Seeking A Homeland

Get Together

Tonight after a more stressful day at work than usual I decided to stop for a beer at a new place near the office that advertises a great beer selection. As I read, ate and drank I was half listening to the music in the background. It must not be easy to select music for a bar these days. You don't want to chase anyone away, but you don't want to bore folks too much, either. This place made what I suppose is the safest choice--classic rock, played at an audible but unobtrusive volume level.

One song caught my attention. You've probably heard it at some point--Get Together, from the 1967 debut album by Jesse Colin Young's band The Youngbloods. The chorus goes like this:

Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now

I got to thinking about those lyrics. When they were new in 1967 I believed them fervently. Then I came to think they failed to take into account the power of evil that had to be opposed, resisted, fought whenever and wherever it appeared. Later I thought they were just naive and futile because evil would continue if not prevail. Finally I thought they were merely sentimentality and kitsch. Some of those phases may have overlapped, too.

Tonight, maybe in light of recent events in Tucson, I got to thinking about them again for the first time in a long time. If you abstract their intention from their sexist language, aren't they true? Not to minimize the complexity and persistence of the world's problems, or to deny the value of addressing them directly, but in the final analysis doesn't the answer have to be love?

Love on an interpersonal level, sure, but also love in our public discourse and love in institutional structure and behavior. We certainly have a long way to go, but the only way to make progress is to find ways to move forward.

I think anyone willing to hear it may believe this way, but for Christians it should certainly be compelling.

What happened to make me stop believing in love? Can I get over it and get back to that belief? How? And how will I express it?

Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

Thursday I finished reading Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (Amazon Google Books preview A-SCPL record) by Jeffrey D. Sachs. Friday a discussion arose on Facebook among some people I know about some financial commitments made this week in Copenhagen. It directly touched on some of the things Sachs wrote about. Since his book was still very much on my mind, I mentioned it in the discussion. It became clear there were some climate change skeptics in the conversation. No one else in the thread had read Sachs's book, but I was unable, within Facebook's limitations, to fully explain what I thought it had to do with the conversation. Therefore what I want to do is to post a longer discussion here, and then I can link to it in Facebook.

First, a little about Sachs. His credentials are very substantial. He is the head of Columbia University's Earth Institute, a cross-disciplinary team of specialists in agronomy, hydrology, engineering, ecology, public health, climatology, economics, geography, and so on. He was the head of the WHO's Commission on Macroeconomics and Health and then of the UN Millennium Project under Kofi Annan. He has worked with the current or former heads of state of several counties, including the USA and the UK. Presently he is an adviser to Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.

His previous book, The End of Poverty (Amazon Google Books preview A-SCPL record) was a bestseller. Of course, that doesn't mean it sold as well as something by Dan Brown or Nicholas Sparks, but within its genre it was one of the most noted books of 2007. The preface to this book was written by Harvard's Edward O. Wilson, who may be the most respected and famous biologist in the world today.

His method is not to make broad, unsupported assertions in stirring but vague rhetoric. Rather, he marshals more and more detail from official and academic sources to support his claims and then makes them in deliberate, cautious language. It seems like there is another graph or table on nearly every other page. In the end he makes a convincing case that addressing each of those issues is not just a matter of altruism but is vital to the economic and security interests of the developed nations.

Sachs's intention, I'd say, is to recommend to the developed nations of the world, and particularly to the United States, that they fulfill the commitments they have already made in several treaties and agreements. Without going here into their wordy, formal titles, these were made from 1992 into the 2000's, through both Democratic and Republican administrations in the U.S. (although more enthusiastically in the former than in the latter), and covered a wide range of interrelated concerns: poverty, climate change, overpopulation, desertification, contagious diseases, and the loss of biological diversity.

They certainly are interrelated, too. For instance, poverty leads people to cut down forests for charcoal or for farming, even if the soil will only be productive for a few years, and that contributes to climate change. Climate change leads to desertification, which forces species to migrate or become extinct. Loss of natural enemies lets disease vectors, like mosquitoes, proliferate. And those are just a few of the ways one problem leads to another.

If all those tragedies would stay in place, maybe they could safely be ignored by the United States, as long as we all were willing to harden our hearts to others' plight and to ignore God's call to justice and compassion. They move around, though. Two results of poverty, overpopulation and climate change will often be war and migration. that makes them vital security concerns for the U.S.

