Justice And Injustice

"Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."
—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail


I hate injustice. The greatest forms of injustice are against children. I hate when bad things happen to kids - it's impossible to explain just how much that bothers me. There's a little eleven year old girl in New York whose stepfather beat her with a baseball bat. She's been in a coma on life support since October '05 and the high court just OK'd her removal from life support. They pulled the plug yesterday and she's managing, by some miracle, to breathe on her own. I hope she makes it.

With Sanctity Of Life Sunday coming up this weekend, I'm reminded so brutally of the horrors of injustice. Millions of unborn babies murdered. USA Today ran a story on January 10 that said, "up to 10 million female fetuses may have been aborted in India over the past two decades following prenatal gender checks...". I love how they choose the words "female fetuses" rather than "baby girls". I put those things in terms of my life and the life of our church and that means Christy, Brooke, Madison, Natalie, Laura, Cailie -- all murdered without even a chance at life. Horrific.

Pictures and stories of injustice to children are hard for me to engage. I prefer to ignore them, but I have to read them. I have to make myself engage these kids' pain, otherwise I dehumanize them and their experience. I can't begin to understand how they feel, but I may be able to feel a little of it, and maybe, in some unseen spiritual realm, that makes their pain a little less.

This is a poem I wrote about a picture of a five year old boy that I saw in a book called "The Holocaust Chronicle". In the picture, he is laying curled up on a sidewalk in a ghetto in Warsaw, malnourished and frozen to death.

The blackest of darkness shrouds
Innocence of light and steals life and love.
Hope and misery meet and misery wins.
Judgment goes undone and mercenaries of greed
Tear apart a structure of beauty.
Where is light?
Where is hope?
Where is God?
He is so cold,
so hungry,
so alone.
Hold him, love him, warm him.
Destroy his hurt and painfully kill
his oppressors.
Walk him into light undying
And remove his pain.
But pain his torturers,
Burn their evil in hell
Wreck their lives
And destroy their peace.
Bring justice swiftly and cruelly
So that those with no hope may hope again.
Zero to the throne.