It is useless to try to adjudicate a long-standing animosity by asking who started it or who is the most wrong. The only sufficient answer is to give up the animosity and try forgiveness, to try to love our enemies and to talk to them and (if we pray) to pray for them. If we can’t do any of that, then we must begin again by trying to imagine our enemies’ children who, like our children, are in mortal danger because of enmity that they did not cause.

Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist

Essay (2003-02-09), “A Citizen’s Response,” sec. 4, Citizenship Papers (2003)
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The essay, including this passage, was also published in a longer form in Orion Magazine (2003-03/04), and collected in his Citizenship Papers (2003).