Faith & Spirit Quote by Don Young

Forgiveness is framed here less as a private moral victory than as a civic technology: a way to turn damage into forward motion. Don Young, a blunt-force, long-serving Alaska congressman, isn’t offering a therapist’s soothing. He’s making a pitch for a particular kind of agency. The line “you’ve got to be willing” puts the burden on the individual’s will, not on the offender’s remorse or on structural repair. That’s a politician’s instinct: locate a lever ordinary people can pull when institutions are slow, messy, or absent.

The religious appeal does two jobs at once. “God, get something good out of something bad” acknowledges real harm without lingering in it; it’s a short prayer that doubles as a strategy. Invoking God also moves the speaker out of the crossfire. Young isn’t promising he can fix what went wrong; he’s proposing a partnership where the citizen chooses forgiveness and the divine (or providence, or history) handles the alchemy. That’s rhetorically shrewd in public life, where promises are currency and disappointment is guaranteed.

The subtext is conditional hope: “if you’ll make that choice... God will do it.” The ellipsis matters. It’s a pause that mimics the gap between injury and meaning, the uncomfortable wait for something good to arrive. Read in the context of politics - grievance-driven, adversarial, permanently stuck on replay - the quote functions like an off-ramp. Not justice-as-revenge, not healing-as-forgetting, but pragmatism with a spiritual backbone: choose release so you can keep living, and trust that the waste won’t be wasted.