An Eye for an Eye Still Leaves the World Blind

Lately, I have been noticing something that has been sitting very heavy on my heart. I see more and more people calling for accountability in the world (including myself), which in itself is not a bad thing. Accountability is necessary. Without consequences, without responsibility, without boundaries, a society cannot function and the vulnerable are left unprotected.

But what has been troubling me is the way I see accountability being spoken about more and more often. It is no longer just about responsibility or consequences. It is about elimination. It is about wishing people gone, erased, removed from existence, as if their disappearance would somehow heal the damage that has been done.

And I understand the feeling behind that. When we see cruelty, abuse, corruption, or injustice, something very primal awakens in us. We want the harm to stop. We want the pain to stop. We want the world to feel fair again. There is a part of the human heart that believes that if the person who caused the harm disappears, then balance will be restored.

But I am not sure that is true.

Many years ago, when Saddam Hussein was executed, I remember opening Facebook and seeing celebration posts. People were posting messages of joy that this man was no longer alive. And I understood why people felt that way. The things he had done were horrific. There is no denying that.

But I wrote something that surprised a lot of people on my feed. I wrote that I hoped that in his last moments he had repented and that he was now sitting in the presence of God. At that time in my life I still carried remnants of my religious upbringing, so I used the language of God and forgiveness, but what I was really trying to express was compassion.

The reaction was immediate. Several people commented, asking me how in the world, I could possibly wish that for such an evil man. They were angry that I would even say something like that about someone who had caused so much suffering.

And I remember responding with something very simple. I said; "Because the God I believe in is a merciful father who would forgive you no matter what."

What confused me then, and still confuses me now, is that many of the people who were the most upset with me were people who called themselves Christians or Catholics, religions built on the very foundation of forgiveness, mercy, and redemption. That moment has stayed with me for years because it made me realize something important. Many of us say we believe in mercy, but only for certain people. Many of us say we believe in forgiveness, but only for certain sins. Many of us say we believe people can change, but only when it is someone we love who has made the mistake.

But if mercy only applies to the people we like, or only when it does not challenge our beliefs, then it is not really mercy.

This does not mean I believe people should not face consequences. This does not mean I believe dangerous people should be free to continue hurting others. Society must be protected. Accountability must exist. Consequences must be real and sometimes very severe.

But there is a difference between consequence and vengeance. There is a difference between protection and hatred. There is a difference between justice and the emotional satisfaction of seeing someone suffer because they made others suffer.

To me, true accountability is not about erasing a person from existence. It is about responsibility. It is about facing what you have done. It is about living with the consequences of your actions. It is about being confronted with the reality of the harm you caused and, if there is any humanity left in you, being changed by that realization.

When we wish death upon someone, even someone who has done terrible things, we have to ask ourselves a very uncomfortable question. Are we seeking justice, or are we seeking emotional satisfaction? Are we trying to protect society, or are we trying to satisfy our own anger?

Because if we are honest, wishing harm, even to those who have caused harm (and believe me the Epstein Files has a lot of stuff to be furious about), keeps us emotionally tied to the very thing we claim to be against. It keeps us in the same cycle of destruction, just from the other side.

I have always felt that every morning we wake up, we are being given something extraordinary: another chance. Another day to learn, to change, to grow, to see differently, to become differently. None of us are the same person we were ten years ago, or even five years ago. Life, if we are paying attention, changes us.

The possibility of redemption is always available for all of us.

So when we decide that someone no longer deserves another day, we are making a very big decision about what we believe a human being is. Are we only the worst thing we have ever done? Or are we something more complicated than that?

Death ends the story.

And when the story ends, so does the possibility of remorse, awareness, growth, or transformation. A lifetime of consequences, a lifetime of facing what one has done, a lifetime of understanding the pain one has caused, that to me feels closer to accountability than simply ending a life and calling it justice.

If what we truly want is a better world, then we have to be very careful that in our outrage at cruelty, we do not become comfortable with cruelty ourselves. History has shown us, over and over again, that when people become convinced that certain humans are beyond redemption, it becomes very easy to justify doing terrible things to them.

I am not writing this because I think I am morally superior or because I have all the answers. I am writing this because I ask myself these questions too. I also feel anger. I also feel outrage when I see injustice. I also understand the very human desire to see bad people pay for what they have done.

But deep in my heart, I do not believe that wishing death heals the world. I think it hardens it.

I do not dream of a world where all bad people disappear. I dream of a world where fewer people become bad in the first place.

I dream of a world where redemption is found through compassion, where accountability exists but hatred does not lead the conversation, where our spirits are allowed to evolve instead of being frozen in their worst mistakes.

I dream of a world where, one day, the suffering of humanity begins to lessen, not because we learned how to destroy each other more efficiently, but because we finally learned how to heal.

Maybe the real measure of our humanity is not how we treat the good and the kind, but how we choose to think about the ones who have fallen the farthest.

Because justice without mercy hardens the world, but mercy without accountability endangers it. The real work is learning how to hold both.

And perhaps that is the hardest work of all.... we are all worthy of redemption

☥