Never has the country ever had a president who needed and still has needs forgiveness more than our current president. Never has an individual apparently received more unconditional forgiveness from his support base than this same politician. There must be so something particularly morally wrong when a person so blessed with the benefits of tolerance to deliberately refuse to the return to others the grace of that same blessing.  We are not talking about presidential pardons on the quid pro quo here.  There seem to be people who have dammed up the flow grace and forgiveness through their own process.  Not paying it forward generates the  three Rs of tyranny: Revenge, Retribution, and Recrimination.  Hording for oneself the material benefits of grace and generosity while depriving others of the same is spiritually reprehensible and socially pathetic.

In little ways we all survive and thrive on the mutuality of second chances. That is how life offers the glimmer of hope in the midst of imperfection and effort. Our country was founded on second chances. When life trips over the edge and feels more hopeless and painful than death, an internal human condition is created that incubates homicide, suicide, and the whole range of senseless violence.  I am making an argument for the hard minded non believers of this world. Authentic Christians (of which there still are more than a few) and practitioners of the many faiths of America already know the crucial importance of forgiveness from their spiritual traditions as well as “real world lives”.  The case for mercy and forgiveness is overwhelming.  The second and third chances are how we learn the deep lessons life has to offer.  I am not talking about people whose records indicate explicit danger to selves or others.  But I am talking about this cattle call of an immigration enforcement that is rounding up the innocent, the blemished, and the guilty like a herd and shipping them to concentration camps or even countries that will be predictably hostile without a iota of attention to the due process guaranteed by the former USA to the immigrant’s life stories.  For these victims of the current administration, it is condemnation without formal judgement.  We are creating hopelessness through the lack of grace and mercy and from that we must own the violence such errors (sins) this president’s heartless  strategy will generate.

A Modest Proposal for Good

Nothing other than new revised immigration laws supported from congress to the president will ever resolve the immigration crisis.  That has already been mentioned in previous posts numerous times.  Everything else is simply people shouting at each other assigning blame when genuine blame has already buried the whole pathetic show.  Redemption will take longer than resolution.  The common denominator that makes all failed governments and republics the same is sharing a form of a leadership that replaces redemption and mercy with the Three R’s. The right to life includes the right to be a human being and to be a human being includes being  imperfect. This government has forgotten that fundamental driving force of history.  We must remember and reconstruct due process no matter the cost.  We must restore hope for America and that won’t occur by destroying the imperfect and the opposition. America needs hope, generosity and tolerance at. the individual level.  That will demand real mature forgiveness from the lowest to the highest levels of society. That would be good.