"The Eloquent Truth..."

Sparks fly as a device fired to disperse a crowd Sunday ignites during a protest for Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager killed by a police officer on Aug. 9 in Ferguson, Mo. Days after Brown's death

In a hearing last week, a senator challenged the Pentagon on the equipment they were giving to local police departments. The interaction was not surprising to me, until the senator mentioned that bayonets were among the arms being doled out. While armored cars and assault weapons disturbed me, it was the image of local police officers using bayonets against their fellow citizens that put it all in perspective for me. WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO US? Are we so successfully terrorized that we are willing to give up all that it means to be a free country? How many civil liberties have we surrendered for the illusion of security? How many innocent people have been arrested, shot, or executed because white America is desperate to feel "safe"? Although violent crime and crime in general have reached record lows, we still are arresting and imprisoning more of our citizens than ANY other country on earth. White America doesn't even ask why. Every week a person of color is exonerated. Recently, a man convicted of murder, and held up by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as justification for state executions, was proven to be innocent. This is what happens when the majority cares more about security than about justice. Ironically, justice is the only source of real security for a free people. I wonder how long a democracy can survive in a fear-based culture. The alternative, of course, is faith-based, but where would a people learn that if the people in the church, or synagogue, or mosque are just as fearful as people with no faith? Entrusting our lives to the Eternal Life is a genuinely different orientation from trusting our security to arms and armies. A member of the St. Louis County Police Department points his weapon in the direction of a group of protesters The white majority in America trusts the army and the police to protect them. People of color know that is an illusion, for them and for us. There is only one real security in life and that is to trust that, as the Apostle Paul wrote, "If we live we belong to God, and if we die we belong to God. Whether therefore we live or we die we belong to God."  Blessings,    Rev. Michael Piazza  The Center for Progressive Renewal ***** People protest at the busy thoroughfare where Michael Brown was killed and that has been the site of previous clashes with police "Fear Eats the Soul"