Of Policemen and Court Stenographers

Take a quick look at these articles from my local newspaper. Do you notice anything interesting about them?

http://www.thereporteronline.com/general-news/20131209/lansdale-police-sergeant-injured-saturday-during-assault-after-vehicle-stop

http://www.thereporteronline.com/general-news/20131210/father-of-two-brothers-charged-over-the-weekend-in-connection-with-assault-of-lansdale-police-officer-is-arrested

I do.

In the first article I count sixteen instances where either the police or the affidavit they filed are cited, and eighteen in the second article. I don’t see one instance in either article where the defendants or other eyewitnesses are given an opportunity to present their side of the story. Why is this?

Do the defendants have any right to be heard? I hear you say no, a human being was beaten. He’s in the hospital and unable to work. There is no doubt who beat him. So who cares what the defendants have to say? This reminds me of a famous trial from long ago:

The high priest tore his clothes. "Why do we need any more witnesses?" he asked.  "You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?" They all condemned him as worthy of death. (Mark 14:63-64)

I’m not equating a bunch of inebriates with the sinless Son of God, but isn’t there a biblical principle being violated here when only one side of the story is presented?

The first to present his case seems right, till another comes forward and questions him. (Prov 18:17)

Though nowhere stated in so many words in Scripture, one can hardly argue with the stated custom of the Romans:

It is not the custom of the Romans to hand over any man before the accused meets his accusers face to face and has an opportunity to make his defense against the charges. (Acts 25:16)

So why is there no interest shown in the other side of the story in Lansdale’s newspaper of record?

OK, you say, but this is a newspaper article, not a court of law.

To which I reply, how many people will bother to find out how the defendants respond in the court trial? How much of their testimony will The Reporter include in its account? If the paper gives thirty-four times as much weight to the policemen’s testimony that it gives to the defendants’, will the defendants have been given a fair trial in the court of public opinion? If not, does it matter?

I heard about this assault a few minutes after a Christian brother told me that on Sunday morning as he was driving to a worship service he was detained by a policeman, who ran his paperwork through the system and then told him he needed to slow down.

Let’s take a look at this all-too-common situation. He was traveling on an almost empty road, one recently opened and so well paved, which could easily and safely accommodate a lone car at 70 mph. My miscreant brother was doing something in the 50s, inconveniencing absolutely no one, putting absolutely no one in danger, and so causing no one any harm.

Yet he was stopped and detained by a policeman. While he was allowed to continue having lost only his time, had he not been properly obsequious, he would have been given a ticket.

Put another way, a man whose salary is extracted from taxes and who, as a member of a labor union, can go on strike and prevent anyone from providing what true service he does provide for less payment (and does so at all times by virtue of taxing money from people who might otherwise use that money to buy the services of another), has the discretionary power (and the approval of society) to extort money from people who have not endangered or even inconvenienced, let alone injured, anyone.

You say the government owns the roads and so can dictate the terms under which people use them. To which I reply that that “ownership” is a function of taxation, eminent domain, and armed enforcement, which are what they are: violations of the property rights of the less powerful by the more powerful. If you say that the more of these things a society has the better off it is, then we have no basis for conversation: your side is winning, and I hope you enjoy your victory. But if God agrees with you, I would say heaven will be better than hell only because it lacks flames that do not consume: at least “our God is a consuming fire.”

Let’s take the notion of broad discretionary police power over those who have harmed no one to the incident at the bar, even the official version of which shows the dangerous level of injustice our society is willing to tolerate.

In act one, Richard Noboa’s car “nearly hit a Lansdale police car” as he backed out of the bar’s parking lot; had the police car belonged instead to a Mundane, the driver would probably have considered Noboa a jerk and left it at that. But being policemen, the occupants of the car—I find it strange, though consistent with propaganda practice, that they are never named, though the “perps” are—took it upon themselves to chase down the driver and detain him. That a man with glassy eyes and a down zipper would have been driving with less than his full skill set is true, but it is also statistically probable that he would have made it home without causing an accident.

In act two, the policemen conduct a sobriety test, which Noboa fails. Having established that Noboa was in no shape to drive, the police could have gone to the bar and urged members of his family to drive him home. One of the policemen could have offered to drive the car himself. Or they could have confiscated the car keys and either given them to someone who could pass the sobriety test or taken them to the police station five blocks away and promised to give them back to Noboa when he was sober. These are but three of the options a Mundane could have exercised.

