 | ||||||
| Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom: An admirable choice for a household god* |
Huffington Post has just reported on the story of a man who opened fire on people breaking into his home where he had just put his infant to sleep, only belatedly realizing they were cops. He killed one. The one he killed was the police chief's son. In a small town in Mississippi. The man was black. The cop was white. A death sentence was handed down.
Fortunately, there were so many errors in that particular rush to judgment that a judge first commuted the sentence to life without parole (whew) and now the man in question, Cory Maye, has been re-sentenced to ten years for manslaughter, years already served. He is on his way home. Mayes did not premeditate killing the cop. Indeed, the cops were in the wrong to begin with. They should have been invading the home of a criminal who lived nearby, not Maye's home, but had a rotten tip from a drugged out informant.
What does that have to do with the nominal subject of this blog, the household gods? The ancient Roman gods supposed to protect those who dwell in a particular place?
Everything. Appended to the Huffington Post story was the following comment:
He shot a cop and now we are supposed to celebrate that he got only 10 years.The person posting the comment, who goes by the screen name Turukano, has 668 fans on HuffPo, and uses the line "Obama 2012" in his/her profile. If I were Mr. Obama, I'd be embarrassed to acknowledge such bone-deep ignorance in a supporter. Turukano did, moreover, apparently jump onto the story the instant it was published to bandy his aggressive stance around; Turukano's is the first comment. (Maybe that's a good thing; the two that came in next were compassionate comments.)
Turukano's comment bespeaks both the incredible ineffectiveness of American academic education, and the totally absent spiritual education provided in American homes and churches.
How can any human read this story and fail to realize that a man may have lost his life because of a Rube Goldbergian series of errors and ineptitude, not to mention craven duplicity and professional incompetence, on the part of any number of the people involved?
How can any human being read this story and contend that for shooting a cop mistakenly--while defending property from an invasion launched in the night when confusion reigned and alertness was compromised--a person should get more than ten years? How can anyone be so moronic as to divorce the action from the impetus to that action, and issue forth a blanket demand for blood?
How? Because a certain segment of America is all about blood lust. That same segment seems to be all about placing some people above others. Why should it be worse and demand a greater punishment when a cop is killed, than, for example, when a teacher or clergy member is killed? Or when ANY innocent person is mistakenly killed.
To quote an old song, there is an answer to this: Teach your children well.
Teach them that blood lust is the province of ignorant people, of people who have barely climbed out of the primordial ooze.
Teach them that the benefit of the doubt is due to those caught in webs of incompetence, bigotry and malevolence, regardless. Eventually, the truth will out, and it is nice when ALL of those involved are alive to see it.
Teach them that there is a higher calling than applying punishment to miscreants based on technical demands; that higher calling is applying punishment tempered with wisdom, justice and impartiality.
I would suggest that an admirable household god to enshrine would be this one: The god or goddess of anti--capital punishment.
In honor of this god, refuse to espouse the ultimate punishment for any man or woman. Because it may be that that man or that woman is innocent, wholly or substantially, and if you impose the ultimate punishment, you can never undo the evil you have done. And that would offend most gods.
* Wiki Commons.Sculpture displayed at Roman Baths, Bath, England.
No comments:
Post a Comment