The drive to move on is forgetful. The failure to remember holds within it the comfort and ease of not having to recall often painful incidents, as well as the threat of repeating cyclical patterns. Breaking a cycle is hard.

When I was a kid, all the neighborhood parks had a merry-go-round. Not the elaborate kind with flower clad horses and music and electricity, requiring an adult operator. I am talking about the ones made out of basic steel.  They were disks, with “n” shaped wedges welded atop for kids to hang onto while one of the kids spun it by grabbing hold and running. We didn’t learn about centrifugal force in science class. We learned about it in the park holding on for dear life, trying not to fly off the merry-go-round. Life is a lot like that merry-go-round. We grab hold as hard as we can so that life doesn’t toss us out on our ass and keep spinning without us. That merry-go-round fiasco reminds me of forgiveness.

The concept of forgiveness circulates in our society as a kind of panacea for what ails the wounded heart. Forgiveness is like a pass that grants us permission to stay on the ride. It doesn’t matter if the last go round you got thrown off and hit our head and you’ve probably got a concussion, no one noticed nor cares. Now the other kids are leaning with their hands held out for you to smack as they spin by. You don’t want to be the one standing off to the side smacking fives while the other kids have a go at it. All you want is to get back on for the next go round. So you get back on, and maybe the next time, some other kid hits her head when she flies off.

Forgiveness, we are told, mends the injured from the continuing violation of past wrongs. An old hurt lives into the present moment because we remember it, while forgiving and forgetting locks the hurt into a finite time frame. Then we are able to move on with our lives, leaving the wrong in the past. Because the work is internal, forgiveness benefits the one doing the forgiving more than the one who has been offered grace.

See, I get the concept of forgiveness. But I don’t buy it. Forgiveness forsakes the psychic and social value of accountability. Accountability is the way that an individual is held to collective standards. Unlike forgiveness, accountability demands remembrance. The community—WE—remember what was done, in order to determine what must not be done. And doing so, helps the individual psyche while working in favor of the common good. Without accountability there is no social justice. And without justice, civil society erodes.

Life has, indeed, moved on following all kinds of traumas. Empires rise and fall. The world has continued to spin around its axis, and spiral through space within the galaxy. Life has been happening with and without us for millennia. But if life is a great experiment in creating meaningful order, that order begins, not with forgiveness, but in equitable systems of accountability. Let’s start at home.