Justice, Really?

Today the United States Supreme Court is slated to hear the case concerning Troy Davis, a 40-year old black man who was convicted in 1991 for the murder of an off-duty white police officer.

Not only was he convicted but was sentenced to death, and his chance at or for life has come dangerously close to an end. His execution has been put off three times, but if the nation’s highest court does not rule in his favor, his time may well have run out.

Davis from the beginning claimed his innocence, and no weapon was ever found. Then, beginning in 2000, seven of nine witnesses who had testified against Davis recanted or contradicted their testimonies, and said that they had been pressured by police.

In spite of that, Davis has been unable to get a new trial.

I am thinking that I would not want to be in Davis’ shoes. I am not sure that there is real justice in many to most cases.

For the longest time, I have noticed that it seems that “the system,” consisting of the District Attorney, the police and the courts, are reluctant to admit when they have made a mistake. I have watched, fascinated, as the Innocence Project has been able to prove that too many innocent people have been shoved into prison, with nobody believing their claims of innocence.

It makes me shudder. What chance does a “nobody” have in a system which is more apt to dole out justice to those whom it chooses, and ignore those who do not “make the grade?”

It’s been shown that the testimonies of so-called “eyewitnesses” is not all that reliable. It is a known fact that many people think all people of another race all look the same. That is the result of our racism, and our unwillingness to get to know other people. We live on assumptions and opinions, not real knowledge of each other.

Then, there seems to be some machoism at work. It seems that too many male law enforcement officers define their masculinity on being right – even when they and everyone else knows they are wrong. I keep thinking of the recent footage on CNN showing an Oklahoma State Trooper harassing an EMS ambulance.

What came through in the footage was outrageous behavior of the trooper, menacing the EMS tech who calmly and repeatedly explained that there was a patient in the ambulance. The trooper kept up his harangue, and kept threatening the EMS tech with being put in jail.

The entire event was caught on tape, but I shuddered. What if there had been no tape? Would there be yet another American citizen thrown in jail, trumped up charges against him, with no chance of justice?

Mix together the disparity in treatment given to people with money compared to people who do not have money, the machismo factor and the ever present racism in this country, complete with the assumptions and opinions that disease has planted in too many of us, and real justice is elusive, unreal and too seldom given.

I would hate to be in Troy Davis’ shoes. I’ll bet he believed at one time that when it comes to justice, truth matters.

It does not.

And that is just a candid observation.

What Michael’s Pain Says About Us

I just heard an interview on CNN between Wolf Blitzer and Deepak Chopra and it made my skin crawl and my spirit cry.

Chopra, talking about his concern about his belief that the king of pop was addicted to prescription drugs, also said that Michael hated himself.

He said that he kept his face covered because he was ashamed of how the vertiligo made him look. (the disease takes all pigment from the skin). And, Chopra said, he engaged in “self-mulitation,” including plastic surgery, to make himself feel better about the way he looked.

I thought of how I have heard people say they hate themselves because of the way they look. Overweight people will often stay in the house because they do not want to go outside and be stared at. I remember Oprah saying that after she had gained weight after losing a lot that she felt terrible, that she didn’t want be onstage and accept an award, that she felt uncomfortable and self-conscious on her own show.

How quickly we forget that we like to “fit in,” and that we like to be liked. We need to be liked; we need the affirmation of people, and even though Michael Jackson received great affirmation for his great and unique talent, it was the sneers about how he looked that he heard more.

He was a great man, and a greatly misunderstood man. He gave all he had inside through his music and dancing, and received acclaim for that, but knew the whispers about him were not good.

If it is a fact that he was addicted to prescription drugs, I wonder if it was partly because he needed to numb the pain. I think it is a fact that all of us, or most of us, are addicted to something. I do not understand it – this tendency of us to need something with which to self-medicate, but what I do know is that we as a culture, or maybe we as people everywhere in the world, seek to ease the pain of the reality of being alive.

Deepak Chopra talked about Michael’s addiction to prescription pain meds. Oprah and others have talked about food being their drug of choice. There are those addicted to cigarettes; I heard, in light of the recent sex scandals involving national legislators, that they were possibly addicted to sex. Dr. Drew said in an interview that sexual addiction is one of the hardest ones to lose. There are people addicted to gambling, others are addicted to hurting themselves.

What in the world is up? Why can’t we live without the addictions?

What makes me sad about Michael Jackson, his pain and his possible addictions, is that it shows how unsympathetic we are, how prone we are to rush to judgement and make disparaging remarks about others, remarks that hurt bad and go very deep. How many of us sneered at Michael Jackson’s consistently changing appearance, due to the excessive plastic surgeries? How much do we laugh at and criticize people who are obviously addicted or out of control? And how much of our criticism and laughter is an attempt by us to run from our own demons?

I would sure like to know the physiology of addiction, or maybe the psychophysiology of addiction. I would like to know what it is about humans that makes us so prone to need a crutch to get through our days and nights. But I would also like to be able to understand our incapacity as humans to show real compassion for each other.

