Jesus, Law and Order

 Jesus, law and order

 

The fake politics behind this rallying cry killed Jesus. Our politicians are again returning to this time-worn phrase, to again provoke violence, which can be met with greater violence, which can again prove the threat of political/military authority over subjects for peace and security. For us, it started with King George citing law and order against his subjects in our colonies. See “The Double Standard of the American Riot,” The Atlantic, June 2, where John Adams is quoted having told the British—“We won’t be their Negroes.” Although increasing violent responses to peaceful demonstration often brings the oppressed into violence, it's false history to say this is the only way. 

.  

Can we learn from our history? How can we step off the trajectory we are on that could lead to civil war after our elections 2020? Where is God wanting to lead us? This is a time for every religious person to pray hard, and seek God’s help to find true stories of our fellow humans finding security following Jesus’ way. Here is mine.

 

I was in Chicago during the reign of Boss Mayor Daly with Curtis Burrell, my college roommate in 1963. He had been a safe cracker for a street gang in Chicago in the late 50’s. He spent two years in the Cook County Jail, where a pastor with a prison ministry led him to accept Jesus as his Savior. The greatest miracle was finding a more powerful response to the pervading violence in his childhood. That was the peace of Christ, not accessible by guns and violence. He became allied with Christian activists for the poor in Chicago. He decided at age 24 to totally set aside his violent past for a college education. He came to the Christian college I attended.  

 

Curtis and I were striking opposites. I was a pale-face150 lb farm boy with almost no exposure to the urban Black culture of  Curtis’ childhood. He was over 6 feet tall, over 240 lbs, and his exceptionally dark black skin stood him apart if not his stature. I was wakened most mornings at end of his 50 pushups on, when he jumped his torso with his finger tips to clap hands between each of the last 10 pushups. I learned to accept that as his mental fitness exercise, not a reversion to his violent past.

 

Being a felon, he could not get a drivers license.  I had my Dad’s car, only for transportation to and from college. When Dr. King came to speak at a nearby college, he was despondent I had agreed with my dad not to drive that car except back home. I grudgingly got it out of mothballs, put in fresh gas and we were off.

 

The speech was loaded with lawyer jargon that connected with the useless retributive justice in the Illinois state penitentiary and the Cook County Courts, based on “law and order,”  that my roommate experienced. I reluctantly agreed to go to the stage with him afterward so he could meet Dr. King about his new ideas now known as restorative justice. It was January, 1963, and the heater in my dad’s old Studebaker gave out on the way home. We kept warm arguing and discussing the ideas.

 

Curtis graduated from college and advanced Biblical studies, and became a pastoral leader in his racially tense community of Woodlawn, the south side of downtown in Chicago. He got into housing rights initiatives there, threatening the slum lords’ income handled by the mob and Mayor Daley. That’s where I first learned the fake use of the terms “law and order.” Everyone in his circle knew “law and order” protected the rights of police to use any violence they chose against citizens advocating for fair rent prices and justice with the mayor’s mob rule threatening their family security in their homes. Yet his work, and the community organizing around hope and peace instead of fear and threat, eventually defeated the mayor and the mob in Chicago, and eventually Barak Obama was part of the move toward a more peaceful, prosperous city less divided and angry. But now we are back again...

 

Once again we have Christians divided. The chaos and caustic cacophony of obscene charges not only unsubstantiated, but designed deliberately to breed fear and anger apparently was planned. In exchange for Trump support for the conservative Christian political agenda, some major evangelical leaders agreed to support Trump’s disinformation campaign inciting the American population into fear and hatred. He was explicit. Inciting fear and hatred would guarantee his political advantage into 2020. (see “Reverend Reveals what Evangelicals Say Privately”, Youtube, June 19, or any other sources on this agreement).

 

We have many courageous people of faith in our community here in Big Horn County. It’s a good time for our religious leadership community to lead us toward Jesus’ better, stronger alternative to the lawlessness and death that so often has followed the cries for law and order in our nation’s proud history. They can help us find those stories where Jesus’ way triumphed, and can again. Those stories start in the Bible. They exist in our nation’s history. And they are relevant now. God will help us find His way in these extremely dangerous times. 

DO NOT vote for the Trump empire to lead our United States of America. Be both patriotic and Christian this November.

