گفتگو

##Conversation Lesson

Dan: Aaron Campbell.

Aaron: Hey. How’s it going Dan Douglas?

Dan: I’m doing very good. Very good sir.

Aaron: Yeah. Are you enjoying the hot weather of the summer?

Dan: Oh yeah. It’s hot.

Aaron: It’s dripping hot.

Dan: Swelteringly, muggy.

Aaron: It’s very muggy. As they say in Japanese, mushi-atsui.

Dan: Alright, that’s enough. That’s enough weather talk. What are we really talking about?

Aaron: Oh I think we’re talking about forgiveness, are we not?

Dan: Yes we are.

Aaron: I think it’s time that you start forgiving me.

Dan: Okay. We’ll get to that later.Aaron: Okay, alright.

Dan: Are you quick to forgive?

Aaron: Yes. I think I’m fairly quick to forgive. I think it makes me feel better to forgive.

Dan: So it’s all about you?

Aaron: It’s all about me, man. Forgiveness is all about me. It’s a very selfishDan: You’re a hedonic, a hedonist but you’re a forgiver?

Aaron: But it’s true. It does make you feel better.

Dan: Yeah.

Aaron: It does make you feel better.

Dan: And that’s why you should do it, right?

Aaron: The act of forgiving is-

Dan: Is that your guiding moral compass?

Aaron: What? That if it feels good, do it? That’s what I live my life by Dan.Dan: You sound like a devil worshiper.

Aaron: Well no. But that quote by Nelson Mandela it’s good one.

Dan: Yeah, that’s a great one.

Aaron: About hatred is like drinking poison and how … Finish it off for me.

Expecting it to kill others, how does it go? Can you remember?

Dan: It goes, let me think here.

Aaron: I don’t know it. It’s in the story. Look it up in the story.

Dan: Forgiveness is-

Aaron: It’s like drinking poison-

Dan: Like a box of chocolates.

Aaron: No, that’s Forest Gump.

Dan: That’s Forest Gump.

Aaron: He and Nelson Mandela were quite a bit different.Dan: No. Forgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to get hurt.

Aaron: Yeah. Expecting it to kill your enemies, or waiting for it to kill your enemies. Or something like that, right?

Dan: I think you just ruined it. But I forgive you.

Aaron: Okay. I forgive myself. Hey. Self-forgiveness is important too.

Dan: That’s easy.

Aaron: It’s not that easy.

Dan: That’s easy. Hatred is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.

Aaron: That’s right, hoping it will kill your enemies. Of course that would never happen. So forgiveness is the antidote to that poison.

Dan: Right. Mandela, I was reading a little bit about him recently and what he went through in prison.

Aaron: Oh yeah. It was terrible.

Dan: They really feared him, even in prison.Aaron: Even in prison.

Dan: He immediately started organizing the prisoners and protesting the conditions and trying to keep alive his fight against apartheid. And the guards, most of them treated him really badly. I think once they made him dig a grave.

Aaron: Oh, really?

Dan: I think they made him think they were going to shoot him in the grave. And then these two guards urinated on him. They were just really trying to break him down, humiliate him, break his spirit and they never could.

Until the point where the government was negotiating with a man in prison, realizing that the end was near and trying to work out some deal. That was … I was reading about how he’s famous for forgiving the apartheid government that had been oppressing black people. And how it wasn’t just purely a spiritual decision. He was a very practical man. He realized that that was the way forward for South Africa, was through forgiveness and that for one, reconciliation was necessary to avoid violence.

And for two, for Africa to succeed economically, they needed the apartheid government. There were a lot of people there that were necessary for the South African economy and to run the bureaucracy. It really was a tactical strategic decision that he made. But-

Aaron: Very political. Politically astute.Dan: But not an easy decision. There were a lot of people that wanted vengeance.

Aaron: Yes, they wanted revenge on the government. I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there that would like to take revenge on the man who invented the pop-up. The endlessly annoying pop-up that ruins the internet experience.

Dan: It’s so funny that people are so upset that they’re sending him death threats.

Aaron: Pop-up. The poor guy. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Dan: Zuckerman, we forgive you.

Aaron: Yeah, we forgive you. We’ve actually experimented with pop-ups on our website. Have we not?

Dan: Have we?

Aaron: Maybe, we must have in the past at some point.

Dan: I don’t think so.

Aaron: I’ve never been a big fan of pop-ups.

Dan: I think you were principally against it.Aaron: Yeah. I don’t like pop-ups.

Dan: I don’t think we’ve ever done that.

Aaron: Really? We must have done one or two at some point.

Dan: If we did, it wasn’t in the sense that Zuckerman a pop-up advertisement.

Aaron: No, it wasn’t an advertisement. They’re pretty annoying.

Dan: It was interesting that he was just looking for a solution to a problem. And he ended up creating this monster.