We would rather point a finger and laugh, as well as make assumptions about what is than to extend a hand to someone who is obviously in trouble.

It happens, often, that great people are very often very tormented people. Michael Jackson falls into that category, or at least it seems. If it was that he was addicted to pain meds, and the doctors with whom he was in relationship fed his drug habit in order to collect healthy paychecks, I will be angry and sad, but not surprised …because people are also addicted to power and money.

Or at least that’s my candid observation.

Are Affairs No Big Thing?

I found myself a little taken aback by my thoughts about Gov. Mark Sanford’s admission of an affair.

I was kind of …non-plussed.

I mean, I felt bad for his wife and children, but I found that in terms of his having an affair, I just wasn’t angry. It’s almost like my actions were saying, “oh well, boys will be boys.”

From the time I can remember, older women would tell us younger girls that men “play around.” I remember being puzzled by it and my mother saying to me, “Susan, there are some things that just are.” I was appalled, but my mother kind of implied that it was the lay of the land, and that women learned to deal with it.

“All married women have to deal with it,” she said.

So, though I hated the thought, I grew up thinking, believing that “playing around” was just what boys and men did. As I thought more about it, I began wondering why any society or culture would insist upon monogamy if everyone knew that some people had no intention of keeping that promise.

I ached for Elizabeth Edwards and Hilary Clinton and women I know personally as their marriages caught the infidelity virus. Because of so much infidelity, I am not sure I even believe in marriage anymore.

So, that’s where I was and am as concerns affairs. I thought it was admirable that Gov. Sanford didn’t lie about being in an affair, but I was really mad at him for another reason.

What was the deal with the lies about where he was? How dare he lie to his staff, his wife and children, leaving them all to scatter and try to figure out where he was? And when he said he’d been in Argentina to see his mistress, all the steam in my ears rolled out.

The audacity! I found myself fuming over the selfishness of it all. How could he not care about how it was all goin to pan out? Did he think at all about his boys? I heard that he left no contingency plan in place for his state, had something happened to him. So, if something had happened that needed his attention to governor, he didn’t care anough about his office and the duties he swore to uphold?

When the United States Congress wanted to impeach Bill Clinton because of the Monica Lewinsky incident, I didn’t agree. He had shown poor judgement and questionable morals but he had not done anything illegal. He had broken his wife’s heart and disappointed his daughter, but in terms of the oath he took to uphold, protect and defend the United States of America, he hadn’t done anything wrong.

But Gov. Sanford’s situation is quite different. He left his role as governor, not saying anything to anyone. Nobody is sure if he used public funds to travel to Argentina, this last times or the times before, but it is clear that he sublimated his role and duty as governor to his sexual and romantic pursuits.

Where is the outcry? Where are the scores of people demanding his impeachment?

When I feel the passion rise about the governor reneging on his public responsibilities and duties, and feeling next to nothing about his affair, it gives me pause. Could it be that we as a society are so used to “scandals” and “affairs” that we no longer care? Are marriage and” family values”as important as we make them out to be, or are we blowing hot air?

It seems that we are on a slippery slope when it comes to marriage and affairs. In one sense, we are the harbingers of morality, and on the other hand, we let breaches of morality go too often without thinking too much about them. I find myself wondering if the majority of people who heard about the Sanford affair were enraged about it, or just sort of blase.

It would be a bad thing if for us affairs are just no big thing.

That’s a candid observation.

From Cocoon to Butterfly

I hate the fact that I have been shy all my life.

It might be because I felt unwelcomed and unwanted in my adoptive family. My new cousins always made sure I knew I was an outsider. They were good and quick at pointing out how I was “different” from everyone else.

I’d been told that even as an infant, I was quiet, but that kind of familial rejection made me even more quiet. For the longest time, I yearned to “belong” to the family, but after a while, I stopped yearning and turned even further inward. I had made a cocoon, and inside, it was warm and I was safe.

The cool thing about the cocoon is that it IS warm and safe and keeps you isolated. The bad thing is that living in isolation doesn’t work in a world based on relationships.

I had succeeded in making myself super shy. As a teen, I would freeze if anyone even looked like he or she was going to approach me. I lost a chance to do television work a couple of times, I was told, because even though I was good on camera, once I’d lost the security of those cameras, I didn’t have anything to say! I can remember going to to lunch after a particular television interview, and being almost in tears because I had to sit with people whom I did not know.

I’d succeeded in making myself lonely. All I wanted was the safety of the cocoon.

Fast forward to the mid 8Os. I was still shy, but trying to work through it. I had few friends, but that was OK with me. But I was in seminary, for goodness’ sake. Though I am now struggling with organized religion like I have never before, that wasn’t the case back then. I was working in churches as part of my theological training, and HAD to talk to and mingle with people whom I did not know. People reached out to me, but I couldn’t reach back. I was stuck in the cocoon.