Darfur and Afghanistan are two examples. The genocide in Darfur is not just a result of the Janjaweed being bloodthirsty and cruel, although they are. It is basically a response to prolonged drought caused by climate change. Nomadic herders and settled farmers are competing desperately for diminishing resources, and when survival is at stake people will do anything they think they have to.

In the same way our war in Afghanistan is not just a response to the Taliban's religious fanaticism, although they are fanatics. The Taliban would not have the support they do, the government would not be so successfully corrupt, and growing opium poppies would not be such an irresistible option if Afghanistan were not in the grip of this same nexus of difficulties. Poverty and war have left it with little infrastructure with which to build its economy, desertification has cut into its agricultural sector's ability to feed its people, and it is is overpopulated in a way that gives it too many young men with nothing to do, no way to support a family, and no hope that things will get better.

Moving on from these two present hot spots, consider two that are imminent--South Asia and America's southern border. The third largest store of ice in the world is the glaciers of the Himalayas, but they are already receding faster than glaciers anywhere else in the world. They are the source of the Brahmaputra and Ganges rivers. They flow through India before they go into Bangladesh, which is largely dependent on them for both domestic use and agriculture. The Indus River, on which Pakistan depends, also begins in the Himalayas and first goes through India. As the Himalayan glaciers recede, they will probably first increase the river's flow, making catastrophic floods more frequent. After the glaciers are gone, though, there won't be enough for everyone, especially if India intercepts most of these rivers' flow before they pass her borders. By 2030 the Ganges could join the growing ranks of rivers like the Colorado, that in the summer at least are completely dry before they reach the ocean. The same could happen to the Indus, too. How could Al-Qaeda or groups like it take advantage of a Pakistan in distress and chaos? What might a nuclear Pakistan do if it is being condemned to die of thirst by a neighbor with which it has had repeated wars?

Closer to home, consider what might happen to Mexico. More frequent and more intense hurricanes on both coasts will make storm surges more and more destructive. Rising ocean levels could easily put Cancun island, with its huge tourism income, permanently underwater, driving away all the people who moved there to work in American hotels. On the other hand, the interior of Mexico will become hotter and probably drier. Today greater Mexico City has a population of about 21 million, and it's certain to keep growing. If heat, lack of rainfall and population pressure deplete its groundwater resources and make it uninhabitable, where will all those people go? Not south to Guatemala and Honduras, that's for sure. No wall will keep them from making their way to Texas and California, then to Colorado, Ohio, and every other state.

Sachs doesn't put it quite this way--it's my generalization--but in the end he draws a picture of a world of trouble, touching every nation but focused on a band form Bangladesh--or even beginning in the Philippines--and stretching through Afghanistan and the more southern of the former Soviet Republics, all of the Middle East, into the Horn of Africa and all the way across Sub-Saharan Africa. Consider what it would be like if the scenarios I've suggested in South Asia and Mexico were repeated all across that band? What would be the cost to the United States of defending its security and interests in all those places while coping with the loss of all of southern Florida, the Gulf Coast, and the port and shore areas of every city on both coasts?

As an example of the sort of advance planning going on in the military and intelligence communities of many nations in preparation for all of this, read this detailed, lengthy study produced by the UK's Ministry of Defence. I've read equivalent studies produced for the U.S. and Australia, too. They all agree that action now and planning for the future are necessary in order to "manage the unpreventable and prevent the unmanageable."

Sachs calculates that all it would take to mitigate much of this--it's already too late to completely prevent it--would be an increase in our foreign aid from today's parsimonious level of 0.14% of GNP to 0.70%. If we today fail to make the lifestyle changes and refuse to make the relatively modest investments needed to prevent all this, what will my grandchildren, whom I may never meet,say of us? Even more so, what will their grandchildren, who could live in a world in which the dystopia I've suggested would seem like a utopia, say of us?

A Pastor's Take On Why Rick Warren Sucked Today

Street Prophets :: Faith and Politics.

Come on, pastordan, don't be mealy-mouthed--tell us what you think! I actually thought he was better than I expected. Granted, that wasn't much.

Evidence of things unseen

This morning Barack was on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. If you missed it you can watch it or read a transcript here. Those who have felt since the election that Obama is moving too far toward the center will probably not be reassured by some of the things he said today.