Aaron: I think a lot of problems in the world start out with good intentions. But then switch to … Or people find uses for what you’ve created that are not so good. I’m sure Albert Einstein had a few issues with that.

Dan: What do you mean?

Aaron: With the atomic, with did his research into it.

Dan: But yeah, it’s interesting that he feels bad about the pop-up ad, but he really feels that enabling advertising to piggyback on top of free content was one of the worst things that he did, or he helped do. Or he helped enable that through his pop-up and finding ways to appease advertisers.Aaron: I thought it was also very interesting that had that not happened, the internet might be much different than it is now. In a way that you would have to pay for content for everything in different ways. Advertising allows us to get free content without paying for it.

Dan: Yeah, but you know that’s the way TV works too. So I’m not sure he was right that the internet would crumble just because.

Aaron: No I don’t think it would. I think it would just be far different than it is now. We’d have to pay for our content.

Dan: I think, even without him, advertising would find a way. They would find solutions because there’s so much money in it. They can see the model, the model is TV. That’s what they’re following. Then again, movies aren’t funded by advertising.

Aaron: A lot of news media is. And if you want to keep your news organization going you’ve got to attract viewers. In order to attract viewers you have to sometimes make things a little more exciting than the actually are. To get the views and keep the revenue coming in.

Dan: Regardless of what your model is whether you’re funding through advertising or you’re funding through interest. I think news companies, they’re always going to be pandering to what they think people want, which is drama and sensationalism.Aaron: But that’s sort of humorous in a way. But the story that follows is not so humorous.

Dan: It’s such a heavy story. I felt like we needed that. The Zuckerman story.

Aaron: To balance the lesson a little bit.

Dan: I’m really not sure how I feel. It’s easy to say, “Oh. How wonderful that he was able to forgive this man.” Or, “We should all aspire to be more forgiving.”

Aaron: But would you be able to do that?

Dan: Regardless of whether you would or you wouldn’t, is that the right thing to do?

Aaron: Is it the right thing to do? Yeah.

Dan: Is it the right thing for him as a grieving father? Is it the right thing to offer that compassion to someone that evil?

Aaron: There’s different ways of looking at that. Maybe the guy’s not evil, he’s just done many evil things. I think that’s how he looked at it. What’s his name? Hector Black?

Dan: Hector Black, yeah.Aaron: I think that’s how he looked at it. Remember the quote when he looked into the guy’s eyes, he saw someone full of suffering?

Dan: Yeah.

Aaron: It’s like, “Okay. I hate what you have done with all of my heart, but I forgive you.” I think if we are able to separate the actions from the actual being on the inside, maybe that kind of forgiveness is possible.

Dan: But does that make the world a better place because there’s some guyAaron: That’s what I was thinking about. Let’s say that everyone forgave people for all the evil actions that they’ve taken. If you were truly of evil intent then you would logically come to the conclusion, “Well it doesn’t matter what I do because everyone’s going to forgive me anyway. So I’ll just go and rape and pillage and steal and cause havoc and kill people because I’ll just be forgiven.” So it doesn’t really work does it?

Dan: Then you could project forward to, what good is forgiveness? Beyond perhaps forgiving, healing the soul of the forgiver who doesn’t have to carry this hatred.

Aaron: But that’s a big thing for the person that’s carrying the hatred. And that’s you and me and whoever is suffering from it. If someone killed my daughter in the same way that his daughter died, yeah, I would be full of tremendous negativity and grief and sorrow and everything else. If I found that to forgive was a way out of that, I might choose that. If it helped me and if it helped the other guy, even better.Dan: I wonder if that’s something that most people can make that choice, that maybe it’s not a choice. Actually, Hector Black says it wasn’t a choice for him.

Aaron: What wasn’t a choice?

Dan: Forgiveness. He says, “I know people think I’m a fool, but I had no choice but to forgive.”

Aaron: Oh, because the alternative would mean-

Dan: Well we don’t know if because he was so, in such a dark place that that was the only way to escape or if he felt a spiritual imperative for whatever his concept of God was. It’s not really clear. But if you take him at his word that it wasn’t a choice, then perhaps the same thing, the ability to not forgive, it’s not really a choice for someone who is full of rage.

Aaron: On a very simple level, it seems living in a harmonious peaceful society seems impossible without forgiveness. If we want to move in that direction, we’ve got to teach forgiveness and uphold it as a great thing. On a simple level.

Obviously it’s more complex than that, but how do you live in a world of peace if people don’t forgive? They just carry around all this negativity towards others.

Dan: I think the thing with the Hector Black story, why it causes a lot of controversy, when I first heard about this story in this podcastAaron: Yeah, I was pretty shocked actually, when I heard it for the first time.Dan: And you look in the comments section, and man, it’s a war zone.

Aaron: Oh I can imagine. People like, “What’s wrong with you? Why would you?”