Instead, in act three, they “attempted to place Richard Noboa inside the vehicle.” Did they do so calmly and gently? Or, knowing they could do so with impunity, did they “give the goddamn motherfucking spic what he has coming to him”? I don’t know. But is there no reason to ask if the beating were a reasonable, if not excusable, response to the treatment Richard Noboa was undergoing? Unfortunately, our intrepid reporter Michael Goldberg doesn’t tell us the “perps’” side of the story, so unless we hunt them down, we are left to conclude that it doesn’t matter what they were thinking—they beat up a police officer.

Again, tax-fed labor union members in uniform abduct a man who has to that point not harmed anyone, presumably to begin a process that will cost that man thousands of dollars and time in jail. There is good reason to at least ask whether they were treating the man decently at the time. The course of action they were taking, however prescribed by law it may be, was more violent than others that were available to them (and that would have been the only options available to Mundanes).

Add to this the editorial slant of The Reporter, which always favors big government: the police are part of the government, and what they say is not to be questioned. We need them today, so the saying goes, to protect us from the likes of Richard Noboa; we need to reinforce their legitimacy in cases like this because they will need popular support when they go after gun owners, hemp growers, Bible thumpers, or whoever the next bogeyman is.

And their version of reality is not to be questioned. This doesn’t concern you?

It may well be that the men who beat the policeman attacked without provocation. Certainly the Noboa family gives little evidence of being good neighbors. If so, they deserve to make restitution for his injuries, his medical care, and his time off work. But don’t bet that that will be their punishment: expect rather that the taxpayers will be forced to pay to incarcerate the assailants as well as to recondition the policeman. That is, the best we can expect from the current “justice” system is injustice. More important, though, is the likelihood that innocent people have been, are currently, and in the future will be railroaded into similar “convictions,” first in the court of public opinion and later in the “real courts.” (Can you say, “Jim Crow”?)

Note that we already have tax-paid agents—that is, agents whom we have no option to not pay—whose job it is to arrest people whose actions have harmed no one: not only those who drive illegally but those who grow certain plants (including otherwise legal plants), or produce or trade or consume certain substances (again including otherwise legal substances), or visit certain voluntarily produced Web sites. If “what’s yours is yours” does not operate in those cases, what logic or precedent stops those agents from arresting people who own, read, or teach from the Bible?

Once such people are arrested, the “journalists” of the mainstream media will dutifully parrot what the police tell them, rarely if ever allowing the accused to defend themselves. Then the court system will sentence them to unbiblical punishments. And when, dear brother in Christ, it comes to be your turn, your neighbors will read the paper’s one-sided account, nod in agreement, and turn to the sports page.

The famous anti-Christian skeptic H. L. Mencken wrote, “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

I have nothing good to say about a man who would drive drunk. But I find the system supposedly designed to protect us from such as him to be much more dangerous in the long term.

Anarchy Versus Democracy and Chaos in One Easy Lesson

The LORD gave Cushan-Rishathaim king of Aram into the hands of Othniel,
who overpowered him.
So the land had peace for forty years,
until Othniel son of Kenaz died. (Jdg 3:10-11)

After Othniel overpowered the Arameans, the land had forty years of peace. There was no king in Israel, so it wasn’t a monarchy. There was no ruling clique, so it wasn’t an oligarchy. The rich had no special privilege (i.e., “private law”), so it wasn’t a plutarchy.

That leaves anarchy as the only meaningful description of the social structure of Israel during those forty years of peace.

Today’s US Christians consider anarchy a dirty word, a metonym for chaos because of the belief that where there is anarchy there is by necessity chaos. Yet the Bible passage in the epigraph states just the opposite.

Instead of anarchy, my brethren pursue democracy or a republic: a democratic republic truly ruled by “we, the people”; a people’s democratic republic. (Where have I heard that phrase before?)

I have lived for sixty years and have never seen a forty-year period of peace, or even a ten-year period of peace. Instead, for every one of those years the US has been on war footing: I was born the year the Korean War “ended” with a truce; yet for every year of my entire life US soldiers have been dying in the border area between the two Koreas. Moreover, President Truman sent “advisors” to Vietnam in 1950, and the US was at war there until 1975. In 1979 the US embassy and spy station in Tehran was taken over, and the nation was on tenterhooks until Inauguration Day 1981. In the 1980s the US was supporting Saddam’s Iraq in its war against Iran, after which the US turned on Iraq. The late 1990s brought US involvement in the war in Kosovo, and the twenty-first century has been entirely consumed with the Global War on Terror.

