Even Tamerlan Deserves a Proper Burial

Is anyone other than me disturbed that directors of three cemeteries in Massachusetts have refused to bury Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev? In light of the fact that the United States calls itself a Christian nation, is there something askew here?

True, the now-deceased suspect is accused of doing something heinous, something he had no right to do. But, as doctors are obligated to treat people whose actions they abhor, aren’t cemetery and funeral home directors obliged to do the same? In the end, isn’t it supposed to be God that judges, and not humans?

Peter Stefan, owner of the Graham, Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Home in Massachusetts, says the refusal of cemeteries to bury the young man is wrong.

“We buried (Lee Harvey)Oswald, we buried (Timothy) McVeigh, and (Jeffrey)Dahmer. Somebody buried them,” he said. “We saw the hearse. Who was driving? It wasn’t Mickey Mouse!” (http://www.cnn.com/video/?hpt=hp_c2#/video/crime/2013/05/05/nr-boston-funeral-director-responds-to-criticism.cnn)

The CNN report said that funeral directors were afraid of backlash from the public should they bury the dead suspect. Was there backlash when McVeigh and others Stefan mentioned were buried? If so, it doesn’t seem to have made the news.

How is it that a Christian nation can so easily bypass and ignore the lessons taught by Jesus. In the 25th chapter of Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says to his disciples that “inasmuch as you have done …for ‘the least of these.’ you have done it to me.” God sending Jesus here was supposed to teach us humans that there is such a thing called grace, and as we receive it, we should also give it.

Brennan Manning, in his book, The Ragamuffin Gospel, writes that “we accept grace in theory but deny it in practice. Living by grace rather than law leads us out of the house of fear into the house of love.” This must sound like romantic dribble to those who support the cemetery directors’ refusal to bury Tsarnaev, but to one who loves the Gospel and the power contained within it, it is the crux of the faith so many of say we love and belong to.

Tamerlan was a mother’s son gone bad. Many mothers have been through that, but in the majority of cases, the mother doesn’t or hasn’t ceased loving her son. At the end of the day, even the mother of a convicted murderer wants her son to receive a proper burial. Parents cannot be with their children at all times; parents lose control over their children when they grow up (and some lose control before then.) All a parent can do is pray that his or her child will make good decisions, but when they don’t, the love of the parent does not disappear. The love is replaced by agony and the pain of seeing not only their child suffer but the families who suffered because of their child.

The parent grieves because he or she could not stop the child from doing wrong. And the parent grieves because he and she remembers when that now-troubled young person was an infant, and then a toddler, a child who was loved and who loved back; a child who was the delight of their eyes and souls.

Tamerlan’s parents still love him. And so does God …if, again, the Gospels we read are to be believed.

If there is not a code mandating that cemeteries bury even people like Tamerlan, shouldn’t there be? One would think so, because the code given to us by God doesn’t seem to hold much water.

A candid observation …

The Manipulation of America’s Voters

All right, answer me something: is a woman’s voice, soft and slightly hushed, speaking under music, been shown to sway people?

I don’t watch television much; I vowed not to watch it much as this political campaign swept into high gear. The ads are manipulative and so often, not true. I remember when in the 1988 campaign between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, an ad was run about a man named Willie Horton. The issue was the death penalty. Bush was for it, Dukakis was apparently against it and advocated convicted felons getting weekend passes. Willie Horton lived in Dukakis’ state of Massachusetts and got such passes. He reportedly murdered a young teen on one of his weekend visits. He was put back into prison but got out and reportedly raped and murdered a woman. That was it. There was Horton’s image on the screen in front of the world: a dark-skinned black man with disheveled hair. He represented what so many people thought about black people, and the ad did what it was supposed to do. Bush won.

I remember being furious about it because it fed into people’s fears and it fed the widespread belief in the inherent “criminality” of black men. The criminalization of black men really originated after Reconstruction, when angry Southern whites decided that black people would not be free, Emancipation or not. Slavery had provided the necessary labor to plant and harvest the South’s crops and thus contribute mightily to the agrarian aristocracy. Under Reconstruction, blacks could own property; they could vote and participate in the political process. Their children could go to public school. Whites were never impressed with Emancipation because many of them genuinely believed that blacks were inferior to whites and that they were supposed to work for white people. And so, by the late 1800s, the South began to fight back. They put in place vagrancy laws that made it possible for law enforcement to arrest anyone for the slightest thing: selling products they had grown after dark, walking without having money (many walked during the day to find work), not having a job …the laws were ridiculous and wrong. What began to happen systematically is that black men were disproportionately arrested for such “crimes” and were convicted, usually without a trial. Law enforcement officers and justices of the peace would “sell” the new convict to a farmer or a business, which would then require the new convict to work until his debt was paid. When such an unfortunate man was sold, he was at the mercy of his new “owner,” and was worked mercilessly, and often, his new owner would accuse him of another “crime” at or toward the end of his sentence, and his sentence would be extended. The result of this practice, called “convict leasing,” was that prisons began to fill up primarily with black men, and thus the “criminalization” of black men began. Their inability to stay out of “trouble” with the law proved they were not worthy of freedom. Blacks were predisposed to crime, the belief would be …and continues to this day. So in 1988, those who ran the campaign knew exactly what they were doing. Horton would be a reminder, most especially to white Republicans, that the country needed a man “strong on crime” to keep our streets free from the awful black man.

