When did it happen that a person in the United States can be arrested, no charges presented, and disappear unrepresented and disconnected from friends, family or community. Such behavior was once the exclusive domain of underdeveloped country’s possessed by ruthless dictators. And yet, now, in this country we all love, the dark art of disappearing people is evolving into a ‘crime of routine. When one person disappears outside the human right of due process you have one too many. Human beings, their lives and their stories are not disposable. In human scale of justice, every story must be told before deportation is even remotely if imperfectly just. We are entering a week when we repeat the remembrance of a judge who turned an innocent man over to the voracious crowds even when he knew the human story didn’t fit a crime and couldn’t understand the spirit of what was happening.

Good is one person at a time. That kind of justice is hard but utterly essential in a true democracy. The moment you say something in general about a group of people, a race, or gender there should be a caution light that goes off in your brain. A bright yellow blinking light should be working in your being that says “be very careful” for you are on the edge of committing the crime of stereotyping. “Them Salvadorians or them immigrants are criminals and members of M-13 gangs” and hey presto, your ‘Us and Them’ statement has created a paved highway to a future crime against innocent persons. This day’s Us-and-Them mindset is not a crime so much as the paving of a road leading to a true crime. If you knew the building three miles up the gravel road was a den of iniquity, why would you pave the road to the building? For the Christians among the readers, this is Holy Week, where the cheering, and then jeering crowds paved the road to the cross that changed everything for you. For this writer, the Holy Week story forced me, even as a child, to think outside of the crowd about cruelty and the individual’s inescapable sense and responsibility to true good. The Good Decision as a practice takes one person at a time. First there is you and your sense of good and then the next person who may have a different sense of good. The consideration and reconciliation of these differences are the first and second steps in a good decision. We should be teaching this in kindergarten and renewing the curriculum every three years until we can as adults be properly repelled by ‘us and them’ thinking. Every individual human story is sacred and that to this writer is good. The Good Decision believes this is good, not for just one religious tradition, but for the universe of humanity.