reconciliation

I had a class yesterday on the justification and limits of civil disobedience and after that I was talking to someone last night about truth and reconciliation and it made me pause and reflect about the nature of conflict. X said that in south africa for example, he had lived through apartheid and seen the violence and abuse perpetrated by a system against its own people. If you had asked him 12 or 15 years ago whether he was proud to be a South African, he would have said no, but today he is. Yet, he won't sing the whole anthem (which has three different verses from Afrikaans, Xhosa and another dialect I believe) and believes that the truth and reconciliation commission has a lot to answer for, for it let a lot of white perpetrators off with amnesty yet did not include any modicum of financial reparations. He said he was denied his identity for so long that he would never surrender it again. War may be political but first and foremost it is always a human experience; it tears the heart out of memory and experience, leaving one with scars that run deep, perhaps never to be healed. He said that all the young, we, can expect from the old generation is tolerance and that they would come together but never forget the scars of the past. And it made me sad to think that there were some things that we would always be imprisoned by and that the past could never be wholly cleansed.