For one thing, people who thought Guantanamo would be closed right away are in for a disappointment. Now we're talking about some time beyond the first 100 days. It is true that among the many hapless Muslims who have done nothing worse than to have an Arabic name there may be a few genuinely dangerous people. Of those who had done nothing wrong we may have made a few into terrorists by keeping them locked up without a trial for years, too. If one of them were to be released and then were to go on to participate in another 9/11 style attack, it would be terrible. Not only would it be terrible to lose more lives that way, but the effect on the Obama presidency would be devastating and irreversible. His enemies, who will remain legion, would jump on that and never let up. So closing Guantanamo will have to be done carefully. He even is thinking about what to do with "some of the evidence against them may be tainted even though it's true." I thought tainted meant unusable, but I guess that in the real world, where struggles take place and people really die, you still have to take it into account.  Still, Obama's commitment to closing it in due course remains firm and unambiguous.

If you had hope that there might reckoning and accountability for Bush and his henchmen for their crimes (see the column I linked to in my post below for some examples), I don't think there's a lot to be expected there, either. The This Week headline for the story about this part of the interview, "Obama Leaves Door Open (a Bit) On Prosecuting Bush Officials," seems to want to say that the glass isn't quite empty. My take on what Obama said is that it's about as empty as it could be. Despite a nominal nod to the Attorney General's independence, it's hard to imagine that Eric Holder (who Obama says is sure to be confirmed) will try to prosecute the neo-con criminals when the boss says, "We have to focus on is getting things right in the future as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past."

The discomfort I admit to feeling with Obama's stand on these particular issues shouldn't be taken as a sign that my support for Obama and my elation at his election have gone away. After This Week I watched some of Meet the Press before we left for church. They showed about one second of that moment when Barack, Michelle, Malia and Sasha walked out onto the stage in Grant Park. Even now, more than two months after that great night, such a slight clip made the tears start to well up inside me again.

During the end of the campaign I was in charge of all the canvassers in my area, about two thirds of my state House district, so for the last month or so I couldn't go out and canvass myself, which I love to do. I had to stay in the office managing canvassers instead. On election night, though, for the last hour or two our field organizer sent everyone out canvassing, trying to round up every last vote we could, right up until the minute the polls closed. (Well, OK, I quit about five minutes before, but at that point I don't think I could have talked anyone into getting dressed and rushing out into a chilly night to try to get in line in time.)

I had planned my canvassing out so that at that time I was just a couple hundred yards from my house. I went in for a while, got a little to eat and talked with my wife and daughter, and then took my car back to our field office. The local Democratic party had planned a big returns watch party at a cavernous restaurant nearby, but our leadership team was congregating in our field office, and I wanted to watch the results with them, because we had become quite close over the last several months.

Before long it became clear that this was not only not going to be a death watch, as in the last two elections, but that it wasn't going to drag on into the wee hours of the morning, either. The election was going to be called quickly. I realized that besides wanting to watch it with my fellow organizers, I really wanted to watch it with my family, too. Sharing events this momentous is part of what families should do. I hurried home, packed them into the car, and went back to the office.

I should explain here that my daughter is now 13 years old. The sweet child who was always Daddy's girl has been replaced this moody, unpredictable, and often angry stranger. The kid who once in a school paper said I was her hero now seems to take the attitude, "Eeew, yuck, you're an adult. And what's worse, you're my parent! I don't want to have anything to do with you!" I accept it because I know it's pretty much inevitable and because I know it's temporary. In fact, it's a necessary part of a positive good, her maturation and separation from us to have her own life. Still, I have to admit that it hurts sometimes.

I go into that because it's the context of the picture that follows below. At the very moment that whatever channel we were watching announced that Obama was the victor, someone there in the office happened to have her camera pointed toward my daughter, my wife and me. (I trimmed some other people off.) You'll notice that my daughter has put her arm around my neck and lifted herself off the ground, swinging her feet around. That's a moment I will always, always remember.

But all that is a diversion from where I was headed, talking about this morning. At church one of the hymns we sang was "Morning Has Broken." I certainly don't want to seem like I am deifying Obama, but it still seemed to resonate with my feelings in this interim, which seems endless, between the election and the inauguration. You may know the melody from the version recorded long ago by Cat Stevens, which you can listen to here. I'll stick its lyrics in here, too, although the ones in ours hymnal are a little different.

Morning has broken /Like the first morning, /Blackbird has spoken /Like the first bird. /Praise the singing! /Praise for the morning! /Praise for them springing /Fresh from the Word! 

