BY JOHN SCHROEDER
The big story yesterday is that the arrested suspect in the Waukesha Christmas Parade Massacre was out on the miniscule bail of $1K for charges of – are you ready for this – trying to run over his girlfriend (well, ex- girlfriend) with a car. In a 2019 paper, the current Milwaukee County DA, the guy that set that ridiculously low bail, wrote “When we pay too little attention to the underlying causes and characteristics of individuals in the criminal justice system, we make significant errors, which can lead to greater problems,”
Well dude, here is your greater problem – five dead people, over twenty injured and a community shattered. But then that is not the “greater problems” you were concerned about, is it?
Meanwhile in New York State, “A man who pleaded guilty to the rape and sexual assault of four teenage girls will avoid prison time after a New York state judge said time behind bars would be inappropriate.” This story is becoming all too familiar. Here in Los Angeles County, “To keep people out of prison, George Gascón is risking everything: rising violent crime, a staff rebellion and the votes that made him district attorney.” I know several people in the DA’s office here – liberal people – that want Gascón gone, or they want out. I have signed the recall petition myself. Most cops I know aren’t making arrests – there is no point as the perps hit the streets minutes after the paperwork is processed.
In 1969 the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, OH caught fire. This stunning event served as a wake-up call on genuine environmental degradation and resulted almost directly in Richard Nixon’s founding of the Environmental Protection Agency. It is my deep hope and prayer that the Waukesha Christmas Parade Massacre will be redeemed by the same type of service, but I fear it will not as the media is already burying the lede on this story.
If we do not get law-and-order restored in this country I deeply fear what is going to happen. Evil is real. There are people among us that are simply bad. It hurts to see them, you pray for their soul, you work for their reform, but they have got to be removed from our midst or they will perpetrate further evil. And in the wake of that further evil, violent chaos could well result. If the criminal justice system cannot deal with the bad people among us, the citizenry will – they have to. Gun sales are through the roof, and this is why. If this kind of stuff keeps happening people will start using those guns at more than the range – they will have to to protect their loved ones.
When I look at prosecutors like George Gascón, or Milwaukee County’s John Chisholm, or the retiring judge in that New York rape case I feel contempt. You see they are as complicit in these heinous crimes as are the perpetrators of them. Sure, Chisholm can now admit the bail he set for this mass-murderer was “inappropriately low,” and hide behind a large legal vocabulary to disguise his complicitness, but it is his actions that set the bad actor among us. That bad actor may be the proximate cause of the Waukesha Christmas Parade Massacre, but John Chisholm is the ultimate one. Chisholm could have addressed that proximate cause when it had caused far less damage than is now evident. He is unquestionably negligent. Would that the law permitted us to punish Chisholm accordingly. (BTW, I’m no lawyer and I may be throwing these terms around “inappropriately” – I don’t care at this point. So if you are a lawyer and have an impulse to correct me – stow it. Correcting me is doing the same thing these prosecutors are doing – enabling mass murder.)
Alright, end of rant, but there is more need be said. This is the greatest sign of the decline in Christian thought in our nation you can find. Christianity starts with a loving God trying to fix a deeply and terribly broken world while preserving humanity as free actors in that world. Christianity starts with the proposition that there is evil in our midst. When we fail to acknowledge that there is evil here among us, we fail to be fully Christian. Way, way too many churches have mutated the Gospel in a fashion that permits them to avoid looking at and acknowledging that evil. And so the church’s prominent place in our culture has declined. As Christians it is easy to cry about how the culture hates us, but that is not actually news. That has been true for most of the church for most of history. Crying about it is just a sign of weakness. No scratch that, it is a sign of a lack of faith. As Paul said to the church in Rome, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” So I cannot let this pass without noting that some of the stuff that has hit the fan here is landing on the church.
Will we notice it?
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