Jail Freedoms

I can't stop weeping.  I just finished re-reading, after many years, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail.  My soul is being cleansed with tears.  The entire letter is a work of Holy Spirit-inspired sorrow and anger at injustice.   As I sat there in the cell with him, I could feel the love undergirding his anger and his pleading, the love that compelled him on a journey that would leave him a martyr for humanity.  However, I sought the letter out for one idea I had attributed to Dr. King all my life:

“I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends."


In any revolution, any movement for change, we must employ the ends we hope for in the means we use to get there.  Sometimes these things come easily.  I would never want to angrily crush my daughter's heart, shaming her into a deep belief of personal worth.  That doesn't make sense.  "You are an awful human being for disliking yourself," is a ridiculous concept that doesn't contain the seeds of what I want to accomplish in the method I am going about accomplishing it.  At other times, it's not quite as clear-cut or simple to distinguish between the two.  And here is where the concept of violence becomes key.  
Does our world become better or worse with more violence?  Can violence ever produce change that is good?  How do we confront groups like ISIS, with no regard for life and a taste for committing gruesome inhuman acts, without violence?  Do we trade our lives and our families' lives for a commitment to non-violence?  Is just war theory a way for Christians to skirt the issue of "turn the other cheek" or are we also to remember "an eye for an eye."?
I'm going to become what I often dislike by not answering the questions I am raising.  Instead I am going to look a little more closely at this topic of violence that Dr. King is raising along with something else that is bubbling around in my mind regarding it.  Criminal acts, punishment, incarceration, and our 'justice' system.  
Baz Dreisinger, in her book Incarceration Nations, visits other countries to get a better understanding of our prison system by experiencing its comparisons and contrasts in those countries.  She is part journalist, activist, social scientist, and story teller so the book is a good read.  In her first country she visits, Rwanda, she begins to experience a contrast to her own family.  Her Jewish heritage includes those affected deeply by the Holocaust and who still harbored anger and a desire for vengeance.  Conversely, in Rwanda, a country chopped to pieces by genocide, she sees the power of forgiveness:
But today I balk.  Is revenge a triumph?  To harm someone who has harmed you, is that not hypocrisy, perpetuating a wretched chain of wrongdoing?  We justify legal violence with the word "deterrence," but one would have a hard time arguing that it is effective, consider the fact that putting 2.3 million behind bars has hardly eradicated crime.  This utilitarian approach to justice, using the lives of offenders as a means to our end--safety--is, as criminologist Deirdre Golash argues, vastly immoral.   "We may require wrongdoers to compensate their victims for the harms that they have done," she writes, "but we may not harm them in order to prevent future harms by others."
And, so my mind went back to Dr. King.  Nonviolence.  Justice.  Morality.  Immorality.  Dr. King was pleading with those he deemed moral, other white religious leaders, to demand change because it was just, it was human.  There is a violence in our divisive rhetoric and the calls for safety.  There is a violence in locking up the brilliant and the capable, and in continuing a generational curse of the prison system.  Terror, wrongs done toward other humans either in crime or war, enforce upon us a reaction.  Our choice is an all-important one.  Will we continue the chain reaction of violence as it heads to nuclear meltdown proportions or will we be the water that rushes in to cool the reactor?  
Any peaceful society must have laws and they must be enforced.  We have to learn to live together curbing our own bents toward greed, violence, and thirsts for power.  I know the sin nature, know it well in myself and others--it is a powerful force--more frequently and more readily changed from the inside rather than the outside.  But, as Dr. King noted, there are God-given laws above the laws of our land that we must choose to obey or not obey as well.  Referring to Thomas Aquinas, King says, "Any law that uplifts human personality is just.  Any law that degrades human personality is unjust."  When we have groups kept out of society physically through incarceration, economically through poverty, and legally through a created modern system of punishment that makes us feel safe by hiding those who have broken the rules; we have become at least as violent as the ones who have broken the law.  When we keep lists and registries of those whose broken rules define them for life, we are absolutely perpetuating violence, becoming more unjust and immoral than our law breakers because we have the power to do something about it.  
And, just in case, I raise a jeer from only my 'conservative' brothers and sisters, I must also speak to abortion.  Violence has reached epic proportions here.  The stink of our murdered young goes to heaven.  How can we hope to reform a system of punishment for those humans alive here on earth because of is perpetual violence and enact violence upon those who have no chance at life because it may be inconvenient for us to bear their lives.  To those who have been aborted, I offer my tears.  To those who have committed that violence against themselves and another I offer forgiveness.  You are loved, completely, as you are.  I hope that you can love me as I am.  It is our only hope, this forgiveness, this love.  It is the perfect antidote to violence, and the only freedom that we may have from it.  
I must live by my own law.  Hopefully, I have forgiveness already and only to those who have wronged me.  And to those who I may harbor some lingering resentment, help me to hold nothing against them and to love them freely.  My God, help me to love and love only, help me to forgive and not perpetuate violence, to bring peace where there is strife.  And help me to be the change that I so want to see in others.