Author: Alan Bean

Tragedy reveals a new side of Texas

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By Alan Bean

Terri Johnson
Terri Johnson

Four people died on the evening of April 26, 2014 when a vehicle driven the wrong direction on Texas highway 287 slammed head-on into a vehicle carrying four passengers.  No one knows why Terri Johnson, forty year-old Wise County Justice of the Peace, was driving the wrong way, although alcohol has been ruled out as an explanation.

Authorities were slow to release the names of the three other persons killed in the head-on collision and they have been largely overlooked in the reporting of the story.  They weren’t responsible for the accident, and they didn’t hold prominent positions in the community, so all the attention descended on Ms. Johnson.

Last Saturday, my wife Nancy and I drove three and a half hours to Quanah, Texas to attend the joint funeral of the three semi-anonymous victims of this unspeakable tragedy: Juan Rios, 32, of Quanah, his wife, Amy Culwell, and Juan’s mother, Terry Rios, 50, also of Quanah.  Nancy and I were in attendance because Amy is Nancy’s cousin, the daughter of Craig Culwell of Tulia, Nancy’s step-uncle.  

I had never met Juan, Amy or Sherry, and sometimes felt like a bit of an impostor.  But the 800 people who jammed First Baptist Church of Quanah knew these people and hard grief was etched in every face we met.  The sanctuary might have held 500 people sitting shoulder to shoulder, with 300 more pressed along the walls and foyer.  There must have been 100 floral bouquets arrayed across the front of the sanctuary.

There was something remarkable about the entire experience, and four days later I’m still trying to figure out what it was.

I suspect the families had a hard time finding clergy willing to preside at the funeral. Juan and his mother Terry were both Roman Catholic while Amy belonged to the Church of Christ. This isn’t the gay-marriage-blessing United Church of Christ we’re talking about here; this is the southern Church of Christ, the staunchly conservative wing of the Restoration Movement that refuses to worship or “fellowship” with Baptists. Catholics are right out.

As a result, the two officiants were a Catholic deacon who serves three North Texas parishes (the shortage of priests grows more acute each year) and a Baptist from a small church in a small town I had never heard of.  Unlike most of their clerical colleagues, these men were willing to give solace to a deeply traumatized community even if it meant stretching the rules a bit.  If your theology doesn’t let you respond to deep grief, you need a new theology.

Both officiants bent over backwards to be inclusive and welcoming.  “We come from different backgrounds and denominations,” the Catholic deacon declared, “but we all follow Jesus and we all want to get to heaven.”  When he asked how many of us were Christians every hand shot into the air.  Well, maybe not every hand. He didn’t ask if there were any atheists or agnostics in the crowd, or if some preferred the “spiritual but not religious” label.  That’s not a thing in Quanah, Texas.

Quanah Parker

The town is named after Quanah Parker, the Comanche leader who defied the US Army for years before finally being driven onto an Oklahoma reservation by a lack of food and good options.  Colonel Ranald McKenzie and his soldiers brought Quanah’s followers to heel by slaughtering 1500 Comanche horses.  Since a Comanche warrior is out of business without his horse, Quanah and his men surrendered to the white man and quickly adapted to his ways.  The Comanche leader went on hunting trips with Teddy Roosevelt and started his own church–an adaptation of Christianity famous for its use of sacred peyote. “The White Man goes into his church and talks about Jesus,” Quanah said, “The Indian goes into his tipi and talks with Jesus.”

Like Quanah Parker, the people of North Texas are socially adaptable, and it was on display during the worship service.  I couldn’t get over the diversity of the congregation–it looked exactly like the demographic breakdown of the surrounding community.  Most of the mourners were white, but many were Latino and the African American community was surprisingly well represented.

I doubt very much that anyone has made a concerted effort at racial reconciliation in Quanah, Texas.  That sort of thing would be frowned upon.  But the three people who died in a tragic car wreck were well known in the community.  Juan was a trucker and his Anglo wife, Amy, worked for years as a hair dresser.  Both had attended high school in the same general vicinity and, a dozen years after graduation, encountered their old school friends on a regular basis.

The Sunday morning worship hour may be the most segregated hour in America; but when the school bell rings on Monday morning, we are about as integrated as we ever get, especially in small Texas towns where private schools aren’t an option and there’s just one school.

