“People should be held accountable for things they did 40 years ago because some acts are irredeemable”
Is a pretty common statement lately, particularly about abuse and assault, but I think it’s more a matter of
“People should be held accountable for things they did 40 years ago because they have had 40 years to redeem their actions and they chose not to. Because they have had 40 years to admit what they had done, change their behavior and try to repair some of the damage done. That’s 14.600 days, and on every day they chose to benefit from keeping their acts a secret, which was a new day on which they inflicted harm on their victims. Every day of secrecy, more harm.”
THAT’s what’s going on.
Becoming a better person is possible. Which doesn’t mean ‘all is forgiven’, or ‘we all act like it never happened’. What it means is: a person can realize that their behavior was horrible, stop doing it, admit their acts and accept the consequences and try to fix the parts of the damage that can be fixed. And while they will never stop being the person that once did the harm, they will be a better person in the now. That process, not the passing of time, is what matters in how we treat someone’s history of harmful behavior. And in these old cases, that process was never started, instead harm was continued.
It’s not about deciding what acts are ‘irredeemable‘, it’s about acknowledging the incredible harm done not just by the act but by the silence that followed it.
