An Eye for and Eye Makes the Whole World Blind Gandhi

     A former gang member who killed four people was put to death last night in California calling up the notions of retribution and redemption. How sad for those families whose loved ones died horrific deaths. And how sad for our society that we killed a man last night as well. Death is death. I have not walked in those family member's shoes. I don't know what it feels like to lose a loved one to violent murder. I cannot imagine their lives. I feel such sadness for their loss.      The terrible truth is that five people have been killed. And now what do we do? If we keep killing each other what will that do?  As Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye makes the whoe world blind."  How do we make this world a better, safer place?      Tookie William's mother moved him from New Orleans to Los Angeles to try and get away from the violence in their hometown. Tookie Williams formed a gang in Los Angeles to try and protect his neighborhood from other gangs. What's wrong with this picture? Why weren't the places they were in safe to begin with? They were places of poverty, decay, and decline.  Poverty leads to hopelessness which leads to a culture of despair. Living in a culture of despair makes you lose your humanity.  And without our humanity we have not love, nor hope, nor anything at all to live for.    We must find a better way to be.     There is the parable of the Downstream Village.  Villagers who lived by a stream began to notice that there were people floating by drowning.  Quickly they formulated a plan to rescue all the people floating by. More and more people needed to be rescued and the villagers did their best to do so.  Finally someone got the idea to go upstream to find out how it was that these people were finding themselves floating down the river in need of rescue.     Systemically, we need to find out what is going on upstream.  We need to get to the root of the culture of despair and stem the flood of victims at the source.  Simultaneously we still need to rescue people as they are drowning.  And once we rescue them we need to make sure that they stay rescued and on dry land.  We do that not by locking them up and making them do time and nothing else.       We must establish a culture of redemption.  All around this country we need to fix our problems at the source and we need to redeem those that have been lost.  That makes it better for everyone.       At the source we need to stop giving tax cuts to the rich at the expense of the poor.  Programs for the poor are not entitlements that allow them to live on easy street.  They should be designed to lift people out of the culture of despair that many of our governmental systems have created.  They should bring about real change and not just be short term answers.  (Althought that step is necessary in many crisis situations.)     This won't happen overnight.  We still have hurting desperate people who are hurting others in their desperation.  Remember, they have lost their humanity in the culture of despair that our systems have created.  Our prison system mimics the culture of despair on the outside.  It does not engender hope and redemption.  We need a culture of redemption in our prisons.  I'm not talking about a prison ministry here and there, although I'm sure these are wonderful.  I'm talking about a whole new way of thinking of the problem.  It needs to be looked at redemptively, not through the lens of retribution.  But what good is a redeemed person if they are doomed to go back into the same cultural system of poverty, despair and decay?  We need to fix the system.     Friends, this problem won't be fixed overnight.  But somewhere upstream we need to figure out how to stop people from drowning in the first place.  This makes life better for us all.  Tookie Williams seemed to have made a path of redemption for himself in prison. Imagine if we had caught him sooner. Imagine if he had grown up, not in a culture of despair but in culture rich in hope and possibility. His life could have been totally different. This not to say that we don't all make choices for which we are ultimately accountable. It is simply to say that we know where the breeding grounds for violence are. Let us work to change them.