I have no way of knowing how many of the 800 people crowded into the sanctuary were regular church attenders.  If the music was anything to go by, not many.  I am used to officiating at funerals where the family has no church connection, but back in the day folks seemed to know a hymn or two, or they just let me pick the music.  At the funeral in Quanah, the family picked the music, sometimes with eyebrow-raising results.

It could be argued that Country music, largely because it deals with the ordinary stuff of life, offers its own brand of spirituality.  Take Luke Bryan’s recent hit, And Drink a Beer. Bryan calls the song “a memorial” because it was inspired by the untimely deaths of two family members.

When I got the news today
I didn’t know what to say.
So I just hung up the phone.
I took a walk to clear my head,
This is where the walking lead
Can’t believe you’re really gone
Don’t feel like going home

So I’m gonna sit right here
On the edge of this pier
Watch the sunset disappear
And drink a beer.

When that last line came over the PA system (there was no live music at all) all the church folk did a double take.  Did the singer just say what we think he said?

Luke Bryan didn’t head down to the local church and visit with his pastor when the bad news arrived–he walked to the edge of a pier and drank a beer.  There aren’t many piers in dry North Texas, but I suspect most of the folks on hand for this funeral deal with their grief by picking up a cold one.

Other than Kris Kristofferson’s One Day at a Time, Sweet Jesus, none of the songs were particularly religious.  The recessional was Mariah Carey’s take on the old Harry Nillson song I Can’t Live, if Living is Without You.  It’s a brilliant pop song, but there’s nothing remotely hopeful about it.  But then we are talking about the deaths of three innocent people who by all rights ought to be alive, so the lyrics fit the occasion to perfection.

Well I can’t forget this evening
Or your face as you were leaving
But I guess that’s just the way the story goes
You always smile but in your eyes
Your sorrow shows, yes it shows
I can’t live, if living is without you
I can’t live, I can’t give anymore.

A lot of people in the room felt precisely that way.  In fact, the lyrics of the songs that were played evoked deep sobs and emotional gasps throughout the room, so I guess they did their job.

The pastors said all the expected things about the dearly departed being in a better place, walking with Jesus, being reunited with family members, and all the rest, but it didn’t fit the occasion and the preachers appeared to know it.  They also gave the mourners permission to be mad at God and assured us that God was big enough to take it.  (Thirty years ago, such sentiments would have been almost unthinkable.) I suspect the country songs communicated because they didn’t try to say too much.  In the face of senseless tragedy, there isn’t much to say.

When the church no longer central plays a central role, people find alternative communities of consolation.  The folks who raised their hands when asked if they were Christians were sincere.  Of course they were Christians.  They are Texans, for God’s sake, and being a Christian is just part of the mix even if you rarely get up in time for worship on Sunday morning.  But you didn’t sense that religion was the primary glue holding this group together.  There must have been 60 people, most of them women, wearing Dallas Cowboy uniforms.  In the bulletin, Terry Ann Rios was pictured in a Cowboy jersey–I guess she was a big fan.  So were her friends.  Watching the ‘Boys while grilling burgers and drinking beer is a big deal in small Texas towns, so showing up to a funeral in Cowboy blue and white makes a certain kind of sense.  It evoked kinship and a sense of shared identity.

unnamedIn similar fashion, the trucker friends of the fallen Juan Rios made a point of driving their Kenworth and Peterbilt trucks to the church and they led the processional to the interment service ten miles to the north.  It was 45 degrees F when Nancy and I got up that Saturday morning, but it was 95 when we arrived at the country cemetery shortly after noon.  We must have walked half a mile to the graveside service, passing at least forty trucks parked in long rows along the way. The truckers formed a close-knit fraternity, an alternative church of sorts.  They wanted to make a statement, and they made it.

