Act Four/Scene Four to A Complex Apology:  The Apology

SCENE FOUR:     Our block politician, the one elected, made it a little easier for us to thread this needle when he went on a national radio show and talked in person with the son of the woman killed in the bank robbery.  The first thing our politician said was how deeply sorry the whole community of Saint Paul was that he had lost his mother, and that whether Joy had ever said it or not, we were apologizing for her actions.  In turn, the California son, in a most kind gesture, said that he understood Joy was raising three daughters, and apparently doing a good job at that, and wished the family his best.

Back in the neighborhood, and in the local paper, our politician elaborated on the apology as an apology for all unjust behavior, the Government’s too, and even got one of the sons of the 1960s Chicago Mayor to agree that his dad should have handled the 1968 Democratic Convention in a better way.  Together the two made the point that you have to have an honest reckoning of the past in order to set a best possible course for the future.

In the end I decided I could support Joy whether I believed in her cause or not based upon the premise that the person you are in your 20s is not always the person you are in your 30s or 40s.  The cause doesn’t matter so much.  Although I could think of no good reason for being a Nazi sympathizer, and I couldn’t imagine myself ever putting any trust or faith in someone who once was on the side of the Nazi’s, it was really Joy’s interactions with our community which I was going on.

Opinions as to the righteousness of her cause, or any other cause, whether the opinion of a holocaust victim or the opinion of a Ukrainian who viewed World War II Germany as an ally in the Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination, were just that – someone else’s opinion.  All I could go on were her interactions with me, and my trust in her judgment going forward.  I didn’t have to consider “what if her cause had been ….”.  But it helped that at least someone had apologized for the killing and that the son of the woman killed had been so forgiving as to wish her family well.

So it was that we each threaded the needle of what to think about Joy.  Seven years later upon her release from prison just about every one of us embraced Joy.  We felt we knew the real Joy, assumed name or not, and that the actions she took with us in the 80s and 90s represented the real person she was.  That though by destiny of circumstance she had lived the turbulent 60s and early 70s in a way most of us could barely imagine, in the end she went on to do good things to make the world a better place.  The criminal part, though real, should not cast a permanent dye.

THE END

P.S. . . . . but this is not the end of my creative writing. If you are enjoying reading these daily snippets, and you choose not to unsubscribe, tomorrow you can start reading my novel, The Rumpkins, again in daily doses.