In some slow not so subtle changes in our country’s sense of justice, to suspect one of a crime is becoming the new standard of punishment:  no trial, no evidence, no justification; simply suspicion can trigger brutal or even capital punishment. Not so long ago, any suspending due process was reserved for a state of emergency and or war. The declaration of war itself required congressional participation. The fatal space of war was guarded by formal public declaration.  But today even the process of law enforcement has been redefined as one man’s internal and perpetual state of emergency. The president’s personality now defines the margins of fatal response. Outside of the presidency, the state of rage and lack of restraint in the arena of self discipline results in a person being hospitalized in a mental health facility; both for their own well being and that of the public

The killing of one person is a crime and killing more than one is a statistic is a this writer’s modern paraphrase of a maxim attributed to Stalin, but more likely was originated earlier by a German writer name Karl Tucholsky.  To survive emotionally, as Americans, we have adapted ourselves to abstracting violence so mass shootings, which occur nearly every week in our news feeds are reduced in emotional response to a video distraction and head shaking. The new drone warfare has toughened up the new American to the understanding that yes, for sure, innocent civilians sometimes get in the way and are killed, but it is a tough world. We watched Gaza be reduced to rubble over time while still a city full of innocent men women and children. Tens of thousands young men, women, and children are being ground up on the stubborn war front in Ukraine.  But with this new adaptation to human violence, it invariably must be that we individually ultimately become abstractions to the experience of ourselves in an immersive field of a violent random events. And we wonder why we, who live through the internet of information about these events, have mental health problems in this country. 

Urgent Proposal for Good

If peace is good or at least better than war and injustice than my proposal is to choose peace and justice and stick to it. The beginning of the skills of peace and justice is to live as if no life is a statistic. Our Constitution tried to guarantee that right but right now our Constitution has been shelved for a national “house cleaning“.  Peace comes when we recognized we owe the percentage of innocent immigrants, victims of war, and random acts of violence, a suffering tax.  If we don’t feel some portion of their pain when they encounter the routine violations of the day, our own numb selves will certainly self destruct. Empathy is the price of life. Never accept accept that a few innocents must be punished or die to get at the guilty. That is the beginning of the end.  Push back on the immorality of our times with the skills and resistance of a peace committed human being.   That would be good.