FORGIVENESS: is it  outdated? 

Only a free person can really forgive / to ask forgiveness. 
This discourse can appear "dated", out fashion. Today's nobody wants to hear this loser discourse. The dominant ideology (increased from the American movies and from our TV ) has created shame for these forms of expression from the heart. It needs to be "winning" and merciless (or also only condescending). And they also created a special word, "buonista" with which they ridiculize those people that only mention the understanding, the acceptance of views different from the proper ones. 
It needs, I said, to have the freedom, or at least a certain degree of freedom to be able to forgive or to ask forgiveness. It needs to dare leave to go the really "itself" or better the fake idea of a substantial self that we have built there. If this deep vision is not had, the vision of the nonexistence of a stable self , someone could be able yes to forgive but maintaining the grudge. How?! You owned "personality" has been outraged by the other person, our self" so almighty has been challenged by somebody else, is there a humiliation that we don't feel to deserve! But if we hold to the relationship with the other person, we can become aware not to be able to set her all the guilts (even if we would like it, even if we do so gladly it). We were also there, in this relationship and this is an insight that we should cultivate: independent people don't exist, we belong to relationships, to connections, to experiences of relationship in which three elements are given always: the two subjects and their relationship; we could say rather that the relationship exists, only a relationship of inter-being where it dominates the law of cause-effect and secondary conditionality. 
That's why it is said that a true self doesn't exist in absolute terms: theself exists but only in conditioned terms, conditioned by a whole series of factors. The Buddha for instance during the night of the Awakening saw really this: in his samadhi there was no trace of a self, in the ultimate dimension any trace of a self was not found; and also in conventional level he was not able but to speak of relationships. We are our relationships, we are the million of impressions and experiences that we receive in relationship with the world, with the experience. Since we are conditioned from this whole inter-being, our life inevitably changes; what was important yesterday it is not today and vice versa; yesterday's enemy is today's friend and yesterday's friend it is the person that we don't appreciate today. 
But if we are the relationship, nobody can be seen as the enemy. If we are the relationship, a self doesn't exist really and far more an "adversary"self . Everything simply happens, there are events not things. In these events there is not a true self at work but powers. And you cannot be attached to this bundle of powers at work (even if we doit!). For this it is said that at ultimate levels last doesn't exist the Good and the Evil (with the Capital letters): if bundles of powers exist only , which Good and Evil can be recovered badly as absolutes? To tell it in simple terms, Satan doesn't exist; powers perhaps exist, powers' bundles solidified in some perverse connection, but the Evil doesn't exist in absolute. Also Hitler, also Stalin, also Pol Pot have had their flashes of goodness. 
Therefore, jumping here from the personal plan to the international one, after September 11 the United States, in the expression of the ineffable President Bush, would have had not to blindly react , with the usual spirit of the revenge that comes from the Bible (the famous Eye for Eye): they would perhaps have had to practice some introspection and "to see": to see for instance their connections of causality with the Middle-East World , the powers at work that motivate the American politics (nationalistic egoism, thirst of money and power, mania of power), assassins' regimes not only set up in power but the same killings perpetrated by the American secret services in decades of international politics: the various Pinochets, Saddam and other dictators, all the characters with the hands dirty of blood not only financed but sustained with direct interventions; the atomic, chemical and biological weapons developed to tons really from the same USA... and so on. If America had dared look at herself beyond the image that wants to give, she would have seen something terrible. But this doesn't mean to guilt USA to unique sense: equal comprimaries were also other countries if not worse: ex-USSR, China etc.. However each has to look at his house and it would not have been bad then perhaps, for the United States, to follow the example of the Pope that has dared ask for forgiveness in various directions for the crimes and the bloodshed actuated by the same Church in the centuries. But to ask forgiveness means "to see" at least some and it doesn't seem that President Bush has this faculty. 
But do you imagine what an epocal developing would have been, that of a great country as USA that dare examine his guilts and not to create the enemy, the Evil, but to ask forgiveness? 
This would have imposed a dramatic turn to History, the strength of not-violence against which any other action of violence would be broken, against which any other murderous hand would be felt delegittimated. We would finally passed from the Prehistory to the History! From the obscurities of an arrogant Self, sick of omnipotence and of violence to the light of the vision and the understanding that illuminates the human history! Certain negative episodes (as that of the Twin Towers) could be used as "Teachers": But perhaps it is easier to persevere in the old errors. 
It's unbelievable as our mind is still conditioned to act in "prehistoric"terms . They still dominate in their easy elementary relationships as dualism, the creation of an imaginary world composed by friends/enemies, the absence of true understanding of reality: then their "staticization in things" and the missed understanding of the existence of "powers". For this we speak of Awakening, of Illumination or Liberation,: it is necessary to awaken to reality, it is necessary to abandon the whole ideological trash (political and religious) that an old world and a prehistoric mind have still sedimented and only so we can reach freedom and the beginning of true History. But we don't need to reify this. It deals with processes and really for this it is necessary to ask ourselves how many occasions we lose every day to enter the personal/collecttive process of passage from the prehistory to the history, from the dualistic and dull Mind to the illuminated one and freed.