North Texas is changing.  The churches, once the heart and soul of every Texas community, are gradually losing their influence, especially among the beer-drinking crowd who watch the Cowboys on television, holler for the local high school team Friday nights, listen to country music, and rarely make it to church.  This slice of Texas rarely votes, they don’t know anybody who’s anybody, they are over-represented in the state’s jails and prisons, they work hard at demanding and often demeaning jobs, and when they die the papers and the TV crew from Fort Worth pay little attention.  So they cobble together an alternate culture in places where no one is looking, using bits and pieces of whatever lies close at hand and hanging onto one another for dear life.

confederate flagAs three balloons were released into the air a cheer rose from the crowd.  Then we made our way back to our vehicles.  I couldn’t help noticing the confederate flag flapping beside one of the headstones, a sinister reflection of the old Texas. Somebody felt they were honoring the memory of a loved one by planting a symbol of hatred and division by their grave.  Maybe they thought the deceased would derive some consolation from the stars and bars.  I wondered how these Old South holdouts, the quick and the dead, would feel about the racially diverse group of mourners filing out of the cemetery.  Texas might not be changing in ways conservatives or liberals might desire, but in its own ornery way, Texas is changing in hopeful ways few of us comprehend .  A funeral in Quanah, Texas gave me a glimpse into one emerging slice of the new Texas, and there’s a lot there to like.

 

 

 

In Memoriam: Glen Stassen

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By Alan Bean

I am gratified to see the many tributes to Glen Stassen that have been appeared in the wake of his death last week.  My wife Nancy and I got to know Glen very well in the late 1970s when we were both students at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  The nuclear power industry was gearing up at the time and a plant was scheduled for construction across the Ohio River in Indiana.  If Glen hadn’t brought this to our attention we would have remained oblivious–(Lord knows, none of our other professors were talking about it).  Instead, Nancy and I found ourselves in Indiana protesting a nuclear plant that, thankfully, was never built.

Glen Stassen was in love with Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God.  Other professors emphasized Jesus’ kingdom teaching on occasion (I am thinking of Frank Stagg in particular), but Glen built his entire theology on a kingdom foundation.  Some would say he was more an Anabaptist than a Baptist, but Glen would have called that a distinction without a difference.

Glen was one of the most intelligent people on the planet, but that isn’t what anyone remembers about him.  When you dropped by his office, the books were double stacked because the ample shelves couldn’t contain his personal library.  But there was a humility to the man; he was all about converting the ideas of Jesus into action (“praxis” was the word he used).

I will never forget the “ethics luncheons” Glen helped organize at Southern.  On one occasion, Duke McCall, the recently retired president of the seminary, defended American economic policy in South America against the critique of the liberation theologians.  McCall counted the presidents of several international firms among his personal friends, he told us, and they had assured him that the American presence in the Third World was an unmitigated blessing.  Glen didn’t agree, obviously, but he didn’t take the disagreement personally.  Glen didn’t think about whether his shirt was tucked in, whether his hair was brushed, what neighborhood he lived in, or what other people thought of him.  He just wanted to change the world. (more…)

Motives Matter

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If a random Google search is anything to go by, it was Ralph Waldo Emerson who originated this clever quip, albeit in a slightly altered form:

“I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives.”

It’s clever, even if the Emerson attribution is somebody’s little internet joke.  Nevertheless, I disagree.  Sorry chickens, sometimes motives must be questioned.

Take Donald Sterling, for instance.  Please, somebody, take Donald Sterling.

The Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP was poised to give the notorious racist a lifetime service award when news broke that Sterling had been caught on tape making patently racist remarks about the very people who wished to honor him.

Incredibly, this would have been the civil rights organization’s second lifetime achievement award to Sterling.

There must be some explanation.  And there is.  Sort of.  Sterling had made a series of modest donations to the NAACP over the years and the group wanted to keep the cash flowing.

Did NAACP organizers really believe that Donald Sterling deserved a humanitarian award?  Almost certainly not.

Did they care?  Same answer.

Motives matter.  The NBA will soon deprive Mr. Sterling of his right to own the Los Angeles Clippers, but the octogenarian’s racial views have been a poorly guarded secret for years.  In 2009, Sterling was sued by Clipper manager, Elgin Baylor, for discrimination based on age and race.  Sterling repeatedly claimed that he wanted to have a bunch of poor black guys from the South playing under a Caucasian coach. Nobody in the NBA intervened.

