The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and What Has Not Changed

By now you have heard of the July 16, 2009 arrest of Harvard University history professor, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director of Harvard's W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research on a charge of disorderly conduct. Someone phoned the Cambridge Police Department to report "a possible" break-in of a Ware Street residence. The residence happened to be where Gates lived. He had returned from an international trip to find his front door swollen. So Gates signaled his driver, who helped him pry the door open. Apparently, that effort was interpreted as a break-in. When a Cambridge, Massachusetts Police Department sergeant responded, the sergeant entered the residence and demanded that Gates provide identification. The sergeant reported that Gates refused to do so. However, the sergeant's official report states that Gates "did supply me with a Harvard University identification card."

Nevertheless, the sergeant arrested Gates for disorderly conduct because "Gates continued to yell at me, accusing me of racial bias and continued to tell me that I had not heard the last of him." Instead of leaving the area, the sergeant placed Gates in handcuffs and arrested him outside his own residence.

Reactions to the Gates arrest for disorderly conduct have varied. Some comments posted to Internet blogs have suggested that Gates brought the disorderly conduct charge on himself by being indignant and "uncooperative" with the police sergeant. Others have responded that the Gates incident again demonstrates how police officers treat black and brown people as criminal suspects, even when they know they are not.

The Cambridge Police Department dropped the charges against Gates on July 21. However, that action should not prevent us from asking some hard questions.

1. If the police sergeant identified Gates as being who he said he was and where he had a right to be based on the Harvard University ID card, as the sergeant's report asserts, why didn't the sergeant merely leave?
2. If Gates expressed indignation toward the sergeant and called him racist, why didn't the sergeant merely leave?
3. If the sergeant saw that Gates was displeased by his presence, why didn't the sergeant merely leave?
4. If Gates was on his property outside his house and was loudly accusing the sergeant of being racist, how was that conduct disorderly? Whose order was Gates disturbing? Who was complaining about Gates' tone or volume? Who, aside from the sergeant, took offense at Gates? Did the disorderly conduct arrest result because the sergeant was insulted? Is "disorderly conduct" merely police shorthand for "contempt of cop?"
5. Why did the sergeant warn "Gates to clam down while I withdrew my department issued handcuffs from their carrying case,"--according to the sergeant's police report--when the sergeant knew that Gates was not a burglar, was upset with the officer, and was not engaging in any threatening conduct toward the officer or anyone else?

The police sergeant knew when he saw Gates' Harvard ID that Gates was no burglar. Gates had the freedom to believe the officer to be racist. Even if Gates was loud in accusing the sergeant of being racist, his behavior did not justify being arrested. The sergeant and his superiors on the Cambridge Police Department acted as if Gates had no right to criticize law enforcement. The decision to arrest and charge Gates with "disorderly conduct" charge appears to have been a power play by the sergeant and the Police Department against an angry black man who refused to behave with sufficient deference. When a white police sergeant can publicly arrest a black man in 2009 who loudly accuses the sergeant of behaving in a racist manner and when the sergeant's superiors permit the arrest to result in criminal charges being filed, it is clear that Barack Obama's election has not changed the reality of cultural incompetence within the law enforcement and criminal justice community.

Gates is a world-renown scholar whose experience captured international attention. However, his experience is endured by countless people of color. Fortunately, Gates was not shot and killed, beaten, or forced to spend a night in jail. Unfortunately, the same mindset that caused his arrest has resulted in many deaths, beatings, or jailings of people of color who are not prominent.

And unfortunately, after each such incident, the cultural incompetence within the law enforcement and criminal justice system does not change. Instead, state and local governments continue to certify culturally incompetent people to exercise physical, and sometimes lethal, force in ways that show they support culturally incompetent law enforcement.

We should not be surprised that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was angry. What should surprise us is that the Cambridge Police Department will not train a police sergeant how to accept criticism from a law-abiding citizen without mis-using his authority and the tools of his office against the citizen. We should be surprised that more of us are not indignant about how Gates was treated.

We should not be surprised that people of color do not trust the police to protect them, serve them, or treat them fairly. After all, the Cambridge Police Department's behavior toward Gates shows that it would rather treat black people as criminal suspects than as law-abiding people who deserve respect when they express displeasure with unsatisfactory service. One suspects that the Cambridge Police Department's conduct is not exceptional within the law enforcement community. Cultural incompetence in law enforcement is alive, strong, armed, and licensed by state and local governments across the nation. That was true before Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was born. It has not changed. Apparently, state and local officials do not want it to change.

