So sorry

Everyone has things they regret. (Well, maybe not everyone, but you know what I mean.) The words that shouldna been said. Things should/shouldna been done. From when we were all very young, and didn't know any better, but that didn't matter. (Tell you sometime about a very young me and my Aunt Claire.) So one of the first things we learn is saying we're sorry. Even forgiveness is given but not believed or forgiveness is not given or given conditionally, or... You know the story, don't you?
But lately, apologies and forgiveness have taken a new sphere. We have assumed a global form of cynicism. We hold all apologies as suspect automatically, and forgiveness is given too easily or not at all/
Now, granted, with many in the public/political arena, the practice is to speak/act first, apologize after. It is akin to the courtroom practice of asking the witness a question that will be objected to, but the very act of asking it will hopefully bring up a forbidden subject. The idea is: I will say this or that, and the audience I am aiming at will hear only that and pay no attention to the apology.
This has contaminated the very concept of sincere repentance, much less forgiveness. Even though we Christians are supposed to pray regularly that we forgive and are forgiven, we seem to have difficulty receiving, much less giving. And the category of the unforgivable has become broader and broader.
The deeper problem is that we are unwilling to accept others. We cannot forgive because we do not want to open ourselves to others. Or we may be overly aware of our own flaws and failures so that we expect them in others/fear others will know them in us.
It is sad but true that we do not trust others now. There are people who can be bad, but we tend to go beyond that to include people we disagree with politically, spiritually, geographically, even what baseball team you root for. (Uh, go Red Sox?) Yet there are people I love that I disagree with about some or all of the above.
There was a time in my life when I hurt some of the people I love. (Story for 'nother time.) And I apologized. Boy, did I apologize. Over and over. Finally, a person I loved and had hurt told me: stop. The very act of repetitive contrition was having the opposite effect from what I intended. The point is we need  forgiveness but we also should forgive ourselves. And we should forgive others, not worrying if they accept our forgiveness. (Or even feel they need it.) The whole point is letting go.