Yesterday, as I was enjoying some pics that +Nicholas Lawrence so kindly shared with me and many others, I stumbled across a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. where he says that “Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.”. Even though I reflected upon the quote, I really couldn’t nail it to anything particular until this morning.
+Mark Koenig wrote yesterday in his blog Along the Graybeard Trail about a crime that was committed twenty-three years ago, not any crime but one against a ten year old girl, Christine McGowen. Twenty-three years ago, my own daughter +Stephanie Quintana was only just one year old, I usually avoid reading or listening to news related to assaults, rapes and murder of children because my heart bleeds. I think of my own children and for one second I feel the world is a horrible place to live in. My faith hits the ground as I reflect, and come to the point where I challenge my belief in a God that is omnipresent and stands by as a guilty witness to such horrors done to one of his own. Yet eventually, time that heals mostly everything, is the one that brings acceptance (even if it leaves my soul dented and grief stricken), and for some strange reason restores my faith along the way.
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What Mark asks us to do here is up to the readers to decide. This isn’t something that you can decide in a beat, but that needs to be addressed by each person individually. Nevertheless, Dr. King’s quote fits like a glove in this particular case. What the murderer of this precious little girl did, certainly is something that will pull us low enough to full our hearts with hate.
Probably that’s why the death penalty was approved in many states. Our hearts full of hatred become the motor we need to get it don with. We just want to get rid of people that are capable of such evil. But, aren’t we giving them the easy way out? Isn’t is much better to have them incarcerated for as long as they live. Put away in a place where all they can listen to are the sounds of their own thoughts. Which will probably haunt them until the day they die. Don’t you think that this punishment is way harder? When each one of these horrible human beings is executed, their done with, no longer do we have them around. In a sense their execution isn’t a punishment for their actions, but something that gratifies us instead, because we feel good knowing they can harm no one again. I’m not going to go into the fact that this particular man already had prior convictions for assaulting other children. That would be another story to tell, how our justice system fails once and all over again and again.
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My heart goes out to the family of this innocent child, and I know if it would have been my little girl, probably my heart would be beyond repair.
Our world has never been an easy place to live in, and probably it will never be. It has survived despite the evil, many men and women have brought upon it for centuries, and through out it’s historical periods. In other words, we have survived!
Great good, but also great evil have and are capable of cohabiting together on this planet through the lives of the people who live here. For as long as time, executions have been around and even for some of us in ways that today may be seen as barbaric. Yet, bottom line, what we do and think about it is up to us, but nevertheless we should never let hate become the motor of our actions or thoughts, because if we do we have lost the battle against evil that is and always will be lurking just a few steps away from not only our own, but the homes of other as well.
