Recently Read: An evening of joy; a morning of tragedy: will we ever wake up?

Dallas, Texas 1942, Wikimedia

by Christy Thomas

We’d had the most joyful of afternoons. After two interminable weeks in a non-weight bearing foot situation, my husband’s bandage was replaced with a walking cast. Delighted, we went to out to dinner and watched a funny movie before bed.

We retired without bothering to check the news. Able to stay in bed lazily for the first time in a while, I slowly awoke and reached for my phone to check morning messages.

Then I saw it, the horrors of the brutal attack on police officers in Dallas Thursday night. President Obama called it a “vicious calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement.” That uses civilized terms to describe the bloodbath.

 

I’m no stranger to morning tragedies. World class newspapers are delivered each morning here, news headlines race across my online news feeds. I read those papers daily for their more in-depth stories and grieve daily over the state of humanity.

We humans are worse than animals. Our methods of killing are much more sophisticated and our creativity with torture has no parallels in the world of “lower” life-forms.

What will stop this?

Well, I can name a few things that won’t:

• More repressive governmental actions.
• More violence.
• More hatred.
• More walls.
• More isolationism.
• More, “I will take care of my own and I don’t care what happens to you.”
• More guns.
• More paranoia.
• More economic and societal inequality.

None of these have ever worked in the course of human history and none will work now.

We need more bridges, fewer fortresses.

We need more jobs, fewer prisons.

We need more hope, less hatred.

We need more “I will lay down my life for my enemy” theology and less “rapture me out of this mess” theology and .

We need more politicians saying, “I will actually do something for the good of our entire society across partisan lines, no matter what it costs me personally” and fewer politicians posturing about how great they are or how they predicted this tragedy.

Read the rest on pathos.com

Christy Thomas is a retired Elder in the United Methodist Church, the place she finally discovered grace after a lifelong search. She loves writing, gardening, reading, asking questions and making connections between political and religious practices.  She often writes directly for UMR but you can always find her on her blog: The Thoughtful Pastor

Recently Read

Recently Read posts are stories the editors of The United Methodist Reporter have found interesting from other sites and wanted to share with our readers. The editors do not necessarily endorse the opinions shared in these stories, and referral here should not imply endorsement of that content.