This is not the first time I have thought about aging men and their propensity for penitence.
The thought came to mind with the murder of Eugène Ney Terre'Blanche, a rightwing extremist in South African politics. Many muttered about the brutality of his death, an old man who could no longer defend himself. True. But in his stronger days his political brutality supported a system which perpetrated unspeakable acts, destroying lives and leaving lifelong scars upon untold generations of people. Was Terre’Blanche a penitent at the time of his death? I don’t know. But there is a long line of his compatriots who are. Forgiven grandfathers who rock their wee ones on the knee while Time heals their guilt.
The thought crosses my mind each time someone is arrested for a war crime. These perpetrators of heinous crimes against humanity are usually of a certain age when they are finally brought to justice. Dressed in ties and jackets - with thinning, speckled hair - they seem so benign between the almost over-sized police guard. How could someone so respectable be such a monster?
The thought crosses my mind as a matron pleads for respect under oath, begging to be believed that she was molested by her father, that elegantly dressed, calm man whose great grandchild sits a few rows back in the courtroom. Her wrinkles and dowdiness versus his timeless image of propriety.
The thought crosses my mind when rows of broken men and women wring their hands in a guilt that is not theirs as they drag out the inner courage to accuse a childhood rapist.
The dotage of men seems to carry with it a socially sanctioned forgiveness for unforgivable crimes committed in youth and inspired by greed, amorality, ego, ego and ego.
Yet, society never forgives the wrong doing of their victims whose lives were cast onto the path of inevitability by the very act committed against them. Their pain is, according to the law, just an excuse for a life of crime.
Society never acknowledges the disease and compromise of the victims of Science, assigning these to the consequences of indistinguishable background noise.
We forgive the dotage of men, and I do not understand why.
***
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
The Hollow Men. T.S. Eliot.