Sweet the rain's new fall /Sunlit from heaven, /Like the first dewfall /On the first grass. /Praise for the sweetness /Of the wet garden, /Sprung in completeness /Where His feet pass.Mine is the sunlight! /Mine is the morning. /Born of the one light /Eden saw play! /Praise with elation, /Praise ev'ry morning, /God's recreation /Of the new day!

Despite the obvious and many problems facing our country and the world, and despite knowing Obama will not solve them all, I still believe that this can be the beginning of a new day.

Resolution

Today I was looking at RJ's fascinating blog When love comes to town and found a link to a similar blog, songs for the journey, by a guy in London named Nick Coke. Both explore the meaning of popular music and relate it to a progressive, experiential, non-dogmatic form of Christianity. Nick had embedded this YouTube video of Dylan singing "Pressing On" from his album Saved. There are no specifics about where and when it was filmed, but it seems to have been somewhere in the U.S. sometime in the 1980's.

The cinematography isn't great, but the performance is. I love the way he starts out alone, and then soon the backup singers join him, but the band doesn't kick in until three minutes into the song. This may have been the last song in the set--not only because the audience is thoroughly worked up, but also  because for the last minute or more he walks away looking tired and lets the singers and band wrap it up. The way they end it is one of the many meanings of the word "resolution." They finish with "the progression of a voice part or of the harmony as a whole from a dissonance to a consonance."

The fuzziness of this video is an example of another kind of "resolution," which is "the fineness of detail (or in this case the lack of detail) that can be distinguished in an image, as on a video display terminal."

Still another kind of resolution is the meaning you may have been expecting in the context of today's date, "a resolve or determination: to make a firm resolution to do something...the act of resolving or determining upon an action or course of action." This post will eventually get around to making that kind of resolution.

The song "Pressing On" is about another meaning of this versatile word, "the mental state or quality of being resolved or resolute; firmness of purpose." As Bob sings, "Shake the dust off of your feet, don't look back/Nothing now can hold you down, nothing that you lack/Well I'm pressing on/To the higher calling of my Lord." That is the kind of resolution I need, and I think the progressive movement needs, in the lee of the great wind that swept Barack Obama into the presidency two months ago.

The temptation now--I feel it myself--is to kick back, relax, and recuperate after months of strenuous campaigning. Lots of people worked really hard to get Obama, Biden and their local candidates elected. I worked harder than most, although not by a long shot as hard as some folks I know. To lay off for too long, though, would be a huge mistake. As I found out late in 2004 and early in 2005, taking a bit of a break can feel so good you just keep on doing it. Now, 2008 is obviously different from 2004. Winning is not as dispiriting as losing, but on the other hand losing does not lead to complacency and to an attitude of, "OK, now we can let the guy we elected to take care of things take care of things." Barack has said often though that what we built last year was not really about him. It was a movement, and as long as that movement's goals are unachieved, it has to keep moving forward.

That is my New Year's resolution, then--to keep working for change. In the liturgical calendar, today is the Second Sunday after Christmas Day, and the Psalm appointed for today was Psalm 84. One verse of it goes, "Happy are the people whose strength is in you! whose hearts are set on the pilgrim way." My heart is set on its pilgrim way. It always has been, and with God's help it always will be. I stumble, I get diverted, I lose faith, I get way off track, but I somehow keep finding my way back onto it. Let me recommend it to you. That is, let me recommend your way to you. Your pilgrimage need not and probably will not be the same as mine. In fact, maybe each person's way is as unique as her or his DNA. Just keep moving on it. As Dylan said in another song, "May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung." 

A Broad Place

You have set my feet in a broad place. Psalm 31:8

I wrote more than two months ago about several books I was reading, one of which was A Broad Place: An Autobiography by Jurgen Moltmann. Then, a month ago, I quoted from it at length as a way of clarifying (I hoped, anyway) the intention of this blog's banner. Well, a few weeks ago I finished it at last. I've been at it a long time, it's true. This is not itself a great book, although it reflects and draws on a great body of work.

