Now that a peace officer has done with his knee what deranged potus45 suggested he could do with a gun on a city’s main drag Americans are quite likely going to sleepwalk through their next opportunity to set their nation of a righteous path and end their navel-gazing and self-aggrandizing. The United States has settled for a right to kill Black people by outlaws like the KKK, by police officers, and by ordinary citizens who assume the right to be judge and jury, the latter carried out with regularity under the guise of some version of self-defence. Do I exaggerate? If I were a United States representative I would be committing myself to introduce legislation to pay all the families who have lost someone to lynching and murder by peace officers, to pay all the African villages from whence the slaves for American industry were taken, and to compensate all the American familes who have been kept in the dark about fair wages, the truth about the epidemic of innocent bloodshed, and ending the carreers of all rotten law enforcement officers.

No-one should underestimate the disgust that violence is to God. Moses wrote that violence was the trigger that set off the judgment of the flood. Violence was one of the offences in the holy city in Judah that resulted in the destruction of the temple and the exile of the people of Judah.

Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth. And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

Gen. 6:11-13

One needs to see how the simple terms of prohibited behaviours (kill, sleep-around, and steal) are not enshrined in secular law. Most governments only care about homicide under certain circumstances. It is not illegal to commit adultery in a state where a religion does not dictate the terms of secular law. Stealing happens under our noses thousands of times each day. For example, the hard-earned cash of citizens is constantly being siphoned off by merchants of motor vehicles, fuel, and common necessities such as food and clothing. It must be a hard sell for spiritual people to be legislators when their equally conscientious colleagues are willing and eager to create loopholes, for example, for lying and dirty energy. A preacher, a politician, a political pundit, or a television commentator can lie through his teeth daily but lying to the FBI will land a person in considerable trouble.

It is a burning shame that well-equipped governments do not have a handle on violence. Humans have the right to be free from deceit and violence, and to be treated as precious, according to Psalm 72 verse 14. Way more shameful, from my perspective, is the number of people who, in the name of caring in the pattern of Christ the Saviour, just continue to preach feel-good messages and fantasy victories over the common human conditions. It fits perfectly: the knee on the neck of anyone gets no play in American or Canadian churches, but the dream job and the mortgaged life does. If I did not hope that Derek Chauvin pays the price for causing George Floyd’s death I would not be human. If there is no in the next few weeks a spate of firings of rotten peace officers we will know that American justice is a spoiled child’s game. God’s justice will not be satisfied with a bipartisan or multipartisan deal, and he can smell a jury’s bias before it shows up. Justice can be anything people want in a democracy, and democracy is a dirt-eating snake pretending to be a spotless lamb, a most ridiculous act and cast which I commit myself to continue exposing.