Not every culture values children. In our not too distant past, we allowed them to be taken from their parents in order that they could be sold. Teenagers in many parts of the world, including ours, are victims of sex trafficking.
We have allowed our schools to replace education with training students to become neat-fitting cogs on the crushing wheel of unrelenting competition. And, as we grieve with the parents who lost their precious babies to gunfire in too many schools, there are those among us who applaud our government’s efforts to separate children from their families through deportation.
My point is this: While it is essential that we limit access to high powered guns and keep them out of the hands of individuals not equipped to handle them safely, such measures are not enough, for we need to fashion a culture in which at every level human life is valued as sacred.
Verbal prayers need to be matched by prayers of action, such as people coming together to celebrate community and vowing to seek justice for all. We must turn away from an ethos of winners and losers and of haves and have-nots.
It does little good to pass laws to regulate the conduct of people who are determined to not obey those laws. We pass laws to protect the environment, only to have businesses and even our government seek ways to circumvent or repeal the laws.
We need to not only link our thoughts, but also our hearts as we define who we want to be and what we can do to create a culture in which everyone is so respected that no violence against any person — economic, physical, or emotional — will be tolerated.
Heroes are kind and we need more of them.
Jim Palermo
Southampton