Moltmann is probably the preeminent theologian of the last 40 years. When the 60's began the theological titans of the first half of the 20th century were winding down their careers. Bonhoeffer was of course long dead, although his influence was continuing to grow. Barth, Bultmann and Brunner were still alive but had become largely inactive. Tillich and Rahner were still publishing, but all of the work that established their reputations was long behind them. Into the vacuum stepped a new generation that had been influenced by all of them, more or less, but needed to respond to new circumstances. The Holocaust, the Cold War, and the rise of anti-colonial movements of national liberation called for new perspectives. Moltmann's first major work, 1964's Theology of Hope, with its emphasis on the future and its concern for political engagement, fit the zeitgeist of the times well. Several of his subsequent books did the same, moving into concern with feminism and ecology as those issues became prominent in the culture and in theology.

This book is certainly a mixed bag. Sometimes reading it is a trial; it can feel as though his diary had regurgitated its contents without any filtering onto the pages of his autobiography. Consider these paragraphs, about one of his many speaking tours, in 1985, as an example:

John McIntyre met me at the Edinburgh airport. He had grown grey and was close to retirement. I had met him 16 years before on my first visit to Edinburgh, when he was dean. He drove me in the university car to the George Hotel in George Street, where I was to stay for three weeks, a quiet, distinguished, and well-kept hotel. Unfortunately, at first I was given a small, cold, dark single attic room, but this was rectified the next morning without any difficulty by Agnes Dougall, the dean's secretary. 'All expenses paid' was the generous offer of the Gifford Foundation.

On the afternoon of 21 February at 4.50, the university car drew up and took me to the first lecture in the Appleton Tower. About 300 people were present...

Well, that's enough of that. You get the idea.

His continual name dropping was a mixed bag, too. Sometimes it was interesting. For instance, I was really envious when I read that he had studied Old Testament under Gerhard von Rad. That will mean nothing at all to a lot of people, though. It was also good to read about his relations with people like Hans Kung, Dorothee Solle (who could disagree sharply and personally with Moltmann), and most of the best known proponents of liberation theology, with which his political theology has a lot in common. If you say that kind of reading makes me little more than a theological Us Magazine fan, I guess I have to plead guilty. Agnes Dougall, on the other hand, I could have done without. Often Moltmann seemed just to be sending a long distance "Hello! Your name's in print!" to countless people he had known over the years.

Sometimes, though, he's much more substantive, and even things he tosses off almost as asides stimulated me to think in new ways. In a chapter about developments in his theology in the 70's he had a section titled, "The Beginning of an Ecological Doctrine of Creation." He wrote there,

...the future of human history is not 'a land of unlimited possibilities...' If it is to serve enduring life and not universal death, it can only come within the limits of the ecosystem of the planet Earth. 'History' as a term for reality as a whole must either be separated from 'nature,' or nature must also be historicized. (Emphasis added.) There is certainly a 'history of nature,' too, as Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker showed, but it is identical neither with human history nor with the nature that is drawn into this history through the agency of human domination.

Either von Weizsacker's reputation has been rehabilitated in Germany more than I would have thought, or Moltmann is making sort of a dubious reference. But that's not what I meant to comment on.

I got to thinking, when I read that, about the historicization of nature and it occurred to me that maybe that's what has been happening in recent decades in humanity's consciousness, and what needs to continue to happen even more. Since the dawn of human awareness the natural world has been seen only as the fixed, the given, so vast, so powerful and so immutable that it lay forever beyond the ability of humans to influence it. As long as people thought of it that way, it remained outside the realm of ethical concern. Once we began thinking of it as having a history, though, and being subject to change, it became conceivable that humans could have input into that change. Then we became responsible for the changes we might introduce.

Seen from that perspective, Darwin and the theory of evolution become not the demons the religious right usually think of them as but rather a providential, prophetic figure and his insight (by implication) into the ways human activity might affect the natural world. (Coincidentally--or maybe not!--as I write this I'm listening to Crowded House's 2007 album Time On Earth.) It's as if, in contrasting the grimy, death-dealing world of England in the industrial revolution that Blake, Wordsworth, Dickens and others had begun to point out with the purity of the Galapagos Islands, Darwin foresaw what could come to pass and began laying a conceptual foundation for responding to it in the future.

Anyway, any book that can, despite its flaws, prompt that kind of reflection is well worth reading.

My banner

I've thought for a while about trying to explain my use of a quote from the book of Hebrews in the banner of this blog. The other day I found in this book I've been reading rather fitfully some observations that are not about Hebrews but still explain my understanding of it in a way that is probably much clearer and certainly more elegant than anything I might have come up with. I'm just going to quote from it at length.

