How forgiving can you be? Is forgiveness a virtue? In Saudi Arabia, to forgive someone ranges from personal dealings to court cases and in 99 percent of the cases there is always someone who comes up saying, “Just forgive them, you’ll be a better person for it.” But is that true? Will forgiving wrongs all the time make us better people?
The spirit of forgiveness doesn’t always help society. There are always those who never learn, those who make a habit of breaking the law, and they always count on the forgiveness of the other side.
A friend told me about a case where forgiving was the worst thing to do. His father was mistreated in a private hospital in Jeddah. The man had to endure — besides his physical pain — the rough treatment of doctors and the nurses, who went so far as to bind and gag him so he couldn’t complain or remove any of the tubes he was connected to. The man eventually died, and his daughter decided to sue the hospital for mistreatment. She was determined to get the culprits punished, but many people tried to talk her out of it because after all the owners of the hospital won’t be affected, it is only the “poor” doctor who will be punished — meaning in this case fired. Eventually the daughter relinquished her rights and the hospital carried on offering medical and not so medical treatment to other “forgiving” patients.
In cases like these, forgiveness isn’t a virtue; it becomes a disease that we have to fight. If in the name of forgiveness you are going to let loose all the reckless drivers, unprofessional doctors and nurses, and all law breakers in the world, you are bound to end up with a lopsided system, a system that doesn’t work.
Saudi Arabia has one of the highest rates of car accidents in the world and fatalities are high: Twelve people die every day on the roads, and four people are injured every hour. Traffic laws are made to be broken here, so we end up with all these accidents. And in most of these cases the guilty party walks free because the other side decided to forgive him. Actually, that is the first question of the traffic police when they arrive at the scene of an accident: “Are you willing to forgive?” And since we are such forgiving people, bad drivers are always on the loose.
There are families who give their children cars, sometimes when they are underage, and give them permission to roam around; even if they are known to break speed limits, it’s OK. These young men eventually get into accidents, and if they are lucky they emerge unharmed and “forgiven”. Their families in any case are always ready to give and forgive, and so they are provided with new cars and a license to go on the road again.
So what is more important: keeping law and order or accepting crimes and misdemeanors consoling ourselves that we are such “forgiving” people?