I became a pastor and had the hardest time pulling out. By now, I had gotten it: people who make it in the world do not make it in isolation. OK. I got it, but I was stuck. It was like I had gotten my head out, but was lying transverse in the cocoon and was holding up the process. The difference between being stuck now and “back in the day” was that now, I realized the value in getting out of the cocoon, and I realized that there was a whole lot more I could be and do.

I finally got out, and realized that I had missed many an opportunity by staying inside so long … but now, at least, I had something important to teach my children. My son was a natural extrovert, but my daughter, I could see, was as introverted as was I. Hah! Now I was a butterfly with wings, and if nothing else, I could teach caterpillars wanting to stay inside the cocoon the value of letting themselves be pushed out in order to become all they could be.

So, I would push her gently to talk to people. “I don’t know what to say,” she’d protest. “Not a problem,” I’d say. “Just learn a little bit about them and get THEM to talk. Chances are you won’t have much to say, but you will be letting yourself get a little further down the birth canal.

I am still pushing her ever so gently, and she is, thank goodness, allowing that push. She is beginning to get her voice, find her stride, and she definitely knows that she cannot live life in isolation.

I never really had close friends, but at least my daughter does. Not a lot, but a few really good friends. I was never in the wedding of a friend, but she will be. It makes my heart sing to know that she will experience what I never did because I had chosen to stay inside a warm, safe place.

My daughter is almost out of the cocoon, and I, her mother who stayed in the cocoon for far too long, am finally able to grin as I see her wings coming out …because I can finally look around and see my own.

Jon, Kate and Divorce

Nobody should ever have to go through the pain of divorce.

It hurts like hell. It’s like one of your limbs is being pulled off, without anesthesia. The pain goes on and on, because, I guess, its root is so deep. Having loved, lived with and slept with someone alters one’s emotional balance with that person forever.

That being said, I ached as I watched Jon and Kate last night talk about their family and now, their imminent break up. While I didn’t like Kate much – she was a tad pushy for me – I ached because she is getting ready to do the single mother thing, and it is no fun. I found myself kind of resenting Jon because he said he was “excited” about this new phase of his life. I guess so; he will not have the every day contact with the 8 children, and will have more freedom to do what he wants.

But this divorce thing bothers me. It bothers me that it is so easy to get married and so much harder to get divorced, comparatively. People enter marriage with not the slightest idea of what the ‘worse’ is in the phrasie “for better or worse,” but clearly, they are not remotely interested in weathering the storms which always come in marriage.

Indeed, I have heard young people say, when I’ve asked them why they want to get married, that if things don’t work out, they’ll just “get divorced.” That seems to be a half witted attitude to take into a marriage, a stop gap, if you will, or an easy out. The definition of things not working out gets diluted when people see divorce as the answer when their infatuation, lust or both, wear off.

The truth of the matter is that marriage is work. Sometimes we have to work to like the spouses we say we love, and sometimes, that is not easy. Of course, everyone who is married knows that. The problem is that too many of us opt out of the work and move on, leaving families in shambles and hearts tattered, while we flit off to the next experiment.

I think we have a problen, in that we lift up marriage as the ideal of all relationships, but we don’t really teach what marriage is. In fact, when young people “get married,” what they are excited about is “the wedding” and all the pomp and circumstance that goes with weddings. They don’t have a clue about “the marriage.” Marriage is seldom ideal, but it is especially not ideal when two people have slept together plenty, but have not taken the time to really get to know each other as individuals. A good bed partner is not necessarily a good spouse.

So, what to do? From where I sit, I can only try to really teach what marriage is, not the romantic stuff we want it to be but the brutally hard work it actually is. I can try to teach communication skills, and rules for handling conflict. I can try to get the would-be marrieds to know each other as deeply as possible, so they can identify their fundamental differences and learn how to navigate them. I can get them to learn each other’s expectations and to see if they’re able to meet those expectations, and I can get them to learn each others’ love languages…

And I can try to explain to them that divorce is the worst pain ever, for them and for any children they bring into the world.

I heard just recently that the divorce rate in America is at 50 percent. Fifty percent of all people who get married do not make it. That is a devastating statistic and a devastating reality, which means that there are a lot of angry, devastated people walking around looking to get into another marriage. How come that doesn’t sit well with me?

I am almost at the point where I want to say “no more marriage,” at least not until you’re old enough to be able to be selfless enough, patient enough, wise enough and secure enough to handle what marriage requires. Hmmm. That would put the average age of marriage “up there,” making it harder for some people to have children. But I keep thinking that fewer children with parents in happy, well-adjusted marriages has to be better with more children in marriages where there is no love, or children who live through the pain of their parents’ divorce.

Kate and Jon’s children will internalize complex feelings from this break up, just like my children did. Kate will have to swallow tears and anger as she works not to let her children see her pain, not realizing that her pain will come out in other ways. It has to. Jon will fight feeling like nobody understands him and that he is missing a lot of his childrens’ growing up.

They will get through it, but their lives will be forever changed, all of them. Life ain’t been no crystal stair, as poet Langston Huges wrote, and this family will taste the bitterness of that thought. I know. I’ve been there.

And that’s just a candid observation.