"Hope does not only give the power to break out of oppression, like Israel, and to seek the promised land of liberty. Hope also alienates people from their native land, their friendships and their homes, and makes them ready to let these go and to seek something new. By this I mean that hope for an alternative future brings us into contradiction with the existing present and puts us against the people who cling to it...If we had before our eyes only what we see, then we should come to terms with things as they are, either cheerfully or unwillingly. The fact that we don't come to terms with them--that between us and the existing reality there is no harmony, either friendly or resigned--is the unquenchable hope for the fullness of life, for righteousness and justice on the new earth, and for the kingdom of God. That keeps us unreconciled, restless and open for God's great day.

"Against the horizon of the resurrection of the crucified Christ, life in history becomes a charge, a mission. The promise opens our eyes for the potentialities of history and the goals which we are intended to reach. It is only against the eschatological horizon of hope that the world appears to us as history. But history is not just full of everything possible, good and bad; for this future is not the vacant 'where to?' of possible changes. the promissio, the promise which God's future opens up to us, gives rise to the missio, the mission into history, so that this future can be anticipated in the context of the possibilities open to us. There are historical conditions in the world which are in contradiction to the kingdom of God and his righteousness. These must be contradicted so that they are changed."

Moltmann wrote this in the section of his autobiography about the time when he published his most famous book, Theology of Hope . I wouldn't be at all surprised if I were to find out that a certain well known American politician who often writes and speaks about hope and who is open about the role of faith in his life had read that book. I wish I could ask him.

With These Hands I Demand the Future

There are several progressive Christian blogs I visit every so often, and one of them is a believer's journal, written by Tim Ensworth, a UCC minister in Waterloo, Iowa. Today I found a post he wrote a couple of weeks ago titled "shame on burger king!" that really got my attention. I don't eat at BK often, but I have sometimes, and it looks as though when I did, I was supporting a claque of robber barons.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the CIW for short, has been campaigning to have the piece rate paid to agricultural workers in Florida who pick the tomatoes that wind up on fast food burgers, tacos and so on raised by an extra penny per pound. That might add--what--an eighth of a penny to the cost of a Whopper? So far McDonald's and Taco Bell have agreed to the increase. Burger King, on the other hand, not only refused to match their increase but sabotaged the deal the CIW had struck with the other chains.

The Nation has been following this story (see here and here) and they suggest the action center set up by Sojourners, the progressive, evangelical Christian (no, it's not necessarily an oxymoron) group as a way to exert pressure on Burger King. After they acquiesce in this, maybe we should try to get them to do something about those awful, tacky commercials, too.

The CIW web site is sort of a mess--lots and lots of information packed into too small a space--but the following video they made compensates for that. It has no information to speak of, but it is a moving tribute to the people whose underpaid labor produces the junk we can unthinkingly stuff down our gullets as we barrel down the highway.

 

An eye for an eye

“Show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” Deuteronomy 19:21 (NIV)

Anyone who planned to go up to the Colorado high country on Sunday, October 9, 2005 for a last glimpse of the aspens’ fall colors was disappointed. A cold front had moved in, stripping most of the leaves off the trees, bringing first rain and then snow. Early Tuesday it had snowed for over a day, leaving about eight inches on the ground in Aurora, an eastern suburb of Denver.

A steady wind was blowing there under a half moon when Terrill Williams, 30, arrived that Tuesday evening at his home, about 15 minutes’ drive from my home, after a night out. He lived in an area of homes and office buildings built in the ‘60s and ‘70s near Buckley AFB that mostly have gone to seed. Many of the homes have weeds instead of grass around them and burglar bars on the doors and windows. The most noticeable features nearby are the Super K Mart two blocks north of his house and the large trailer park across Colfax Avenue, the old U.S. Route 40, from the K-Mart.

Williams may have had in mind the need to get some sleep so he could get up in the morning and go to his successful produce business. He may have been thinking about his fifth child on the way. On the other hand, since he had been having himself a good time, he may not have had much specific on his mind at all. We’ll never know. He was clearheaded enough, though, that when he saw burglars in his home he knew he was in trouble.