The tape released by Sterling’s “girlfriend” V. Stiviano is singularly depressing.  The Clipper’s manager is hurt that she would accuse him of racism.  He is devastated that she would embarrass him by allowing herself to be photographed with Magic Johnson and, heaven forfend, memorializing the magical moment on Instagram. He repeatedly threatens to throw her over for a more accommodating woman if she doesn’t quit her lowdown ways.

In short, Sterling comes off sounding like a man who has spent his entire adult life surrounded by groveling toadies. Donald gets to say anything he wants, no matter how puerile and degrading.  As a man of means, his motives don’t matter.  And if he creates offense, he can cleanse his reputation with a paltry donation.

Cliven Bundy, the man widely feted for standing up to the bullying tactics of Uncle Sam, lost his support overnight when he shared his take on “the negro” with New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney. 

“They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

Like Donald Sterling, Cliven Bundy doesn’t think of himself as a racist.  He introduced his remarks by saying it would be a shame if the “colored” people and “the Spanish” had to go back to the way things used to be. He then suggests that “the negro” was happier under slavery.

When his remarks spawned a tidal wave of outrage from sea to shining sea, Bundy was taken aback.  “Was it something I said?”

Bundy was used to sharing his views with white people who shared his warped worldview and had no idea folks would take offense.

Sterling didn’t want his girlfriend associating publicly with “minorities” because he assumed “the world” would be offended.

With the media hanging on his every syllable, rancher Bundy assumed that his growing fan club would be enlightened and informed by his views on “the negro.”

No one asked why Bundy had been letting his cattle graze on government land since 1993 without paying the required fee.  Not a single eye brow arched when the grand old man of the rolling plains allowed that the federal government had no legitimacy and therefore no authority.  No one asked where these views come from.  No one questioned the man’s motives.

Motives matter.  Sure, plenty of westerners think the feds own too much land, or that federal officials can be heavy-handed.  But when a man asserts that the United States of America is a legal fiction he is free to ignore, we’re dealing with something radical.

Historically, when Americans question the legitimacy of the federal government, the motive is racial resentment.  So it was in the South before and during the Civil War.  So it was during the nation’s brief flirtation with Reconstruction.  So it was in the halcyon days of the civil rights movement.  When the federal government ended slavery and segregation by legislative fiat reinforced, when necessary, by force of arms, the response has been predictable.

Motives matter.  When a man like Cliven Bundy denies the authority of the United States to limit his freedom in any way, we need to ask why.  Mr. Bundy shouldn’t have to reveal his deep-seated racism for all the world to see before we ask the obvious question.

Why are we willing to celebrate the heroism of a Cliven Bundy or hand out humanitarian awards to the likes of Donald Sterling right up to the moment they fly into a racist rant?  And why, when the ugly truth is revealed, is the nation shocked, shocked! that anyone could think that way fourteen years into the twenty-first century?

Sure, Sterling deserves to lose his team (even if he profits richly from his humiliation).  But isn’t there something a wee bit creepy about the orgy of recrimination we have witnessed on Sports Central and the evening news?  The talking heads have been in a competition to see who could express the deepest outrage.  Its almost as if we need to burn a token racist at the stake of public opinion every now and then to assure ourselves that we are a post-racial nation.

Donald Sterling likely had good reason to fear that his reputation would suffer if his girlfriend showed up in the wrong company.  Guys like Stirling hang out with guys like Stirling; guys like Bundy hang out with guys like Bundy.  There are millions of unreconstructed racists out there, folks, and the vast majority of these people would eschew the racist label.  They’re just tellin’ it like it is.  They’re all about free speech and the first amendment.  They’re American heroes who resist the dictates of the politically correct.

But let one of these heroes slip up and use the n-word and we break out the tar and feathers.  You can act like a racist so long as you don’t talk like one.  Actually, you can talk like a racist so long as you avoid epithets and slurs.

Men like Donald Sterling and Cliven Bundy are the way they are because nobody questioned their motives.  If we told them the truth, the donations might dry up.  If we ask too many questions, our all-American hero story might vanish with the western wind.

So we gain the donation or the killer story and lose our souls.

Motives matter.

 

 

Will Obama finally back up his merciful rhetoric?

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By Alan Bean

Could President Obama be on the verge of commuting the sentences of hundreds, even thousands of non-violent drug offenders sentenced under draconian, and now-defunct, mandatory minimum laws?

