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By Root 1332 0

many white supporters of apartheid were not interested in listening to the broadcast confessions of their peers. South Africa has hardly become a paradise; it is still suffering from poverty and high crime rates. Yet it averted a bloodbath. When psychologist Solomon Schimmel traveled there, interviewing people across the political and cultural spectrum for his book on victims of injustice and atrocities, he expected to hear them describe their rage and desire for revenge. “What most impressed me overall,” he reported, “was the remarkable lack of overt rancor and hatred between blacks and whites, and the concerted effort to create a society in which racial harmony and economic justice will prevail.” 24

Understanding without vengeance, reparation without retaliation, are possible only if we are willing to stop justifying our own position. Many years after the Vietnam War, veteran William Broyles Jr. traveled back to Vietnam to try to resolve his feelings about the horrors he had seen there and those he had committed. He went because, he said, he wanted to meet his former enemies “as people, not abstractions.” In a small village that had been a Marine base camp, he met a woman who had been with the Viet Cong. As they talked, Broyles realized that her husband had been killed at exactly the time that he and his men had been patrolling. “My men and I might have killed your husband,” he said. She looked at him steadily and said, “But that was during the war. The war is over now. Life goes on.”25 Later, Broyles reflected on his healing visit to Vietnam:

I used to have nightmares. Since I’ve been back from that trip, I haven’t had any. Maybe that sounds too personal to support any larger conclusions, but it tells me that to end a war you have to return to the same personal relationships you would have had with people before it. You do make peace. Nothing is constant in history.

Chapter 8

Letting Go and Owning Up

A man travels many miles to consult the wisest guru in the land. When he arrives, he asks the wise man: “Oh, wise guru, what is the secret of a happy life?”

“Good judgment,” says the guru.

“But oh, wise guru,” says the man, “how do I achieve good judgment?”

“Bad judgment,” says the guru.

ON JANUARY 26, 2006, an astonishing cultural event occurred: Oprah Winfrey devoted an entire show to apologizing for making a mistake. Oprah had endorsed James Frey and his self-proclaimed memoir of drug addiction and recovery, A Million Little Pieces, an endorsement that had boosted Frey’s sales into the millions. On January 8, The Smoking Gun, an investigative Web site, had shown that Frey had fabricated many parts of his story and greatly embellished others. Oprah’s first reaction, faced with this dissonant information—”I supported and praised this guy, and now it turns out he lied and deceived me”—was to do what most of us would be inclined to do: Keep supporting the guy, to smother the feeling that you have been duped. Accordingly, when Larry King interviewed Frey after The Smoking Gun report had appeared, Oprah called in to the show and justified her support of Frey: “The underlying message of redemption in James Frey’s memoir still resonates with me,” she said, “and I know that it resonates with millions of other people.” Besides, she added, if mistakes were made, they were the publisher’s; she and her producers had relied on the publisher’s claim that this was a work of nonfiction.

There Oprah was, at the top of the moral pyramid, having taken a first step in the direction of maintaining her original commitment to Frey. Yet instead of continuing to justify that decision, sliding further down the pyramid claiming “the publisher did it” or “my producers were to blame” or “the emotional truth of this book is truer than the true truth,” and other buck-passing maneuvers so common in our culture these days, Oprah stopped in her tracks. Perhaps she personally had a change of heart; perhaps her producers yanked her back from the ledge, advising her that her defense of Frey was not helping her reputation.