Showing posts with label excessive force. Show all posts
Showing posts with label excessive force. Show all posts

Friday, May 29, 2020

Our broken hearts: Where hope flees, riots and madness fill the vacuum

Violence, looting and arson engulfed Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and other cities this week, played out in endlessly recycled video clips of mob madness on our screens.

And we wonder, "Why?"

The myopic, yet narrowly accurate answer is that -- in scenes echoing such civil breakdowns in past years and decades -- a handful of criminal opportunists can quickly turn peaceful protests into riots, steering the desperate masses into acts they will later individually regret . . . while the thugs sparking it all could not care less.

But history teaches us that wherever trust, justice, hope, and mutual respect are absent, anger and madness waits to fill the vacuum. And this has been true for all ethnicities, racial strife, political rage, religious hatred sadly being universally human (https://www.brainz.org/riots/). 

Now, we see black faces, twisted in rage over the death of another African-American man fatally injured during an arrest exhibiting excessive force. But look beyond the sensational, incendiary in themselves clips on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, et al, and you also will see faces of our brothers and sisters sobbing amid those truly mean streets; others scream in impotent angst; some pray, and most deplore their legitimate grievances being hijacked by violence and destruction  . . . mayhem that undercuts the message we should hear.

This is not a new pattern in America. In the late 1960s, riots scourged Chicago, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Kansas City. Louisville and many other cities. At their roots were racial oppression, segregation, and economic hopelessness in the slums, ignited by grief and anger after Martin Luther King Jr. -- the prophet of non-violent protest -- was gunned down. 

Mixed into this cauldron, too, were anti-Vietnam War protests. And again, given human nature, non-violent protests morphed into darkness as mobs picked up rocks, sticks, Molotov cocktails, and firearms to battle police, and to "burn baby, burn," as the cry went at the time.

And here we are, half a century later. Trillions of dollars spent on education, jobs, urban development, welfare, anti-gang programs, wars on drugs, etc., etc. Technological advances and social engineering unheralded in modern history. So much has changed.

And yet, so much has not changed at all. For this truth remains, as it has from the beginning of humanity: our hearts are broken. That "image of God" we bear is tainted too often by our choices of pride over humility, materialism over charity, offense over forgiveness, hatred over understanding.

When no one listens, the desperate scream louder. Unaddressed pain and injustice eventually will bring anarchy and the Abyss, that dark chasm Nietzsche warned stares back at those who gaze into it for too long.

True for individuals. True for communities, for nations, and for civilizations.

Lord have mercy, we repeatedly pray in services at my Orthodox Christian parish church.

We all need that mercy. And we all must somehow learn to give it to our fellow flawed humans, as well.