Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The tree of forgiveness
(1881-1882)

"Let the rest of us seek reconciliation and forgiveness."

After the end of apartheid in South Africa, Nelson Mandela authorized the convening of a court-like restorative justice body to both hear testimony from witnesses identified as apartheid’s victims and perpetrators seeking amnesty from apartheid-era civil and criminal prosecution. This body was called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and was intended to achieve something similar to what the Nuremberg trials after WWII had not. The Nuremberg Trials represented retributive justice, seeking to attribute guilt and impose punishment. The TRC sought something similar to the opposite, to acknowledge the wrongs and to seek forgiveness. This high-minded effort fell short of its aims, yet left a deep impression on both South Africa and the world. It still serves as a model for seeking alternative justice for widespread criminal behavior, beyond the individual and into the social. Canada mustered one as part of its Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement to document the systemic harms and history of Canada’s residential school system. Guatemala, Peru, and East Timor also pursued similar reconciliation strategies following self-inflicted human rights tragedies.

As these EndDays stories near the end of their series, my thoughts have increasingly turned toward What’s Next, though I already posted my WhatNext Series back in the autumn of 2020. Then, I was anticipating the ending of The Muse and my long exile. Today, I’m considering what form our necessary reconciliation for the crimes committed by this administration, which has seemed to ache for retribution since day one, might take. I have long savored the thought of the necessary impeachment trial, though winnowing down that Bill of Particulars into a convictable indictment might prove nearly impossible. Few believe the Senate would ever convict at trial, anyway, so they wander away thinking our perpetrator-in-chief will probably just get away with it all again. This conclusion might amount to cynicism roughly equivalent to that held by the cynics assembled in the Senate, but it might still prove accurate enough to smother the will to impeach, which will not in any way help resolve the real source of the problem we’re facing.

I wrote last week about how Truth must be the primary shared purpose if self-governance is to be accomplished. Lies piled up to near high heaven can never level appropriately the field required for Big D Democracy to effectively play, and undermine every attempt to achieve justice. Under this regime, though, Truth has become a criminal offense, punishable by any of a raft of very likely illegal injunctions. The courts have been working overtime playing Whack-A-Mole with this administration, determined to indict every remaining ham sandwich, however nutritious. Truth has become the chief victim of a thousand criminal conspiracies. It has flourished anyway, in many more than a thousand, often little, ways. The criminal communication system seems determined to supplant what was once considered reliable information, seeking to bring into question even issues long settled by scientists as well as citizens. The resulting uncertainty has gained unprecedented legitimacy under this walking miscarriage of administration overseen by our adolescent incumbent. We collectively ache to become grown-ups again.

As much as I might feel attracted to the concept of a bloodletting impeachment, I admit that we might need more realignment than retribution. If I acknowledge that the breadth and magnitude of these crimes might deserve punishment, I must also observe that nobody could ever live long enough to atone for these sins. How many centuries would be required to repay the moral debt incurred in just the first year and a half of this administration that knows no bottom? How many lives can one mass murderer forfeit? These calculations seem destined to fail to deliver retributive justice but to bring eternal disappointment. Further, if we do nothing to address the cause of this damning erosion of Truth, we might just make matters worse by pursuing Nuremberg justice in the face of these latest and, arguably, ever greater criminal and civil insults. We must reclaim our identity if we are to continue as the nation we believe we deserve, if, indeed, we still feel as if we deserve such a nation, one dedicated to Truth, Justice, and, what was that American way supposed to be about, anyway?

Hence, my thoughts return to Truth and Reconciliation. First, the Truth, and little but. This administration, which has yet to meet a truth it felt it could swallow, considers even the smallest truth poison. It thrives on what most citizens acknowledge to be toxic. The media that feeds their obsession do not represent free speech but the loosest and the worsest of loose talk. Free speech does not even imply any right to engage in loose talk. Ask the crowded movie theater when the loose talker yells, “Fire!” The difficulty of determining Truth pales when compared with the deep down damage loose talk has done, and continues to do. Reconciliation demands not just Truth, but the courage to honestly seek it and the perhaps foolhardiness to stand up and declare it, however personally embarrassing it might seem. We have seen the collective and personal costs of undermining Truth. Perhaps we need a civic exercise intended to bolster and promote it. We might start by taxing Faux News out of existence. Let its messages go underground to feed a justly undernourished resistance. Let the rest of us seek reconciliation and forgiveness. (More talk of Truth & Reconciliation to come in my next installment.)

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz