Should there be a limit to forgiveness?
In 1773, black American slaves in Georgia responded to forced bondage by creating a church in Savannah, Georgia, the first black church in an incipient nation, where slaves received a short respite from unrelenting hate and brutality, a pestilence visited upon them by their white masters.
Membership within the church allowed slaves to reconnect with their African roots and cultivate a supportive community, thus prompting the creation of assorted black churches across the territory before the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776.
Church-going slaves became more ambitious before long, employing ingenious methods to actively counter their waking nightmare. Parishioners exercised rebellions, the majority of which were quiet and peaceful. The Underground Railroad ran through many of these structures, providing cover for runaway slaves making their way to states and territories where slavery was outlawed.
The black church grew in stature as the years passed, becoming irreplaceable houses of valor, spiritual connection, and progress during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. It’s where Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the most hated black man in America at the time, forcefully and eloquently expressed his vision for a more just, tolerable, and egalitarian society.
White Americans, anxious and spooked by the movement, exercised a violent reprisal. They set fire to multiple black churches, the most infamous being the firebombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, resulting in the tragic deaths of four young black girls in 1963. Survivors of the attack forgave the mongrels who destroyed their church, members of the Ku Klux Klan, a group renowned for their intense hatred of black people. Proponents of the Civil Rights movement, a significant number of whom were churchgoers, employed forgiveness as a weapon to protest Jim Crow, forcing the hand of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the landmark Civil Rights Act into law in 1964.
***
On June 17, 2015, Dylann Storm Roof, a young white Supremacist, walked into a modest white building, where he encountered nine unsuspecting members of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, one of the oldest black churches in America. The parishioners granted Roof’s request for a group prayer, and they were massacred for their trouble, becoming victims of a deluded man who was intent on starting a race war. Amazingly, family members of the victims expressed forgiveness for Dylann Roof at his court hearing, a symbol of their devotion to their spiritual beliefs.
Of course, photos were captured of an inexplicably sedate Dylann Roof, one of the worst mass murderers in this country’s history. His face was expressionless, his glassy eyes betraying no hints of fear or regret, because he coveted the attention showered upon him. I live in Denver, Colorado, a liberal and diverse city situated hundreds of miles from where those victims and their families lived, and I knew that I could not have offered the same absolution.
Roof attacked the larger black community, and I could not forgive him, because he acted under the guise of reconciliation and fellowship. What Roof did on June 17, 2015, was arguably worse than the firebombing in 1963, because he entered that church under false pretenses, performing a reconnaissance mission inside a house of worship as he hunted. I was 38 at the time, and could not recall witnessing or hearing anything more evil.
As President Barack Obama eulogized the victims of the Roof massacre, he broke into a rendition of Amazing Grace before extolling each victim for exhibiting their goodness. As I watched Obama list each name, my anger metastasized, enveloping my whole body. I thought that we were, once again, practicing leniency by bestowing forgiveness, because black people like Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and Michael Brown, young men and women who should have existed for additional decades, were killed during the Obama presidency, with none of the perpetrators receiving a just punishment. Cops fed Dylann Roof fast food before taking him into custody.
I, a practicing Catholic, believed that we were allowing the unredeemable to use black forgiveness as a crutch, providing a patented way for the worst among us to escape an equitable reprisal. The same bull jive keeps happening, meaning individuals whose skin color grants them privileges continue to victimize the traditionally marginalized.
Things can’t change unless we overhaul society, making it so that power is equally dispersed, especially with respect to the justice system. However, I was never under the assumption that this would ever happen, because power rests with a select few white billionaires and crooked politicians who, for centuries, have convinced their lower-class brethren of the supposed decrepitude of brown people, gay people, and transgender members of our society.
***
Four years after processing the massacre in South Carolina, I felt grateful, because I had found writing and discovered that I was somewhat competent in the endeavor. I’d been published in Full Grown People and Level Magazine, which could not have happened if I had not escaped an encounter with the police in May 2005:
After the cops smashed through my hotel room door, they threw me onto the floor to restrain my arms and legs with zip ties. And then it became quiet, apart from the shuffling of boots across the musty carpet.
“Please, please don’t shoot me!” I exclaimed.
Thankfully, after stunning me with a taser, the officers decided against plugging me with metal bullets.