It appears so.  Criminal justice reform advocates have wondered for years why a president who claims to be concerned about our seriously flawed system of justice has been less willing to pardon and commute sentences than hard-nosed conservatives like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, the former governor of tuff-on-crime Texas.

Part of the reason, as this Pro Publica article spells out, is that few petitions for clemency reach the president’s desk. Ronald Rodgers, who heads the Office of the Pardon Attorney, is an ex-military man and former federal prosecutor who has little sympathy for convicted felons.

But why hasn’t Obama sacked Rodgers long ago if the Pardon Attorney’s policies are incompatible with the president’s wishes?  Lord knows, the president has taken a lot of heated criticism over this issue over the years.

It could also be argued that Democratic presidents are vulnerable to charges of being soft on crime; but in recent years, reform has become a bi-partisan issue.  I suspect the libertarian wing of the Republican party has done more to further concrete reform legislation than purported liberals over the course of the last decade.  So the fear-of-backlash theory doesn’t wash.

How can mere mortals understand the workings of a US president?  It is like grappling with the problem of evil–the ways of the Almighty are inscrutable.

But, whatever the explanation, there are rumors afoot that Rodgers is on his way out and that the merciful rhetoric we have been hearing from Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder in recent years may finally translate into action.

Let’s hope so.  And if the mercy movement reaches folks like Ramsey Muniz, a 70 year-old civil rights activist who has spent 20 years in federal prisons on trumped up narcotics conspiracy charges, so much the better.

Obama plans clemency for hundreds of drug offenders

Barbara Scrivner’s long quest for mercy tests a president’s will — and her own faith

By 

April 21, 2014
Yahoo News

DUBLIN, Calif—Scrawled on the inside of Barbara Scrivner’s left arm is a primitive prison tattoo that says “Time Flies.”

If only that were the case.

For Scrivner, time has crawled, it’s dawdled, and on bad days, it’s felt like it’s stood completely still. She was 27 years old when she started serving a 30-year sentence in federal prison for selling a few ounces of methamphetamine. Now, 20 years later, she feels like she’s still living in the early ’90s—she’s never seen or touched a cellphone, she still listens to her favorite band, the Scorpions, and she carefully coats her eyelids in electric blue eye shadow in the morning.

It’s out there, outside of prison, where time flies. (more…)

Only a homeless Jesus can change us

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The Rev. David Buck sits next to the Jesus the Homeless statue that was installed in front of his church, St. Alban's Episcopal, in Davidson, N.C.

By Alan Bean

Was Jesus homeless?  Yes, he was.  In Matthew 8 we read:  “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”  

And then there is that startling passage in Matthew 25: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

Jesus of Nazareth was an itinerant preacher, walking the dusty roads of Palestine with an odd assortment of men and women.  He never worried where his next meal was coming from, partly because his friends provided food and drink for the journey, and partly because he learned how to live with hunger.

So it is entirely appropriate that St. Alban’s Episcopal Church should depict Jesus as a homeless man wrapped in a blanket in a piece of public art.  And it is also appropriate that a woman driving by should pick up her cell phone and call the police.  Jesus didn’t go to the cross for identifying with the poor . . . but it was certainly part of the mix.  Had he identified with the wealthy, he would have avoided the cross and his message would have been the mirror image of what we read in the Gospels.

In his book, Doing Justice, Congregations and Community Organizing, Dennis Jacobsen talks about what happens when white and black professionals abandon inner city communities by incorporating separate municipalities.  When that happens, tax money flows to affluent neighborhoods (like the real estate surrounding St. Alban’s Episcopal Church) while inner city communities wither and die.  It doesn’t have to be that way, Jacobsen says:

David Rusk argues for a policy of regionalization of planning, taxing, and spending.  He points to Indianapolis as a positive example of regionalization.  when now Senator Richard Lugar was mayor of Indianapolis, he finessed a state legislative action that made the boundaries of Indianapolis and its surrounding county congruent, creating a ‘uni-government’.  The effects have been dramatic.

