children must be punished. You begin to hate all valley people and you avoid them when you see them. Your parents say, what did you expect, they are valley people, and make sure you stay away from them!
I believe many hurtful and wrong things have occurred in the past. For example, genocide, the holocaust, colonialism. How can true reparation be made for the past? I don't believe the past can be undone. I believe the only solution is for people to stand together, to see each person as an individual, with feelings and potential and God-given purpose, and to forgive and move forward from past wrongs. If we don't forgive people and if we harbour generational hatred, are we any better than the people we accuse of the same atrocities?
"Therefore you are without excuse, O man, whoever you are who judge. For
in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself. For you who judge
practice the same things." (Romans 2:1 WEB)
Related blog articles:
Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You (Part 2)
Learning From the Fear That's Motivation For Discrimination
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