GODSTUFF

GETTING EVEN WILL GET US NOWHERE

My still-fresh memories of Kenya, where I spent a couple of weeks in October, are not of the sociopolitical tensions, violence and chaos that I’ve watched explode in images on television and online this week.

What I remember most vividly are the people I met and befriended (hopefully for life) — men, women and children who changed the way I see the world, the way I perceive myself.

I recall their hospitality, humor and stubborn grace, whether they were desperately poor mothers and children in the Kibera slums in Nairobi; artists who had fled violence and unrest in other parts of Africa for the refuge of stable Kenya; a flinty band of Luo widows near Kisumu who had formed a collective to support themselves and their families; or our college-educated Kikuyu traveling companion (a supporter of the Luo opposition candidate in the disputed presidential elections) who had dedicated his life to helping the poorest of the poor get a fingerhold on the bottom rung of the ladder leading up.

We spent our last night in Nairobi lingering with some of these new friends over dinner at a trattoria in the city center not far from where police clashed with thousands of angry panga-wielding demonstrators who took to the streets Thursday, heeding the call of opposition leader Raila Odinga’s for a million-man march to protest his narrow defeat by President Mwai Kibaki in the Dec. 27 elections. I remember the fresh pasta and so-so wine, taking goofy digital pictures, meeting the charming fiancee of our Kikuyu friend, praying together, hugging and laughing and having a thoroughly pleasant evening.

Now some of our friends fear for their lives, and with good reason. But not for a good cause.

Because vengeance is never a good cause.

In the wake of the Kibaki-Odinga election fiasco, one side emerged feeling wronged and, rather than sit down at the bargaining table, chose to begin meting out their twisted form of justice by torching businesses, homes and churches — in one horrific instance with the families who had sought refuge there from the street “justice” locked inside — or by having a go at their neighbors with rusty machetes.

“When one group kills three people, the other group also kills three people,” one Kenyan observer told the Los Angeles Times earlier this week. “When one burns three houses, the other burns three houses. The situation has really deteriorated.”

Revenge is a never-ending cycle. There are always more eyes to be poked out, more hands to be shorn off, more victims-who-in-turn-seek-revenge to be made.

Where and when will it end?

Far from being particular to the powder keg of poverty, desperation and age-old tribal rivalries that have rent the fabric of Kenyan society this week, the urge for revenge is a universal desire that leads, invariably and universally, to great tragedy.

Sometimes it’s societal revenge, as in Kenya, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, or the Middle East.

Sometimes it’s particular, personal revenge, as in the case of an 82-year-old poet in Sardinia who was murdered over the weekend. The octogenarian poet, known for his verses about peasants and shepherds, was gunned down in cold blood — six bullets pumped into his head and shoulders — as he went to buy his morning newspaper. Those who knew him say it was likely a vendetta from 50 years earlier finally catching up with him.

Vengeance also appears to have been the motive behind the arson murders of an Indian family in Oak Forest, Ill., last week. A pregnant mother, father and their small son perished in the blaze prosecutors say was set by the child’s grandfather because he didn’t like the man who had married his daughter.

When we foster memories of offenses — real or imagined — and allow them to morph into ideologies or, worse yet, mythologies, they end up consuming families, societies and whole peoples — including our own selves.

The cycle of revenge appears unstoppable, but, as William Bole, co-author of the book Forgiveness in International Politics: An Alternative Road to Peace, said at a Woodstock Theological Center gathering in 2006 in New York, there are examples — huge, societal, unbelievable, superhuman examples — of alternatives to the theopolitics of revenge that have worked. Big time.

“The most celebrated example is South Africa,” Bole said. “A brutal, white minority regime fell, and black South Africans rose to power. Practically everyone assumed that blacks would do unto whites as whites had done unto them. They didn’t, as a group. Nelson Mandela, the prisoner-turned-president, appointed a truth commission instead. And through that commission, South Africa formally abstained from revenge.”

If forgiveness can make it there, to paraphrase Kander and Ebb’s song, it can make it anywhere.

Most people who attempt to exact vengeance believe what they’re doing is moral because they were wronged first. Bole calls this the “ethics of even-numberedness,” as in “the second punch that gets thrown is right and just because it responds to the first.”

The problem is how and when you begin the counting. Rarely can anybody agree on who started the fight.

Can you really ever get even with someone, whether they’ve cut you off in traffic, betrayed you and broken your heart, stolen your lunch out of the break room fridge, or taken the life of someone you love?

What does “even” even mean?

Revenge doesn’t work.

No matter how you keep score.