He may even have recognized one of them. A few weeks earlier he had been in a liquor store parking lot when a 19 year old named Derek Lanctot drove in, cut him off and gave him the finger. Williams was no patsy. He’d been a football player, a defensive back at Wayne State and then semi-pro, with the Colorado Wolverines. Words would have been exchanged, and Williams hit Lanctot. Ever since then, Lanctot seems to have had it in for him.

When Williams walked in and saw himself outnumbered and outgunned, he did what any sensible person would in that situation: he turned around and ran. Lanctot did what a coward might: he shot Williams twice in the back. A strong man pumped up on adrenaline, cocaine and ecstasy, Williams ran about four blocks to the trailer park before he had a heart attack, fell in the snow and died. He was found four hours later.

Williams may not have been a plaster saint, but by the account of his family he was a good man, hard working, caring and full of life. He certainly did not deserve to come to his end face down in the snow, bleeding and alone. Whatever else he was doing that night, if Derek Lanctot had not shot him he would in all likelihood be among his family today, enlivening their lives with his unique energy, about which they speak movingly. The person who killed him deserves the most severe punishment.

But what does someone who had little or nothing to do with this tragedy deserve?

Michael Evans is certainly no saint, either. Twenty years old at the time, he apparently was part of the same criminal cohort as Lanctot. There was testimony that he helped hatch the plan to burglarize Williams' home. He later told police that if he had been able to get a gun, he would have been there that night, too. But he says he couldn’t, and he wasn’t. There is nothing to disprove his claim that he wasn’t there. The other young man who was there that night has since been killed in the course of another robbery, so to the cops’ frustration, I suppose, he’s beyond the reach of justice. But Evans is close at hand. Now Lanctot has been sentenced to 25 years in prison, with the possibility of getting out sooner than that. Evans has been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Lanctot is white; Evans is black.

Did Lanctot earn a deal for himself by agreeing to testify against Evans? Police and prosecutors often think in terms of “putting bad guys away” and “getting garbage off the streets for good.” Those are good things to do if  they are in accordance with the rule of law, meting out justice rationally and equitably. If it is just a matter of the authorities deciding that someone needs to be taken out of circulation and then concocting a justification for doing so, that’s little more than lawlessness.

Is that what happened here? Did the Aurora police and the Arapahoe County prosecutors decide on their own the public would be safer with Michael Evans out of the way and then come up with a way to get that done? And did race play a factor in making them believe that the black man who didn’t shoot anyone was more likely to remain forever a threat to Coloradans than the white man who did shoot someone? It certainly looks like that may have been the case.

It doesn’t make cowboy justice right if it is papered over with a dubious law, either. Evans was convicted of felony murder. Under this law, if one of several specified felonies results in the death of a victim, everyone involved in the felony is fully responsible for the death, regardless of the level of that person’s actual involvement with the death.

The statute of felony murder has come under increasing attack recently, and with good reason. It may have ancient roots in medieval English common law, but around here lately it seems to be a favorite weapon of prosecutors eager to pander to panicked citizens. Since the 1993 Summer of Violence prosecutors have been able to direct-file, charging juveniles as adults without first having to go through a hearing to determine if it is appropriate. Then they can turn to the felony murder law to send young people to a life spent entirely behind bars.

Defenders of the law tout its ability to deter crime, but it’s being used against kids. When they get into trouble they usually lack the legal knowledge, the intellectual and emotional maturity, and in some cases the sobriety to allow them to think about how what they’re doing could result in a life sentence. With all that missing, the deterrent effect is pretty much nil.

The most famous example by far in Colorado, and I think in most of the United States, of the application of the felony murder statute is that of Lisl Auman.. A minor burglary she initiated in 1997 ended, for her, after a wild chase when she was handcuffed and put in the back seat of a police car. Unfortunately for Auman a friend who had helped her in the burglary kept running, killed a policeman, and then killed himself. That left her alone to take the heat for the death of a cop. She was charged with felony murder, convicted and, like Michael Evans, sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Fortunately for her, though, a white girl makes a more appealing poster child than a black man, and a bevy of celebrities lined up in her corner, including Morris Dees, Johnny Depp and most of all Hunter S. Thompson. Even the thoroughly apolitical Warren Zevon got in the act because of his friendship with Thompson. After several years of being a cause célèbre her conviction was overturned on a minute technicality and she was released from prison.

Michael Evans doesn’t have anyone rich or famous in his corner. He does have an attorney who cares. I have spoken to Lisa Moses and I could tell that she honestly believes her client was denied justice. She is appealing his conviction, but she has a long, lonely and very much uphill fight ahead of her.

