The Only Way Out
I know that I am unwell; I know that there is nothing good in me, apart from Christ. And I do not feel very Christian in spirit today.
Yesterday, on the anniversary of the President’s attempt to violently suppress the will of the electorate, which killed several innocents, the White House proudly published a bald-faced lie, promulgating a false version of events that we all should remember. But they knew that their supporters don’t care anyway. Then, today, a protester, a single mother, was shot and killed by an ICE agent during a confrontation. Footage of the incident suggests that both parties may have made mistakes; but regardless of what happened in the confusion of the moment, which is still being debated while we wait for more evidence to emerge, the fact remains that the agent was on that street as part of what has for months been a gang of political thugs who have repeatedly committed illegal violence against the innocent, and faced no repercussions for doing so, who in many cases have no qualifications and no legitimate authority to hold deadly force over any citizen, and who conceal their identities, so that they must all be treated as one. The woman who died was there trying to resist, in some small way, this visitation of evil upon her community. The Department of Homeland Security has wasted no time in posthumously declaring her a terrorist, slandering her in order to justify the killing and absolve themselves of guilt for a situation entirely of their own making. And again, they do this because they are confident that their supporters do not care, and that nothing will happen to them.
I have spent too much time already on my phone, distracted from living by the addiction to wrath, and witnessing over and over and over the shameless and open embrace of evil by many who mock and laugh at the death of the innocent at the hands of their fellow tribesmen. And I know better than to condemn others, not just because I am also guilty, and not just because my motives are not the pure love of justice, but also the forbidden, dramatic burn of spiteful rage, and the self-flattery of pride seizing upon a moment when I feel myself to be so right that going too far seems justified. And I know I am casting about in this moment, simply the latest addition to a long train of wrongs, for some as of yet unshattered glass to break in case of fire, some new word to utter, to respond to the worsening world by escalating in turn and making myself unmistakably clear, as if a word could be said which would cause the wicked to combust, rather than simply being laughed off, or silently ignored. And that is itself an almost comically delusional self-important way of thinking, the shame of which alone should be enough to shut me up. And yet I want to say this one thing, and then because of that I must say another.
One
I will be simple. This opinion did not form in a day, or in response to a single day’s events; it accreted through the friction of many actions taken in the same direction for ten years, until it has, finally, accumulated a weight which can no longer be supported. There are so many things this administration has done, continues to do, and threatens to begin, which constitute crimes against humanity. There is no point rehearsing everything that has happened. It is enough to state the simplest, most important realities.
They imprison, injure, rape, and kill innocents.
They proudly admit their motives are selfish and cruel.
They spurn legal accountability and lie to protect themselves.
They cannot be shamed into stopping.
We cannot bring justice in any true sense; we are not permitted revenge. The rectification of evil is the province of God and waits beyond time for its fulfillment. But when such things are done, the guilty must be stopped, and when the guilty are society’s leaders, backed by a large portion of public opinion, and their crimes cause as much harm to the innocent as these do, then a demonstration must be made for future leaders and publics yet unborn that neither the elite nor the majority are so practically immune from accountability that they believe themselves to be beyond good and evil. The lesson must be scored into history so that it will not soon be forgotten and cannot be misinterpreted. There is one tool which we have availed ourselves of for this purpose, and which today would loom above ordinary justice.
We must hang them from the gallows.
Two
We must decide to hang them; and then we must let them live instead.
Nothing we can do will surely deter the atrocities of future generations. Nothing we can do will restore the dead or repair the harm done. At the end of our brief day, the only thing we can do is live as Christ would. And Christ affirms the necessity of the gallows, that the irreparable breach of death is the only answer to the irreparable harm of evil. But he affirmed it by going to the gallows Himself, the once for all. We have no right to erect another. And then He made a demonstration for all time that the harm of death is not, in fact, irreparable; and so the harm of evil is in the same way no longer irreparable. Mercy, then, is justice; we witness that God has done justice in death, and will do justice by undoing all malice, all injury, all kidnapping, all rape, all murder, until every spot of blood is both accounted for and also restored to living veins. Then the only retribution will be restitution.
These are my conclusions. We cannot arrive at the second except by way of the first; we cannot achieve any kind of justice by settling on the first, or we remain trapped in the hell we started in.