Fourteen years later, I decided to thank them for exercising restraint. And as I wrote about my experience in that hotel room in a viral essay, I thought about the family members of those victims in South Carolina, finally understanding why they’d proffered forgiveness to an unrepentant monster.
Letting go of past hurt is a mechanism for gaining freedom, and after I finished writing and publishing the essay, one of my most read pieces on this forum, I kicked myself for not letting go a little earlier. Because I’d hurt a lot of people as a younger man, and I’d earned their forgiveness without trying too hard, because they had chosen to look past my considerable faults as they considered the entire man. Why couldn’t I do the same? It took me about fourteen years to forgive those officers, about a third of my e life at the time, but I was elated because I’d summoned the resolve to do what I knew was right.
***
Right now, I am trapped in a black tunnel, bereft of a path forward to that ever-elusive light at the end. I’ve been stuck here for more than one year, a punishment akin to solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison. I know that I am not the only one who feels this way, but I’m a human being, and so, my reaction to the second Trump presidency is distinctive from everyone, though a byproduct of the decisions made by millions of American voters, individuals who have confounded me.
My anger is directed at more than the usual suspects, because, this time, Trump secured power with a broader coalition of myopic adults, many of whom are beginning to regret their ill-advised decisions, their changing opinions reflected in the way they’ve voted in 2025. Nevertheless, it is too late for them, because too much damage, much of which may be irreversible within the remainder of my lifetime, has already been inflicted upon our once-prospering nation.
The Department of Education has been dismantled, USAID has been summarily shuttered and 600,000 children have already died as a result. An American Gestapo operation has been launched in our cities, every day Americans are being taxed through Trump’s ill-advised tariffs, and the job market is as arid as the Sahara Desert. America, as we once knew it, is being torn asunder, replaced by a burgeoning authoritarian state, the government actively being looted by a Trump kakistocracy, government comprised of the worst people…ever.
And it’s only been a year since Trump was reelected, thus we have three more years remaining of this nonsense, three more years of the abject cruelty, racism, and the nastiness. I attempt to manage the situation by desensitizing myself, but I can’t ignore what is going on around me, because evil is visible and all-encompassing, seeping into the marrow bones of this country, infecting, twisting, and withering what was once good, corrupting the future.
Some of the people who voted for Trump are suffering under his policy platform, an equally just and unfortunate comeuppance. After choosing to punish Kamala Harris and the Democrats for not acceding to some of their outlandish whims — perfect was the enemy of the good — these voters became victims and are now on the receiving end of the foreseeable karma. SNAP benefits are withheld from Appalachia, ICE agents flood the streets populated by some of the brown people who chose to supercharge white supremacy, cumbersome work requirements presage a decrease in Medicaid expenditures for beneficiaries in red states, and the rich are given permission to hoard trillions of dollars after receiving an unnecessary tax cut. Americans voted to accelerate their own demise, pulling the rest of us down with them into the black void.
Muslim residents in Dearborn Michigan, where Trump and his crony, Stephen Miller, tenaciously flood the streets with ICE agents, are clamoring for Democrats, the party they betrayed through their vote for Donald Trump, to end the raids. These same people seemed to have forgotten about the Muslim Ban, created by a racist Donald Trump in 2016, that was designed to keep their relatives out of the country. They knew who Trump was and they still voted for him over the woman who would have left them alone to live out their lives. So did the farmers, whose livelihoods are ravaged by the tariffs Trump has promised to inflict for decades, individuals who are forced to beg for a handout from the government they once espoused contempt for. They knew who Trump is— a conman, racist, rapist, business failure, and failed president — and still voted for this man because they wanted to see other people suffer, an unforgiveable offense. As a Catholic, despondent because of the evil emanating from Whitehouse like murky mist, I don’t know when if I’ll be able to proffer a second glance at anyone who supported Trump for an indeterminate amount of time.
My goal is to live until at least summer 2061, when Halley’s Comet flies by the earth, providing that elusive light that I am unable to see right now, the light that can force me open my heart to forgive the Trump supporters. I want to live to be at least eighty-six years old, because, right now, I cannot summon the power often deployed by my black brothers and sisters, a significant number of whom are frequenters of the church. For my heart is closed, festooned with rusty razor wire, a barrier for anyone seeking absolution from a most horrible sin: voting for a man bringing unnecessary suffering, destruction, and upheaval to millions.
We should stop making it too easy for offenders and reserve our grace for individuals who actually deserve it. From now on, forgiveness must be earned.
