- People who call themselves Christian, but don’t give a shit about people around them.
- People who care about nothing but themselves and their wants.
- Companies and corporations to whom greed is more important than the people who they serve. This includes schools, the mental health industry, insurance companies and big pharma.
- A country that is supposedly open to all people, but really only the white people get the benefits and the power.
- People who want to put a band aids on societal problems, if they’re willing to do even that, treating them as a final fix.
- Companies and people who support violence as entertainment and teach revenge is the only way to fix your problems.
- Justice meaning retribution and revenge.
Before this experience, generally speaking I was in favor of stricter gun controls. But when you deal with a child who has mental health issues and you have had the <sarcasm>joy</sarcasm> of having to deal with big mental health providers in it for the money, you have a much better picture of what happens in this country for those few who can afford to go to a mental health provider. And you know no one cares.
Every time a teenager is in the news having committed a crime, I grieve for the child and their parents. I know there is a great possibility I will be meeting them if only in silent passing in our communal grief, communal loss at the worst time our lives.
So, in the middle of an uproar about yet another school shooting, I am dead to the outcry of the kids and their parents. My child is alive, but already sentenced dead. I live in a world of ghosts. I wish I could say I’m sorry for you. I would have felt something, before this. But, I am proud of you for standing up to the politicians though.
Instead I am grieving for Nick. I am grieving for the family who took him in. The moment I heard he had been adopted and descriptions of him, I knew the problems he faces, his past, how he tipped over. I can not listen to the calls of retribution, revenge and stripping him of his entire being.
I’m tired of how in our society violence must be dealt with more violence with hearts filled with hatred. Even those accused of lesser crimes, guilty or not, are met with the same destruction of being and entire future before they even make it to court. The entire system is set to destroy the person. There is no deliverance. There is no forgiveness. And that violence is not reserved for the accused, it flows over to the accused's family.
This is not justice.
In what is supposed to be a Christian nation, justice is nothing more than magnified Hammurabi’s code. 4 Eyes for an eye. A code that is 4,000 years old and nowhere related to the message of our God or our Savior.
When a person commits the act, all the judgement, hate and violence are all aimed at the person and the act. No person, institution or group is required to take responsibility or be dealt the same justice as the person whom they have put in the situation, to whom they have taught behavior, to whom they have left self-defeated, demoralized and in some cases mentally and physically incapable of not (re)acting anymore than how they did.
As a Christian we are supposed to live God’s justice. Justice that includes taking care of and standing up for the vulnerable, living in equality with all of our neighbors, fellow countrymen and foreigners in our land and living in generosity.
This is the place I want to live. Because my child would never have been torn away from his birth family and come to my home. He would never have been sexually molested in second grade in school. He would have better self-esteem and self-value. He would be making magic with amazing inventions instead seeing himself as a stupid idiot believing he is a failure so tries nothing. And he would not be sitting in jail today.
Only we can make this country a place of true justice. But it starts with you and it starts by simply by being kind in all you do and in every way you connect with every person physically or virtually, no matter their politics, their color, their religion, their sexual orientation, their country of origin or culture. You don't get to judge. EVERY person is a creation of God.
Please, please, be kind. Teach your children to be kind. If you want the shooting to stop, it starts here.
