A few weeks ago I was engaged in conversation by a civic minded religious friend who feels that the social gospel, the work we Christians are commissioned to do, can be effectively advanced by forming alliances with local officials, quasi governmental agencies and law enforcement. We should meet with them, my friend said, and see what we can do to organize ourselves to help them raise the quality of life in our community. I strongly disagreed.
The first flaw in my friend’s thinking, it occurred to me, was in the notion that our bureaucracies and law enforcement agencies are in any real sense concerned with the quality of life in our community. Certainly, they are concerned with the quality of life in the affluent areas of town because their funding and political lives depend upon it, but our community does not lie in one of those areas. Our community is filled with people who of themselves, owing to their poverty and the unpleasant characteristics that poverty bestows, would be considered quality of life issues, undesirables to be removed, by residents of affluent communities.
Secondly, everything in my life experience tells me that law enforcement officers are among the more dangerous threats to the peace and safety of the poor and that the poor are eaten at all levels of bureaucracy, both within and without the government. The farther we can stay away from bureaucrats and policemen as we go about God’s work, the better. My friend was in disbelief at my attitude. My friend, I think, inhabits a different world.
Evil, my friend seems unaware, is in no short supply. I mean the raw and vicious sort of evil that thirsts for the blood of innocents and the defilement of the sacred. The kind of evil that incestuously delights in the union of filthy affections and greed. I am talking about the demon of the capitalist mind, the genus of filthy corruption which allows men and women in Detroit to die a fiery death for want of money to pay a utility bill.
I am talking about corruption of the soul so complete that it drives public utility employees to blindly follow orders to murder fellow citizens by depriving them of heat in the frozen days of winter. I am talking about city officials, both elected and employed, whose hearts are so calcified that they prefer that men and women should come to their ends alone and frozen in the cold to the expenditure of public funds for their relief. Evil, surely, is in no short supply, and it is living a lavish life in the offices and hallways of public utilities and in the seats of city governments across America.
Here in our city, in the cordial and congenial South, Nashville police officers chauffeur Evil nightly through the frozen streets and alleys as though it were truly a prince, a cruel and punishing prince who delights in inflicting desperation and misery upon the poor, the homeless, and women without so much as a manger in which to rest, even in childbirth. Such officers neither protect nor serve. They intimidate and abuse the most vulnerable and helpless, and victimize our daughters in the delicate moment when new life begins. What arrangement might we expect to make with such men that would advance the cause of justice or nurture compassion?
Evil loves the darkness, the secret and the unseen. It operates with precision, like clockwork, every night throughout America as law enforcement officers, federal agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) in concert with duly constituted state and local criminals wearing guns and badges, shuttle illegally held captives through a labyrinth of secret detention centers where torture and abuse are games. In these places human beings—men, women and children who bleed and feel the pain—are simply made to disappear. Dare we approach such men with our plans for the relief of the strangers among us? Dare we share with public officials in league with I.C.E. the “who and where” of undocumented immigrants in our communities? Can we reasonably look to those who deny their victims the most basic civil liberties for cooperation in our struggle to win justice for all? (see video at right)
Water is a necessity of life. Without it we die. So hard is the heart, so corrupt is the soul, of public officials blindly enforcing every jot and tittle of Evil’s law that for money, nothing more than money, water is taken from the glasses of children. They go unwashed to school, their mothers have no water to prepare their meals or clean dishes, and toilets cannot be flushed. Because Evil demands payment, and obedient bureaucrats are its slaves. It is with such men and women as these that my friend suggests we sit in council.
Evil is a trickster, a liar and a fraud. It gives only as an investment, reaping profits without mercy, taking without restraint. It is the plate from which the rich feast upon the poor. It is the reason the social gospel was given, the enemy against which we contend.
My friend is misguided—good hearted, but beguiled by sculpted and practiced smiles and the illusions of honor which official titles confer. “Come sit with us in council,” say the spiders to the fly.
Photo Credit: Debaird/Flikr
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
This is one time Prentice when I must disagree with you. While I understand that the ranks of politicians, police and greedy capitialist power brokers are filled with men and women who serve no other master than their own desires, I do not believe all can be painted with the same stroke. I have known too many good people in this world to feel that any particular career path rides the beaten path of evil. I just can’t accept that Prentice. Granted evil things are done by some, but is that not just another challenge to fight for those things right and good? Branding an entire government, group of public officials and law enforcement personnel as evil is reckless and quite frankly serves no purpose but to promote apathy. Actually I need the gift of hope that I receive when I at least seek to recognize the good in even the most misguided of souls. To be sure sometimes it is like looking for a needle in a haystack – but if I don’t at least seek to see a smidgen of the positive the pain I feel only serves to make me less than the God who created me meant for me to be. For if He can do for me what I cannot do for myself, I have to believe that He will do the same for others. Perhaps I am wearing rose colored glasses, but I like the view.
Beverly, I seem to have failed to make my point. I’m not quite sure how. I have painted with a broad brush because I believe the evils to be pervasive. I have not, however, “painted all with the same stroke.” The words “all”, “entire” and “most” appear nowhere in the article, only in your comment.
If I say that “Nashville police officers chauffeur Evil nightly,” that is not the same sentence as “All Nashville police officers chauffer Evil nightly.” If you read the latter, you did not read it in my piece.
Having said that, I would add that no one would more welcome the news that none of the things mentioned in the article occurred than would I. Sadly, my glasses will not filter the images from my sight.
I have been impressed with the clarity of Jeannie Alexander, writing in The Contributor (Nashville’s homeless newspaper) as she described the event of a homeless child born, to a homeless mother harassed by the police, on the streets of Nashville on Christmas Eve. The event, and Jeannie Alexander’s article, are mentioned and linked in my post.
“Unto us a child was born, and unto us an opportunity was given: an opportunity to show love instead of hate, open doors and compassion instead of jail cells and disdain, justice and mercy instead of the damndable torture of hell-twisted minds that choose the most dangerous path of all—indifference. And so we failed. I failed, you failed, and thus this city failed, and a child was born homeless, a child was born screaming in the night onto streets of death. Did you hear? Could you hear the cries of one so small: Nashville’s newest, youngest, homeless person?”
Actually Prentice, you didn’t fail to make your point. I suffered a cognitive mishap and only read what I thought I was reading – not what was written. To put it more simply, I am wrong and promptly admit it. Although IF YOU HAD WRITTEN, what I thought I had read – I would have been right. Does that hold up?
The federal, state and local governments in this country are designed to serve the wealthy not social justice. Local government is closest to the people on the street and it does a great job of keeping the problems of the poor from touching the lives of the rich, just like it is designed to do.
The linked article about the homeless mother giving birth on the street is heartbreaking, and all the more so when you realize that this sort of thing must happen dozens of times every day in cities across the country. I have personally seen the way the homeless are treated by the police and it does not make me proud to be a taxpayer or citizen.
Perhaps your friend has never really had a life circumstance that placed them in a situation where they had to deal with the harsh realities that can happen to a soul at the hands of government or law enforcement – if that’s the case they are very fortunate – naive but fortunate.