War and democracy seem to be inextricably linked. President Wilson rallied the nation into a war that he promised would “make the world safe for democracy” but instead set the table for the Bolshevik revolution, the starvation of the Kulaks, the Rape of Nanking, the Korean “comfort women,” two horrific battle theaters, the Holocaust, the Iron Curtain, and the Cultural Revolution. Maybe that was what Wilson meant.

In short, if you want chaos, reach for democracy. If you want peace in the land for forty years, anarchy is your best bet.

“Why Are Black Americans So Angry?”

I had only come by to drop off a book, but they invited me in for a chat. Personal friends of Francis Schaeffer, he was a committed deacon at our church and for years she ran a preschool that exposed dozens, if not hundreds, of unchurched children to the Gospel, touching more families for Jesus than most of the rest of our congregation, my wife and me included, combined.

As we chatted, she mentioned that a Kenyan friend—one of scores of saints they have hosted over the years—had brought his family to visit them years ago. Two things had stood out to her over the course of their time together: First was the assumption by their non-Christian neighbors that Africans could not voluntarily become Christians. Second was an impression they had gathered from living in a black American neighborhood for some time: though living at an economic level most Kenyans would die for, the black people in that neighborhood seemed angry with almost everything, which brought the Kenyan to ask, “Why are black Americans so angry?”

As my friends spoke I realized I had just read a thick book on just that subject and am hereby recommending it to them.

Randy Alcorn’s page-turner Dominion (Portland, OR: Multnomah, 1996), a whodunit set circa 1996 in Portland’s ghetto, is a gospel sermon on racial tension, which Alcorn (who is white) capsulizes in the words of one of the characters: “We don’t have a skin problem; we have a sin problem.” Alcorn considers the human heart the heart of any matter, and so while he spins an engaging tale of murder and detective work, his goal is clearly to put a conservative white evangelical readership in the shoes of a conservative black man whose experience in evangelical culture is increasing his skepticism about the gospel message. In doing so he introduces the reader to heroes as well as villains, but red and yellow, black and white, all have sinfulness to fight.

The sinfulness we have to fight is not only our own, but our ancestors’. As a white friend, Jake, tells Clarence Abernathy, the black protagonist,

I know if my grandfather stole from your grandfather it isn’t my fault. But if my grandfather used that money to buy a house and send my father to college while yours couldn’t go because he didn’t have money that was rightfully his, then not only did your family suffer from the stealing, I benefited from it. Without realizing it, I’ve been the beneficiary of the exploitation of slaves and sharecroppers. Their loss has been my gain. ...

[In Daniel 9, Daniel] confesses the sins of his forefathers as his own, even though he didn’t do those sins. Same with Nehemiah. ...

If [Jesus can hold the religious leaders of his day] responsible for the blood of prophets shed by [their] forefathers hundreds of years earlier, there has to be some kind of transgenerational responsibility. ...

Maybe the only way for descendants of oppressors to get out from under the curse is to face up to their ancestor’s [sic] sins, repent, and seek forgiveness from those they’ve wronged.

If we’re responsible for Adam’s sin, obviously we’re responsible for our grandfather’s.

Not all sins between blacks and whites are political—i.e., the product of government policy—but those that are and have been spill over into “everyday life” and give black people good reason to turn a deaf ear to “gospel preaching” that equates Christian discipleship with white American culture.

In short, the powerful see the world completely differently from the way those under their power see it. (“The guy looking up the barrel of the gun is much more eager to discuss the situation than the guy with his finger on the trigger,” as I like to say.) When Jake tells Clarence he has never thought about his own skin color, Clarence replies,

We had to think about it. With segregation, busing, voting, separate drinking fountains and restrooms and schools and what have you, we didn’t have the luxury of not thinking about it. I first went to integrated school in fourth grade. When I sat down, the chairs around me emptied like I was a pipe bomb. I was the brunt of jokes, was spit on, called names. Even the kids who weren’t cruel were always whispering about me. Most of the teachers weren’t really hostile, but they tolerated the meanness and that just encouraged it. The color of our skin chased us everywhere.

But Clarence has his own set of sins to deal with. Like this writer, he writes passionately about right and wrong as he sees them, is easily angered, and finds out the hard way that not only does he not always have his facts straight, he is as prejudiced as those Christians, true, false, and non, at whose hands he, his ancestors, and his contemporaries have suffered so much.