Well, things have not changed so much. There have not been, among the ads I have seen, any such that compare to the Willie Horton ad, but they are plenty slanted toward the same base that Bush’s 1988 ads were. Mitt Romney’s now infamous “47 percent” speech is not surprising. I wonder who he was really thinking about when he named “47 percent” of Americans who were content to be “victims,” and mooch America’s treasury? I wonder his his campaign thought of who was in that 47 percent? President Obama uses Romney’s words to his advantage …as any politician would.

But there are ads where an attack on either candidate is as vicious as a wolf eating its prey, and what I have noticed is that many times, there is a soft-spoken woman making the point of the attack, her words carried by music, a lot of it piano. What is the deal?

I wish there were no ads at all. I despise the fact that both candidates are raising literally millions of dollars to get their messages out while so many people in America are in dire straits. I thought about that today as I thought about a friend who is really going through it right now. He is unemployed and “out there,” and it is a constant job to keep him above ground. I wonder how that soft woman’s voice and piano music sounds to him?

I know there is probably someone in marketing who can explain the effect of this soft voice/soft music is. What part of the brain does it reach?

And is there a place on the brain where the suffering of people takes hold? It doesn’t seem like it. Americans are manipulated as they listen to their views or their circumstances articulated in such a masterful way. What is sad is that after the election, there won’t be anyone out stomping the land, trying to raise money for America’s struggling citizens.

And that makes me very sad.

A candid observation …

Are Kids Trying to Tell Us Something?

We must be doing something wrong as a society.

Today a young teen was shot and killed and four others shot and injured by another teen at Chardon High School, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. The alleged shooter is a young man named T.J. Lane who reportedly went into the high school’s cafeteria a little after 7 a.m. and began shooting. Young Lane was said by newscasters to have had a “lot of resentment.”

Only he knows why he is so unhappy. One student at the high school who knows him said he comes from a broken home, but that he was “quiet and nice.” Then whatever happened? For how long has this young man been unhappy or mad or sad, and nobody noticed?

There seem to be a couple of issues in these types of situations: first, a young person is sad or unhappy and either nobody notices or nobody cares. Depression among young people is high, but very often, teens are ignored and their depression or other serious mental imbalance is regarded as “normal,” if unpleasant, behavior for teens. There still is no clear understanding why Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot 13 classmates in the horrendous shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. Investigators say they had not been bullied, a common reason given for teen violence, but clearly, something was wrong. Those two young men were not happy.

Neither is there much understanding as to why Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007. Apparently the young man showed signs of being disturbed and unhappy, but few took him seriously.

Whatever the reasons for these horrible shootings, a second thing that seems to keep coming up is that young people seem to think that violence is the way to handle their pain. They must be learning that from us older people, who too frequently resort to violence as well. How many times have we heard that children will do what you do before they will do what you say? It seems fruitless to tell a child or young person not to be violent when they see adults resort to violence all too often.

Not only, however, do the kids direct their violence toward others; too often, they turn the violence on themselves as well.

Something is very wrong.

It seems that people in general are violent, notwithstanding belief in God, a Constitution, or “family values.” America‘s history is peppered with violence, from the time the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts. Diplomacy and fairness do not seem to be favored or respected ways of handling conflict; violence, on the other hand, has had a prominent role in conflict management from the beginning.

“Drive-by shootings” were commonplace way before now; in pioneer days, gunfights were common and during Prohibition, gangsters made drive-by shootings almost romantic. Elliot Ness and others were romanticized for their conquests taken by and through violence.

The point is that it seems that we have taught our children that the way to handle our pain is by eliminating “the enemy.” How many of the kids who have gone into schools, shooting, or disgruntled employees who have done the same, have voiced discontent with the way they have been treated by others? Violence is often the last resort of people who feel powerless. Ending someone’s life, or seriously hurting them fills that void…or does it really?

I don’t think young Mr. Lane feels all that powerful now. He has destroyed his life and taken the life of at least one other young person. We older people, I think, need to stop and think. Perhaps we are failing as mentors and leaders and advisors for too many young people, who are struggling with problems of self-esteem and self-love, and who are on a path of self-destruction.

I cannot imagine the pain of the parents of the young man who left home this morning for school, only to die a senseless and tragic death. My hope is that we can learn something before something like this happens again. Violence doesn’t bring a sense of power to one who feels powerless.It only brings pain and, too often, a desire for revenge.

Enough, already.

A candid observation.