The Politics of Cruelty
“There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.”
W. E. B. DuBois
There are some things we can’t unsee, some things that root themselves more firmly in our memory with each feeble attempt to forget. They say that ignorance is bliss. Intentional ignorance is cruelty.
Out of sight truly is out of mind and I guess that’s why so many prisons are nestled among the hills and valleys of the sprawling countryside, a little barbed wire on a Sunday drive after church. America loves Christianity when it comes in the form of push notifications. Truth is overwhelmingly inconvenient; and so is life.
How readily we take to the streets to rally for the lives of the voiceless; how easy it is to cry out for those with no names, no histories, no complications. And as complicated as pregnancy can be, the movement that decries the elimination of unborn life is incredibly simple. Everything changes when that life becomes a child and begins to breathe on its own.
See, people have
Needs and
Voices and
Desires and
Opinions and
Humanity is very, very
Messy.
At what point is it acceptable to forget about lives that mattered in utero?
When parental rights are terminated?
When a child enters foster care?
When residential treatment facilities swallow up state funds in exchange for erasing the kids we consider to be bad influences on our own children?
When does life transition from something to protect at all costs to something threatening?
In preschool?
In the third grade?
Whenever we decide they look grown, even though they’re only eight?
Choosy moms choose Jif and we choose to justify death when it is convenient.
When we feel
Threatened.
When we want the problem to
Rot in prison.
When there’s innocent men on death row but overturning their conviction would require examination of
New evidence.
Only in a world such as this could we march for life and dismiss the plights of those already walking this earth in the same breath. Yell and scream and wave signs for the voiceless and vote for state-sanctioned murder at the local, state and federal level. Red or blue, dead is dead.
And I am so afraid that so many of us waiting for Jesus would miss His coming because we haven’t come to terms with the fact that the son of God doesn’t look like He did in the pictures. That we’ll tell Him to go back to where He came from. That we’ll do anything to keep our eyes from meeting His as He stands on the street and we drive farther, farther, farther away until we can’t even see the man who was standing there anymore. Erasing Him from our memory because we only stand for the lives of the unborn.