The Christian gospel doesn’t damn the wealthy (although it comes damn close); the gospel is a call to repentance and a call to take responsibility for the men and women who sleep on park benches and undergo similar forms of humiliation. (more…)

The Man in Orange meets the Grey Lady

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By Alan Bean

Forty days ago, I sat down in Kent McKeever’s office in Waco.  It was the first day of a Lenten fast in which the lawyer-pastor would give up free world respectability by wearing the orange jumpsuit of the incarcerated.  He never dreamed that his story would end up in the New York Times, but so it has.

Kent wanted to use his blog to draw attention to mass incarceration and what the experts call “felon disenfranchisement”.  The normal course would have been to rail against the powers and principalities of this evil age.  That would have garnered a few hundred hits, a few thousand at best, and most of the readers would be in full agreement with his perspective.

But following in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, Kent decided to dramatize his message, even if that cost him the anonymity and social comfort that comes with being a white male in a town owned and operated by white males.

In today’s blog post, Kent voices his amazement at the attention his symbolic gesture has received.  He shares three experiences from Good Friday including this:

My parents are in town for the weekend so we went to a local restaurant for some takeout.  As we waited for our food, a couple of the staff mentioned that they had been reading about me.  I gave them my usual smile and thanks, and kept sipping my water.  And then Juan came up to our table where we waited.  He said he heard what I was doing and wanted to shake my hand.  He knew what I was wearing.  He had been there.  He thanked me.  I asked how long he had been out.  Two years.  And he had been blessed with a job at this restaurant since he got out.  Things were going pretty well for him, praise God.  But I could still see a remnant of that shame that we unnecessarily and without mercy place on people like Juan.  We shook hands again, he thanked me, I told him it was a blessing for me, and he concluded, “We’re not all bad people.” 

Amen, Juan.  Amen.  And that’s 40 Days in Orange.

 

An Orange Jumpsuit for Lent

By JESSE WEGMANAPRIL 18, 2014

Kent McKeever has been summoned for jury duty twice. The second time was on March 17, more than a week into Lent, so he had no choice but to wear his orange prison jumpsuit. As he entered the McLennan County courthouse in Waco, Tex., two sheriff’s officers stopped him.

“The first one just kind of looks at me. He asks, ‘Where’d you get that?’ ”

“I said, ‘At the jail supply company.’ ”

“ ‘They sold it to you?’ ”

“ ‘I told them it was for personal use.’ And he was, like, ‘Hmm.’ ”

Mr. McKeever, a lawyer and part-time youth minister at Seventh and James Baptist Church in Waco, had prepared for worse when he committed to wearing the jumpsuit for Lent. After years of providing both spiritual and legal assistance to the poor and formerly incarcerated, it was time to do something more visible to call attention to the nation’s prison crisis, and to the obstacles inmates face on returning to society. But 40 days is a long time to dress like a convict, especially in Texas.

Kent McKeever, a lawyer and part-time youth minister, is dressing like a convict for 40 days.CreditDylan Hollingsworth for The New York Times
Kent McKeever, a lawyer and part-time youth minister, is dressing like a convict for 40 days.Dylan Hollingsworth for The New York Times

“A couple different people said, ‘I hope you don’t get shot!’ ” Mr. McKeever recalled on Wednesday, Day 37, speaking by phone from his primary job, as the director at Mission Waco Legal Services, where he helps clients navigate the legal barriers they face at every turn. “I didn’t know what people’s reactions would be. But I knew that I personally needed to experience what it feels like to be rejected and have stigma attached to you. As a white professional male, I’ve never had that experience before.” (more…)

Charles Kiker: Jew Killer?

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By Charles Kiker

Tragic events unfolded in Overland Park, Kansas on Palm Sunday. A shooter took aim at innocent bystanders at two Jewish centers: a community center and an assisted living center. Three people were killed. A suspect has been arrested.

But there’s an ironic twist to what happened Palm Sunday. The shooter apparently had decided to vent his hatred against Jews. So he began his killing spree. One Jew down; two more Jews down.

But wait, it turns out he killed three Christians! A Roman Catholic and two Methodists.

Hate turned loose is hate turned loose, indiscriminate hatred. Jesus says when we hate someone in our hearts, our hearts have become murderous. Murderous hearts are indiscriminately destructive. Hatred unleashed recognizes no boundaries.

