I
call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing;
therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live~ Deuteronomy
30:19
I did not intend to write a blog post this week.
My plan was to wish my
readers a very Happy New Year and take a break from blogging until 2015. Then
an event transpired and I felt compelled to write about it. On the surface, the
event in question appears to be nothing more than an unpleasant social issue; but
in truth, it’s a deeply spiritual one.
Last week two New York
City police officers, one Hispanic and the other of Chinese descent were
assassinated as they sat in their squad car. Paradoxically, the shooting was a
protest against racial inequality and police brutality. I suspect Martin Luther
King Jr. weep openly if he could see how far we’ve drifted
from the ideals he dreamed of.
The slayings should not have been entirely unanticipated, after
the four months of racially charged grandstanding, rhetoric, and sometimes violent
anti-police protests that followed the deaths of Michael Brown in Missouri and
Eric Garner in New York. The circumstances surrounding the deaths of the two
men could not have been more dissimilar and yet have somehow been lumped together
in the minds of many protesters. It was only a matter of time before an
unstable soul took the rhetoric to the next logical level and killed a cop.
I have to confess that
this story is an emotionally charged one for me. I have a son who plans to go into
law enforcement after he graduates from college next winter. I trust God with
my son’s life and future; nevertheless, it’s been difficult for me to watch
news coverage on this subject without envisioning my own son sitting in that
car.
The death of those two officers has resulted in an awful lot
of blame being tossed around. I have heard folks blaming, among other things, the
Mayor of New York City, the media, racism, the broken mental health system, bad
parenting, race baiters, corrupt police, white guilt, substandard education,
the President of the Untied States, and television violence. But by far the
most frequently blamed cause of last week’s shooting was society.
Although it can be argued cogently that no one issue or
person mentioned above is completely without blame, it seems to me that the
real problem here is that everybody is blaming something or somebody and nobody
is really examining the issues.
Society is not some nebulous, vague entity. Society is made
up of individual people who have made the choices that have produced the muddle
we find ourselves in. You and me, we are the society we all spend so much time bellyaching
about.
It is people, not some nebulous entity, that have elected the
leadership we have—or, by neglecting to vote, have chosen by default the leaders
we are stuck with. It is individual people who have stood by refusing to make
judgments as forty-eight percent of all white babies and seventy-two percent of
all black babies are born to single mothers.
It is individuals in our midst who have chosen to overlook
racism when they see it. It is a whole other set of individuals who have taken
to calling opinions that differ from their own racist. Society did not raise up
a generation of aimless young adults who are lacking respect for police and
other authority figures. Parents did.
All of the aforementioned choices and a hundred others have
had ugly consequences that threaten us all. Confidence in government is largely
non-existent, and rightfully so. Lack of trust in leadership makes implementing
much-needed change nearly impossible.
The children born to single mothers are nearly always destined
to live below the poverty level. They meander aimlessly through childhood, deprived
of guidance, stuck in bad neighborhoods with second-rate schools, rarely
reaching their full potential. One more generation of unsupervised, undereducated
children may very well doom our civilization to self-destruction.
Race baiting has successfully ended some much-needed
discussion regarding how to most effectively help minorities prosper.
Indiscriminately throwing around the term “racist” has shut down debates
challenging views that desperately need to be challenged. Overused allegations
of racism have dumbed down our definition of bigotry and succeeded in making
genuine racism feel much less appalling than it actually is.
Changing the course of a society where bad behavior has
become commonplace is neither quick nor easy. Nonetheless, it is possible. It
has to begin with a commitment to breaking free from apathy and getting
involved in our communities and in the lives of people around us.
Changing the course of society will take a revival of
personal accountability, shame and respect for authority. It will take a return
to personal responsibility, purity, integrity and self-restraint. A change of
course will take grown-ups who are willing to set aside some personal pleasures
for the sake of the kids in our culture. It will mean parenting the current
generation of kids differently than the past generation. It will take a
generation of Christians who take their faith seriously and live what they
believe and it all begins with you and me making the commitment and being the
change we want to see.