forgiving the well-known

Most people like to be righteously indignant about someone else's objectively bad behavior.  I am no different.  The question I have is at what point do we need to let that indigence go and allow for someone to move on with their lives.

A few years back I posted on the requirement in the Christian faith on forgiveness.  It is expected to be unwavering and absolute, because our level of forgiveness reflects our level of acceptance of the position we have in relation to God.  This is not an expectation for non-believers, for Jesus himself stated that the one who has been forgiven little loves little (Luke 7:47), but there are no exceptions for Christians.  We are to forgive as we have been forgiven, and that is an astronomical standard to meet.

The first universal examples of where this becomes difficult that spring to my mind are with celebrities. Names that spring to mind of people who others seem to find difficult to forgive for their real or perceived sins are Michael Vick, Mel Gibson, Tonya Harding, and Kanye West.  For my own part, one person who always rubbed me the wrong way is the former Phillies outfielder, and later flawed investment adviser Lenny Dykstra.  This was mostly due to his reputation for brash obnoxiousness, but he also served time for bankruptcy fraud and money laundering.

Celebrities are easier to forgive than the next group that springs to mind: dictators and war criminals.  Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, the entire Kim family in North Korea, are the easiest names to generate in my mind.  These are just the well-known ones, though.  In reality, just the last hundred years has seen thousands of people who violently abused their positions of power.  None of these people ever wronged me or my family, so I am not in a position to need to forgive them, but how could a person do it?

My issue is that it is difficult for me not to think of myself as morally superior in my own self to many of the people whose names I have listed.  I don't think I am alone in that.  It seems a low bar to imagine myself as better than someone who is renown for their failings.  As long as I allow myself to dwell there, though, my pride is every bit as evil to God as the crimes of those other individuals.  That is my struggle.