 

(End of article for Big Horn County News Sept. 3, 2020. The following is discarded paragraphs rescued in case of interest)

 

 President Trump should not alone be blamed. It’s his empire of loyalists that has blocked access to evidence and truth.  His loyalists now dominate every sector of our federal government except the House of Representatives. It’s a coup against our democracy. Our confidence we once had in our national institutions and federal government is possibly at an all-time low.  It’s led by the official designated responsible for bipartisan investigation of political criminality or wrong-doing. Now it is openly partisan, something that never happened in our nation. William Barr, the current Attorney General of the United States, appointed deliberately for his loyalty to the Trump empire, still refuses the hard evidence of the reliability of mail-in and absentee ballots as overseen by our seasoned county election commissioners across the state, and the nation.

 

There is a well-researched trajectory nations typically go through when regressing into civil war or genocide. It happened in Germany, Rwanda, Slovenia, Belarus, Ireland, and many other nations as vulnerable to a propaganda machine as we now seem to be.  It brings on civil unrest, violence, and tragedy. We in the United States, unbelievably, seem to be on that track. Many of us now believe truth is relative, our elections can or will be rigged, the Spanish films of violent demonstrations used in the Republican convention were really in Seattle, Hillary and Biden will bring pedophilia, homosexuality and take away our guns, democrats block Trump's medicine against covid 19 because they want more deaths on Trump’s watch.  Now that there are separate and legitimate realities for our polarizing media frenzy, is all simply false? And foreign governments hating our freedoms and constitutional rights are gloating. Their success in starting this frenzy to undermine or nation’s values of democracy and Christian pursuit of truth and righteousness has gone too far.

 

It’s time to name the deception. but the cacophony blocks hearing it. Trump officials in his defense department and the justice department leave open using selected federal troops to monitor our upcoming election, setting the stage for a military takeover in case the election is close.

 

Anyone against law and order? Or family security, or religious freedom? It’s time to be simply biased. voices now telling us truth is relative, and all these essentials of our nation are almost gone unless we become activists, stockpile military weapons, and prepare for war. We truly are stuck in separate, polarized realities watching either MSNBC,  or the other extreme, Fox News. Almost all of the news reporting takes us one direction or the other. Which one is true?

 

I remember my college days in the 60’s, when  the loudest advocates of law and order were the most lawless and disorderly. They wrapped themselves around our flag, our Christian faith and and patriotism.  With friends and fellow Christians concerned about the extremism of the John Birch Society, the KKK and FBI director J Edgar Hoover,  I joined with an activitist college friend from the south to inquire directly what was happening in voter registration there. It was spring break, and we did not go to Ft Lauderdale beaches. Instead we walked the streets of St. Louis and Chicago, seeing square miles of government housing horribly wrecked from rioting, looting and burning. We visited Choctaw Indian communities with bombed churches in Mississippi and Alabama. My college friend had been an exchange student at Tugalo College, the training institute for disciplined demonstrating in King’s way of non-violence.  We stopped at Ole Miss (Mississippi State University) campus. We four white boys walked the campus incognito, saying nothing so as not to betray our Yankee dialect. We eventually found James Meredith’s dorm room on spring break in 1964. He was the only black student on campus, quarantined not from a virus but because his life was threatened. He was the one who broke the wall of segregation on that campus in Mississippi in the early 60's.

 

Eli, a good friend of his from demonstrations that turned violent, called his name and he responded “Eli!  It’s You, You’re alive too!” He unbolted and unlocked the door to hugs and grateful tears. We had just sat down and gotten briefly acquainted when the shout came through the door, “Police, open up!” James said, “What’s your name and number?” It was  federal agents, on their job to protect him from the “law and order” radical right in Mississippi vowed to take any means necessary to stop integration at Ole Miss.

 

 

Returning to the loud voices of "Law and Order"...

 

 Their voices are the most dangerous, not because of the good values they proclaim, but because of their behavior. The ideas of freedom are hypocritical to the degree of their fear mongering. In fact, they are anything but committed to these national values upheld by our constitution and enshrined in our Bible.