A thick book short on action passages and long on discourse will be preachy, but Jesus commands us to preach, and Alcorn is a dynamic preacher. He preaches what William Wilberforce would have recognized as the whole gospel: not only that all have sinned and salvation comes only through Christ, but what heaven will be like and how our view of heaven should affect our lives on earth, particularly how we treat our neighbors—those we know in our families and circles of friends, and in our churches, but also strangers whose lives we affect in chance encounters and especially through our political systems. His message to white America is essentially, You’re not responsible for the injustices of slavery, Jim Crow, and the welfare state, but you have benefitted from it, and blacks still suffer from it. You don’t have to think about race because you’re the dominant race, but race affects everything your black neighbors do.

This hit home to me for many reasons, but one that’s not so shameful I can’t bear to share it is that twice during my commute to Philadelphia I was walking on the street and came to places where either a black person or I would have to stop to let the other pass. Though I was clearly the one who should have stopped, before I had a chance to get my mind around the situation, the black person simply stopped well short and let me pass: a black man let me cut in front of him when I crossed the street in the middle of the block onto a narrow sidewalk, and a black woman stopped halfway down a staircase when I could have easily moved over to make room for her at the bottom. In both cases, the expression on their faces made me think they were doing it not because they were being polite but because they felt I expected them to, and I was so disoriented I didn’t even thank them.

Alcorn presents anecdote after anecdote of interracial sin, mostly white on black, but also black on black and black on white, in conversations on earth and in scenes viewed from heaven. Whether heaven will be as Alcorn describes it is certainly open to question, but I for one am open to the idea that we will be shown the consequences of our actions so that we may be rewarded for the good and truly repent of those sins Jesus has forgiven. And if Jesus taught by telling stories, Alcorn is certainly within his rights to do the same, and he does it in a way that should keep anyone from teens to antiques engaged.

Having preached, I’m a-gonna meddle a bit.

If Clarence Abernathy, who lived the American rags-to-riches dream, finds white US Christianity hard to swallow, is it any wonder that those who don’t make it out of the ghetto, let alone the projects, shun the church? If blacks are disproportionately targeted for drug law enforcement and sentenced more stringently than whites—let me state here that Alcorn is no foe of the War on Drugs—is it any wonder that Islam is spreading much faster among blacks than Christianity in US prisons?

It is fashionable for white Christians to disparage the black community for its illegitimacy rate and for playing the race card at every opportunity. But have whites ever really taken seriously the residual effects of slavery and Jim Crow?

If we have been guilty of excusing white people’s sin against black people in the past, is it possible that we are now excusing our sin against blacks or against some other group of people that is “not our kind”? I know I have been: in the weeks after 9/11, I was all for bombing the Kaaba, the Mosque of Omar, and every Muslim city from Marrakesh to Jakarta, one at a time, after any event that could be taken as Muslims taking revenge on the US for US revenge for 9/11. After all, they had attacked us.

However once I considered the possibility that a federal government that has committed atrocities against its own people—Roe v. Wade and No Child Left Behind, not to mention the conquest of the Confederacy, Prohibition, Social Security, and the War on Drugs, and such atrocities against others as the murderous Trail of Tears and the executions at Wounded Knee—might commit atrocities against Muslims overseas, somehow the idea that 9/11 was a response to Uncle Sam’s evil didn’t seem so far fetched, and I wondered aloud whether the question might at least be worth considering by the elders of any church that prayed for the troops fighting the post-9/11 wars.

It seems, though, that just as Bible Belt Christians never wanted to shine biblical light on slavery and Jim Crow, today’s US Christians don’t want to consider the possibility that overseas Muslims have legitimate complaints against Uncle Sam. My prediction is that just as the barbarism of the Obama presidency can be traced back to centuries of injustices and careless subjugation of blacks in this country, God will place much of what is today US territory under Shari`a law by exposing the hypocrisy of the church in regard to such things as nationalism and collateral damage.

Meantime, Alcorn’s book is a great read and belongs in the library of any primarily white church that seeks to reach out to the disaffected black community.

Health Care for Illegal Immigrants

Regarding Jon Stewart “owning” Ron Paul over health care

If a five-year-old illegal immigrant walks into a hospital in the US and needs care, should he get it?

Ron Paul: [We need to fix the system and let the free market operate.]

Jon Stewart: “I’m sorry Congressman Paul, the correct answer is yes.”

Quill Pig:

What’s yours is yours.

If you own the hospital and you want to treat the kid, the answer is yes.

If you own the hospital and you don’t want to treat the kid, the answer is no.

If you don’t own the hospital, what’s it to you?

If you don’t own the hospital and the hospital doesn’t want to treat the kid, treat him yourself.

If the hospital doesn’t want to treat the kid and you don’t want to treat the kid either, shut up.