The Bible verse I quoted at the beginning of this post is actually found three times in the Pentateuch, in almost precisely the same wording–an indication of the importance attached to it in ancient Israel. It’s often cited today as an example of the brutality at the heart of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition but that’s a misunderstanding of the verse arising out of a failure to understand it in its historical context.

In a time when the prevailing notion of justice was sort of, “You slap me, and I’ll kill you,” and “You kill my cousin, and we’ll wipe out your village--men, women and children,” the idea of an equivalency between damage and punishment was a revolutionary advance. Along with the ideas of holding a hearing before a council of the community and forbidding perjury it held out the promise of retributive equity. Wrongs could be redressed without escalation into mutually destructive vendettas. Social cohesion and stability were promoted and there was a chance for everyone to flourish.

In time prophetic voices would begin to point beyond this minimal standard, toward the power of repentance and forgiveness to bring healing without the need for punishment. Finally Jesus announced the advent of a new era when love would rule.

Sometimes I have to admit, though, that that new era seems, in the words of a song, “a long time coming.” It probably seems that way to Michael Evans, too, if he thinks about it. He might even say that lately we seem to be slipping backward. That Mosaic code concept of and eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth must sound very good to him now.

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Edit: While this might be a violation of the laws of blogging, I'm going to edit this post, although only to add some attribution and links to more information.
The basic source of my information for this post was Brandon Johansson's article about a month ago in Aurora's local newspaper, the Aurora Sentinel. Another source of information about this case was this article in the Rocky Mountain News. This is a good article on felony murder in the Denver Post. The Wkikpedia article about felony murder was also helpful.

In Memoriam: Erick Hernandez

You've never heard of Erick Hernandez. He wasn't famous or rich, like Lindsay Lohan or Michael Vick. Even within the limits of local news, his story was no more than a passing blip. Although he had the courage and honor needed to do whatever he could to care for his family, even if it took him far from them, he probably wasn't a scholar. Like many a good man before him, he was a ditch-digger.

From what I've gathered so far, which is incomplete, and from what I've inferred from that, he came to the United States not long ago from Honduras. He hoped to earn enough money to support his wife and three children back home. It would be hard to say now whether he was documented or not, but that really doesn't matter. He was 26 years old when he died.

According to news reports, yesterday afternoon he was working about a block and a half from the Colorado Governor's Mansion on a sewer line, one of those essentials of modern urban life we prefer not to think about, much less see or smell, and still less to climb into. He was working in a hole twelve feet deep when he dropped his shovel. When he went to retrieve it, the sides of the hole, which didn't have the required support, collapsed and buried him. He died quickly, although not immediately. His co-workers struggled desperately to unearth him, even using a backhoe, and when they had uncovered his head he was still moving, but it was too late.

What, if anything, did he think of in those last moments? Did he think of how it ennobled him to die so that people like you and me could casually flush unpleasantness out of their lives? Not likely. Did he wonder what would happen to his little ones? Very possibly, but we'll never know.

The Bible readings we heard in church this morning were, as it happened, about work, wealth and death.

The first reading was the familiar beginning of Ecclesiastes, a meditation on the ways everything is in vain, or in the word used there, vanity. First the author reflects on the meaninglessness of wealth and pleasure and then on how the rich man's heirs will enjoy what he has accumulated. He asks, "What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? for all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest." Long ago I had a job as a dishwasher at a cheap restaurant. When I went to bed at night I could see trays of dirty flatware inside my eyelids. Maybe Hernandez dreamed at night of sewers. Again, we'll never know.

The gospel lesson was Jesus' story about the rich man who invested in larger barns to hold his riches and figured he was set for life. "But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God." As it was being read I also thought of the story of Lazarus and Dives, in which Jesus also brought out the other side of that coin, the blessedness of the poor man who suffered in life, but, in the kind of inversion characteristic of the Kingdom of God, was rewarded in death. I also thought of the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.  Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth."

Erick Hernandez has inherited his small portion of the earth sooner than he hoped--or in a way, the earth has taken him. I pray that his family will be comforted.

In the meantime, though, I will continue to follow this story, as much as I can replacing my suppositions above with facts. And I will see if anything can be done to ensure that the employer who illegally and carelessly exposed him to danger compensates his family for their loss. Check back here for updates.