I recently saw this article online:
http://mobile.slate.com/articles/life/family/2013/02/abusive_parents_what_do_grown_children_owe_the_mothers_and_fathers_who_made.html

It's a very good article, and got me thinking. A quotation will illustrate the track of my thought:
'The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal.

Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.

They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness.

These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.' -Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

I am constantly enjoined to forgive my father, along with platitudes that he can't be all bad, and that everyone deserves some care and love. I always thought that this was part people not understanding, and part them reacting to my dislike for him by trying to moderate the opinions they heard.
As the article says, even some good qualities don't redeem a mostly evil person. I also happen to think that the argument doesn't apply to my father, but that's another story (about the sum of many small annoyances).

However, people don't always just take a contrary point of view. I do, myself, a lot of the time: it's part of my questioning nature (I like to think). I think this writer is correct: people say it because they have a general idea that I shouldn't let 'bad' emotions fester. I want to address this concept. If I want to avoid giving nasty people 'power over me', as people often like to call holding grudges, it's best done by not letting them get away with things and weakly rolling over and telling myself it's fine. That sort of self-delusion is not healthy. It's wrong even if I can't do anything about it. Morality doesn't depend on the likelihood of justice actually being done. It's not alright if someone's wronged me: that's an oxymoron. It's wrong if someone's wronged me.

This begins to explain the link between the article on abusive parents and A Brave New World. Every time someone tells me just to make my peace with my father, it rankles: it goes against my very nature. I might have the wrong moral principles (again, another argument) but I do value them highly. Principles are an essential part of who I am. And yet making peace with someone evil is ignoring every moral qualm about them; it's the ultimate act of mercy, but the people who push for it, which seems to be an overwhelming proportion of the population, talk of it as necessary for my well-being. If I try hard enough, perhaps I can dismiss wrongs and injustices and be at peace with a world that inflicts them.

 It's this supposed link between my well-being and throwing aside morality that really disturbs me. I've been urged many times effectively to forget my moral concerns and think instead of my mental health. I'm not convinced that paying attentiont to morality is bad for one's health, but even  if it is, that's too high a price to pay for a little bit of well-being.
This is a symptom of a wider problem in society: our focus on ourselves at the expense of moral principles. Greed is good, after all, so it must be good to forgive wrong-doers if it helps me. But even ignoring the  parallels with capitalism and some of the nastier assumptions/requirements of economics, it shows that a lot of people genuinely value 'adjustment' over morality. It shows that people cannot imagine that I'd have a moral concern about it, and so the appeal to self-interest then makes sense. If all these people urging forgiveness had a notion of justice, or understood that justice takes precedence over self-interest, they'd never suggest such a ludicrous notion as forgetting a lost childhood (or mother) and making friends with the person who caused it.
When society wrongs us, many people become small-minded: they focus on individuals they know who exemplify some sort of unfairness. A recent survey found that the people who will suffer from the recent round of cuts of government benefits all despise each other as being scroungers: people spoke of the people down the road who clearly got too much. None of them cares that it's a load of politicians and bankers who made the cuts necessary (to an extent: it's certainly an argument you'd expect to hear a lot but didn't come up).
That's because we've all learned from a young age to 'forgive and forget', because that's good for us. There's even a revolting prayer I first heard on the lips of an equally revolting (now ex) girlfriend: 'give us the serenity to accept those things we cannot change'. I know that the interpretation of the prayer can vary from person to person, but the general intent seems to me the same. It's saying 'please let me throw away my moral principles and accept whatever injustices are bothering me'. 
If well-being is more important than other concerns, a recent study showing that people with attachment anxiety have weaker immune systems suggests that everyone who worries about their partner, gets upset and starts rows, or cares about cheating should just discard their concerns and move on with life. The double-standard here annoys me. I can imagine someone trying to justify it as being about the future, rather than the past, but I don't think that changes anything.
This focus on forgiveness and humility worked well to spread Christianity through the oppressed classes of the world. It makes people easily-dominated and persuades them to accept what they shouldn't. As an individual, if someone really can find that serenity, it might benefit the person's health. But it diminishes him as a person. A respectable human knows right and wrong, cares about morality and isn't a doormat to be trampled. For every act of unearned forgiveness there's an act of unjustified wrongdoing. If we get too deeply into the mindset of forgiveness, we forget what makes us human: our memories, sentience and morality. 'Closure' on my grudges is also closure on my humanity.

I bear grudges because although I know I can't change some things right now, I get my serenity from dreaming of them made right. The past is indeed the past, but we shouldn't forget it. We should learn from it.