can justice ever look like forgiveness?

Last month was National Poetry Month, and my mind was preoccupied with a talk I gave on April 30 for the Greater St. Louis Hospice Organization's Volunteer Symposium on the Poetry of Hospice. I tried to blog about the process of putting this talk together, but instead of focusing me on what I wanted to say, I felt overwhelmed.  So, that's one of the main reasons I wasn't keeping up with the blog.   If you'd like more information on volunteering with any hospice, you could check out http://www.gslho.org/ or any local hospice group. 

Now.  Thinking about Osama bin Laden's death.  I wrote the beginning of what I think is a poem last night:  I stumbled on forgiveness like a gift I didn't want.  Here is what confuses me:  is it important to delineate between small scale hate, like bullying and large scale hate, like what has been perpetrated by Osama bin Laden?  I can forgive on the small scale.  In fact, in my own life, I have forgiven a number of transgressions.  Sometimes I've talked to the person who I felt wronged me, sometimes, the forgiveness was something internal.  Sometimes, I didn't even want to forgive - I even enjoyed holding onto my anger like a little souvenir from being wronged and it gave me a 'superiority' to know that I had been wronged.  But.  Over time, holding onto that anger was a waste of my energy.  The anger dissipated.  I realized that most people in our own little lives are not trying to, are not purposefully hurting us.  They are just living their lives.  Most people hurt us in ignorance, or out of the inability to get out of their own point of view, but they are not usually hurting us out of maliciousness.  What's the point in holding onto that anger or rage? 

But hate, evil, transgressions on a large scale...can that be forgiven?  Should it be forgiven?  If it is forgiven where is the justice?  I had several hospice patients who were Holocaust survivors.  Certainly, all their lives were shaped by that unimaginable experience.  But they each had a unique attitude toward it:  one man told me he "didn't go in for all this forgiveness business."   One woman said there was nothing special about her survival, only pure luck.  One woman espoused New Age philosphy/spirituality.  I think about Elie Wiesel and the great good he brings to the world through his memory and testament to the Jewish people, persecuted people everywhere and any person in despair.  Reading him, I am struck not by his damning of those who caused his suffering, but his commitment to and love of his fellow man. 

I don't know the answers here. I am challenged.  I know that forgiveness has been a good, freeing part of my own little life.  I think I am able to see  more objectively how others interact w/ me and my influence on others.  I feel a greater compassion and my own world is a  less threatening place.

On the global scale, it seems clear that some do have malicious intent toward us.  What is the ethically/morally correct response to this?  It is my gut feeling that more death and killing is not the best response, but if not that, then what?

It's very unsatisfying, but I don't have a way to wrap this up.  I would just like to raise the question(s) and continue to be a voice that is not afraid of not knowing.  A voice, that I hope without naivete or ignorance, can ponder words, ideas and feelings like Love and Forgiveness.