To tame the savageness of man...
I found this video link, yesterday, in the Miami Herald, and I'm still mourning this kid's death...
Wrongful death suit in the case of 14-year-old killed in boot camp custody...Miami Herald...July 13, 2006...
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/15025553.htm
Apparently Martin was turning things around for himself...
He was a kid...somebody's son...Tallahassee Democrat...March 3, 2006...
http://www.tallahassee.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060303/NEWS01/603030348/1010
...which makes this case all the more tragic...The sad irony is that the officers involved, here, clearly needed counseling as much as this kid did for anger/control issues...but so much of what we say people need to resolve situations like this reinforce these officers in their more aggressive and controlling ways...
Sadly, we often tell teachers and officers and parents and others who work with kids if they would just get a strong enough hand on their kids, then, finally, their kids would know who's boss...and in this case, it meant that this 14-year-old kid died...
It's beginning to occur to me that the reason why our children and grandchildren have to learn our lessons for us is because our persistent tendency towards hubris in our assumption of having arrived at final answers on human questions that the Greeks warned us of more than a millenia ago is, like Jesus' observation about the need to pluck the beam from our own eye before we pluck the splinter from our neighbor's eye, a truism better than an approbation...
Future generations and families of kids like Martin will hopefully forgive us all for the role we play in this death...and we do play a role...whether we acknowledge that or not...
Love,
Ben
"Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until at last, in our own despair, comes wisdom, by the awful grace of God...Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago. To tame the savageness of man, and make gentle the life of this world."
- Bobby Kennedy upon the news of the death of Martin Luther King