Jesus let the chips fall, and went with the least of these, the disenfranchised, the slave class, the poor, children, the women, and the outcasts. For that he was marked and ID’d with the rebels and activists of his time, complete with elevation to a cross with the sign “King of the Jews” in case anyone mistakenly claimed his cause, the one he died on, was unpolitical.

 

Today We all agree we need to abide by our laws for order, truth, freedom and security. It’s true there is endangerment for some of our our families, our faith tradition, and our nation. What we see now in our nation is our government wrapping these words in Christian faith and patriotism while fear-mongering to promote disorder, violence, disruption, racism and murderous vigilantism. The federal executive branch promotion of extremist hate groups with a track record indulging in immoral, lawless, and disorderly attacks on our own citizens is shocking and totally unprecedented.This is increasingly happening again in the name of national security, law and order, and other easily abusive labels of communist, socialist, racist, anarchist, muslim, jewish, democrat, republican, or whatever. The most dangerous lawlessness, violence and murder is now coming again from those standing proud with the flage and wrapping themselves around our Christian faith. Their behavior is neither patriotic nor Christian. It’s time to be simply biased against this fake Christianity and patriotism.

 

We’ve been there before as a ntiona. . white people about the socialists and the communist n…’s and Martin luther King, Jr.

 

It was not that long ago. I was there

 

Trump can be blamed for his neglect. But the loyalists around him, though some are falling away, remain surprisingly faithful. And foolish.  These Republicans want every snake oil they make distribute with their belief in law and order. That’s what our federal government has undermined and damaged. When they talk “law and order,”  I remember living in Mississippi in the 60’s. That phrase remains today the same rallying cry for those who support systemic racism across the nation. And systemic racism undermines real law and order.

 

But I’m not a trained historian. I am simply an observer and participant in life on both sides of the polarized divide in our nation, state, and even families.

 

I sat in a dorm room at U of Mississippi on 1964 spring break time. Four of us radical college students did our spring break visiting black voter registration sites in the deep south. We stopped in mostly small black towns from  Louisiana to Georgia. An exception was to spend a few hours with James Merideth, the first black successfully enrolled at that university. Afraid to go home for spring break because of threats to his life, he was essentially in quarantine, stuck in his dorm room for almost two weeks. He was guilty not only of defying laws against registration of colored people at the university, he also helped of organize demonstrations that became violent. He was shot twice. His good friend and collaborator was murdered. He graduated with honors eventually at the University of Mississippi, now a very different place.

 

We also stopped in at Dr. King’s father’s church on Easter Sunday Morning, in Birmingham, Alabama. I heard Dr. King recount, with his congregation chiming in, the real truth of what advocates of “law and order” and “national security’ were doing. He spoke of beating, siccing dogs, bombings, bashing skulls and outright murder. The label our FBI then smacked on these human beings was lawbreaker, rioter, Communist, and worse.

 

This was in the 60’s. It’s escalating like it did then.  But this time, it’s not just FBI.  It’s the entire executive department of our nation, which has taken over the entire judicial branch of our nation, and successfully threatened all senate Republicans but one, to kow tow to politically correct speech with the tag “Law and Order.”

 

It seems every government spokesman and its media minders has aligned to cover up the lawlessness, disorder, endangerment, lies and citizen right-to-livelihood our government has has broken in the last four years. Real fake news originates from those with the loudest protests of “fake news!!”

 

I saw this in China fon CCTV when teaching there 20 years ago. Now it’s the Communist bosses in Hong Kong and in Western China’s Xinjian provine. It’s Putin, the head of ___? . It was Stalin, Dragomir Milošević of Sarajevo, Rewanda’s leaders, and in our country George Wallace, Andrew Jackson, Bull Conner, the list goes on. Most have been unseated, repudiated, or worse. I am gratified that few of us in Big Horn County join in advocating the mayhem portrayed as law and order by all these authoritian leaders and more. But I am aware that all of them had enormous popular support by at least a minority of their citizens.

 

Two days after King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, William Sullivan, the FBI’s director of intelligence, famously responded by writing, “We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.”

 

.  Administrators had trouble finding someone who would room with someone not of the same race.  I didn’t mind because my father welcomed a black boy two years my younger, who walked the ten miles from town to help on our farm for nothing, except the food on the table. We took him home. So I had a case of color blindness thanks to my parents.