Daphne Holmes: Prison Reform holds Key to a More Peaceful Society

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Guest Post by Daphne Holmes

While some believe inmates languish in luxurious settings, with too many creature comforts, prison reformers paint a much bleaker picture of the conditions plaguing inmates in federal and state corrections facilities. Penalties like solitary confinement, for example, are seen as inhumane and ill-suited for rehabilitating criminals.

Wherever you stand on prison reform, it is hard to deny a link between the way we function as a society on the outside, and the way we mete out punishment for those serving time on the inside.  Compassion and empathy are central to human interactions outside prison walls, so they should also play roles in the way inmates are rehabilitated. Until we establish effective programs to break the cycles of crime and recidivism, natural order will continue to be elusive on the streets.  Viewed in this light, prison reform holds real potential for supporting a more peaceful society.

Balance is Essential to effective Corrections Policy

Corrections systems are tasked with protecting law-abiding citizens from harm, by incarcerating offenders.  But the system is also responsible to maintain a balancing act between punishment and rehabilitation, which are not always administered equitably.  The best outcomes are seen when prisoners have opportunities to better themselves, so that positive contributions to society become distinct possibilities for those committed to legitimacy once they are released. (more…)

It’s time to end homelessness

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By Alan Bean

Nobody is a fan of homelessness, but we’ve learned to live with it.  We are most adept at living with it.

I will never forget my first encounter with homelessness.  I was visiting Washington DC with my wife and three children in the late 1980s.  We were walking through a park en route to the Mall and the kids were amusing themselves with a game of hide and seek.  As my daughter Lydia searched for her brother Adam, she happened upon a large square piece of opaque plastic lying on the grass.  Thinking her brother might hiding under there, she lifted up the plastic sheet and discovered an old man fast asleep.  He had obviously spent the night sleeping in the park.

I had spent most of the early 1980s in Canada or in isolated places like Glenrock, Wyoming, so I had no idea what was going on.  I rememb.ered speaking to a weeping nun in Louisville Kentucky when I worked as a social worker at a mental hospital.  She told me that federal funding for mental health services was being cut back and soon there would be nowhere for people to go but to the streets.  The woman was inconsolable with grief.  This was in 1980, before Ronald Reagan had worked his magic on the safety net.

As I looked down at the sleeping old man under the plastic in a Washington park, I realized what the sister was talking about.  Frankly, I was horrified.  I was also embarrassed to be living in a country that tolerated such horrors.

But I got used to it. (more…)

The Beast and the Border

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train 01
The Beast

By Alan Bean

Mike Seifert works with poor immigrant families, documented and otherwise, in the Rio Grande Valley.  The story he tells below hasn’t received a lot of attention in the mainstream media, fact that is significant in itself.  A border patrol agent kidnapped, raped and attempted to kill three Honduran women who were attempting to surrender.  This happened in Seifert’s back yard.

No one is saying that the agent responsible for this outrage is typical of the men and women we employ to guard the border.  But when you hire vast numbers of people in a hurry you don’t get the brightest and the best.  When government officials keep telling you to hire 100 more agents, you do the best you can, but you can’t be choosy.  Hence, what happened to these Honduran women is a direct consequence of a failed immigration policy.

Please read Father Seifert’s entire post.

The Beast

By Mike Seifert

Several times a day, a train rumbles through our neighborhood. Johnny Cash may sing wistfully about the lonesome locomotive’s whistle, but there is nothing romantic about this train’s horn. The blasts come every few seconds as the long line of boxcars pass churches, parks and schools. The constant racket of the rails is a reminder of how much international commerce flows through Brownsville.

This is the same train that immigrants from Central America and southern Mexico take to get to the US border. The migrants call the train “La Bestia” (the Beast), no doubt for the horrific accidents and deaths that often happen to those who choose to ride the rails.  People fall from the train; people are thrown from the train. The amputations and the deaths are well-documented, and the rail line offers a daily chronicle of nightmares. A Beast indeed.

Once, years ago, while visiting Honduras, I rode The Beast myself. I had clambered up on the roof for the absolutely inexcusable reason of wanting to have the experience.  It was a terrifying few moments, as there was not much in the way of handholds. After a very short while, I crawled down the side of the car and back inside. I was shaking so badly that I couldn’t stand up. (more…)