I said I’d write about the apology to indigenous Australians and I meant to at length, but that was before Doug and I popped La Vie en Rose into the DVD player. Intense movie and lengthy. Very, very impressive. I knew Edith Piaf had a hard life but I had no idea it was that hard.
Actually, it ties in. Piaf was abandoned by her mother at a young age, dragged out of another home by her father, dumped with her grandmother at the brothel she ran and then picked up again and rippedfrom this home by her father again when he decided he wanted her. Unsurprisingly, she became a drunk and a drug abuser and had some issues. We watch a film like this and we criticise the perpetrators and we feel sorry for her and for some of them because we understand it’s a cycle. And we want her father and her mother to say, “I’m sorry, Edith. I thought I was doing the right thing by you but I fucked up.”
That’s what saying sorry is about. It’s not about saying, I did something evil and I was wrong. That’s atonement. I was brought up Jewish, I know the difference. Feeling sorry is about understanding that despite your best intentions, a course of action was wrong. And saying sorry is the beginning of making amends. Of mending the gap between what you meant to do and what actually occurred.
Brendan Nelson, the leader of the Opposition, seems to think that when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologises tomorrow morning, it is disrespectful to Church leaders and government workers who acted on orders or according to policies or beliefs that they thought were beneficent. It’s not. It’s acknowledging that those orders, those policies, were misguided. And apologising for their unintended effects.
It is instead profoundly respectful to the people who were damaged by those orders and policies. Those people who, unsurprisingly, became drunks and drug abusers after they were torn from their families, but for some reason, we don’t want the “perpetrators” in this story to apologise and we don’t want to see the cycle.
Children stomp around refusing to apologise for their acts, saying “I didn’t mean it!” Adults understand that it is an act of maturity to stand by our actions, own them, and offer sincere and heartfelt sorrow for damage we have caused, unintentionally or not. Australia as a nation-state may have been ‘born’ on January 1, 1901. It will reach its majority on February 13, 2008.