Dan: And other people thinking, “Oh this is so wonderful.” But other people saying-

Aaron: That’s pretty strange because he actually befriended the guy right?

Dan: Yeah.

Aaron: They have communication. They have a relationship now. And this is the guy that murdered your own daughter. That is quite far out.

Dan: And in the beginning, a lot of their communication was about what really happened. It’s very dark, what he did to the daughter.

Aaron: And those details are not in this story right?

Dan: There are, we’ll link to it and if anybody wants to hear the actual story … It’s quite dark and that Hector Black didn’t know the extent of what he had done to his daughter. He knew that his daughter had been murdered. But after he forgave him and started a relationship with Ivan, he wanted the details. So Ivan had to put all these dark details about what he actually did to his daughter. And then that was the beginning of their relationship.I think it evolved past that and he said, now they just write each other about trivial things like what books they’re reading or what’s happening in the garden or just … It’s hard to imagine. It’s really going beyond this real extreme. It’s not just like, “Okay I forgive you and I never want to have anything to do with you.

Aaron: “Let’s move on with our lives.”

Dan: “I never want to have anything to do with you. But I forgive you.” It’s like, “No. I forgive you and I’m gonna build a relationship with you.” I wonder what his daughter would think of that.

Aaron: Yeah, I don’t know.

Dan: What would you think of that? Of course, you’re dead. But imagine, if you had been murdered and then you were able to look down upon your father or your mother, building this friendship and then writing about, “Oh today I was gardening.”

Aaron: Well, okay I know what I’d feel about that. I think if it helped my parents deal with the loss and it helped them move on, then I would feel happy for them.

Dan: Okay great. But what if the choices are, they move on and they have no relationship? Or they move on and they become buddies?

Aaron: I wouldn’t judge. I would just say that’s a little weird. The guy’s creeping me out, but whatever, it’s your life. You’re right. It’s extraneous. It’s not necessary, right? Dan: Yeah.

Aaron: Maybe in his case it was.

Dan: Maybe it was the only way.

Aaron: It’s hard to imagine. But something similar took place with the American that was tortured or held prisoner, a prisoner of war in Thailand, and later developed a relationship.

Dan: He was British.

Aaron: Oh he was British, sorry.

Dan: Yeah, Lomax.

Aaron: Lomax. And he developed a relationship with his captor, who I assume tortured him as well.

Dan: He participated in the torture.

Aaron: He participated in it. And then later developed a relationship with him.

Dan: That I can understand. I can understand forgiving somebody during wartime and you’re still alive and it didn’t happen to your flesh and blood. I can’t imagine if somebody were to kill my child.Aaron: Oh right.

Dan: I don’t know. I hope maybe if … Actually, I don’t know that I hope that I could forgive them. I don’t know, it just seems like … Part of me feels it’s meaningless.

It’s like, who are you to forgive? That’s great if it heals you, but it’s as if you’re doing something for this tortured soul. And are you really? By saying, you’re forgiven.

Aaron: I don’t know. I hope we never find that out.

Dan: It’s a wild story and the one about Lomax and Nagase it’s much easier to understand.

Aaron: Yeah, right, right.

Dan: But that’s very interesting that Lomax in this other extreme, he held on to this rage for almost 50 years. He must have been in his 70s when he’s flying around the world thinking, “I’m gonna murder this guy.” He’s like a 70 year old man, in his 70s.

Aaron: Hunting him down, right?

Dan: Yeah.

Aaron: That’s another pretty amazing story.Dan: And then that all changed when he felt that sincerity and that humility and … I guess he was able to recognize the humanity in what he had been thinking of as a monster for the past 50 years. Nagase, I would like to learn more about his life. It sounds like he did a lot of good things. Protesting war. I read that he faced a lot of backlash in Japan for trying to publicize what he felt Japan had done wrong in the war.

Aaron: I see. ‘Cause he was an activist?

Dan: Yeah. He was really sticking his neck out and probably getting a lot of backlash from conservatives that didn’t want to-

Aaron: Sure, people in power.

Dan: People who didn’t want to face up to-

Aaron: What had actually happened in those camps.

Dan: Yeah.

Aaron: Forgiveness. It’s okay Dan. I forgive you.

Dan: You don’t have any right to forgive nothing.

Aaron: I forgive you for all that you’ve done, all the-Dan: People in glass houses don’t get to forgive. That’s a mixed metaphor. Don’t practice that one people. People in glass houses. What is it again? People in glass houses can’t throw stones?

Aaron: Yeah, you can’t throw stones or something like that.

Dan: Well they can’t forgive either buddy.

Aaron: Oh yes they can. I forgive you Dan.

Dan: Look deep into your-

Aaron: You should accept my forgiveness…

Dan: Dark rotting-

Aaron: …for your own well being.

Dan: Thank you. I feel much better.

Aaron: I’m sure you do.

Dan: Alright, until next time.

Aaron: Okay man, see you later.

Dan: Adios.