Christ, War, Torture, and Guns

According to media reports, an Assembly of God congregation in Louisville, Kentucky is inviting worshippers to wear their unloaded handguns to worship on June 27 to promote safe gun ownership and freedom. Pastor Ken Pagano of New Bethel Church is quoted as saying, "I believe that without a deep-seeded belief in God and firearms that this country would not be here." Ponder for a moment what kind of handgun Jesus would choose were he to attend the service. When one combines Pastor Pagano's view with recent studies showing that a majority of people who regularly attend worship services believe that torture is often or sometimes justified, it is not surprising that the gospel of Jesus Christ has become associated with militaristic imperialism rather than the love and peace of God.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was no stranger to violence. Violence and the threat of violence hounded him throughout his public ministry. King's home was firebombed and his family was often threatened. He was stabbed. His followers suffered violence from vigilante groups and experienced government sponsored and sanctioned violence. Eventually, Dr. King was murdered.

Throughout his life, there is no record of Dr. King urging his congregants to wear their unloaded handguns to worship to promote responsible gun safety. Did King not know about the Second Amendment? Did he not understand that the civil rights movement was threatened by dangerous people, and by people who merely harbored dangerous ideas?

I suspect that King understood that gun-packing does not make a society free any more than nuclear-weapon proliferation makes a world safe. The fact that dangerous people exist who will do dangerous and even deadly things is no excuse for contaminating the gospel of God's love and truth with a Jack Bauer approach to faith. So I suspect that Dr. King never contemplated having a "bring your gun to church Sunday." He rightly understood that the gospel of Christ calls for "a more excellent way" to affirm freedom than to parade symbols of fear and death around while singing "Have Thine Own Way."

Essentially, to embrace torture and militarism means that one must surrender to fear. Those who advocate either approach are basically saying that personal freedom and safety is possible only by projecting a robust militarism and willingness to employ violence. Dr. King, like Jesus and Christians who have suffered violent persecution in every age, understood that violence does not make a people more free or safe. It only makes them more fearful and dangerous to themselves and others. Perfect love casts out fear, not perfect marksmanship and powerful weaponry.

On April 4, 1967, Dr. King called for an end to American military involvement in Vietnam in a sermon delivered at Riverside Church in New York City titled "A Time to Break Silence." In that sermon, King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." His remarks were denounced by editorial writers in such leading papers as the New York Times and Washington Post. A year to the day later, King was murdered in Memphis.

It is ironic that King's most often quoted words do not come from "A Time to Break Silence." It is ironic that the nation that celebrates his birth with a holiday and pays lip service to his non-violent movement for social change has yet to take up King's call for "a true revolution of values" that affirms love of others over love of things and weapons. How odd, that a nation that calls the world to suppress the development of nuclear weapons (and what bigger guns can we imagine than those?) leads the world in merchandising death-dealing instruments.

Perhaps it is no more odd or strange—some might even term it twisted—than to affirm that the Biblical philosophy of love affirmed most clearly and profoundly in Jesus Christ justifies taking weapons of violence into a shrine supposedly dedicated to following one who is called the Prince of Peace, and who, when he was threatened by armed assailants, gently yet firmly said to a sword-wielding follower, "Put away your sword."

Mahatma Ghandi once said. "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." When I read about evangelical Christians supporting torture as sometimes or often justifiable and about Pastor Pagano's invitation for worshippers to wear their unloaded handguns to worship God on June 27, I agree with Ghandi. In his love for all people and rejection of the doctrine of "salvation by force," Ghandi was perhaps a better follower of Jesus than many of us who quote his words in our sermons and hymns, but who have a strangely twisted sense of his heart.

Jack or Jesus, Fox or Faith

Almost daily it seems that the American public and wider world learn more about how people were tortured and subjected to other inhumane treatment during the Bush administration. Most recently, President Obama reversed his previous position favoring disclosure of information about what has been done. At the urging of his military commanders, Mr. Obama now has ordered his administration to continue the policy of the Bush administration which concealed photos about that mistreatment, despite a recent decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that ordered the photos released. Sadly, religious leaders have not publicly urged Mr. Obama to obey the court decision, release the photos, and condemn the policies and practices that produced the inhumane treatment depicted by them in the spirit of repentance.

Meanwhile, a recent poll of regular churchgoers that was taken by the Pew Research Center revealed that 54% of the respondents consider torture "often" or "sometimes" justified. As the world ponders that finding and President Obama's decision to continue a deliberate policy of concealing proof about the torture that the Bush administration denied while committing it, I am reminded of Oscar Wilde's statement that "life imitates art far more than art imitates life."

Jack Bauer is the protagonist in "24," the American television series produced by Real Time Productions and Imagine Television in association with 20th Century Fox Television. In the series, Bauer is an anti-hero who disregards human rights, due process, and anything else in the name of U.S. national security. "24," which is beginning its seventh season, has been nominated for 57 Emmy awards. By commercial television standards, "24" and Jack Bauer have achieved iconic status. Judging from the Pew Research Center poll results, Jack Bauer has replaced Jesus Christ as high priest and savior for many Americans who profess to be Christians.

If 54% of regular churchgoers consider torture often or sometimes justified, then half the people who regularly attend Christian religious services either do not understand or care that the values of Jesus Christ are not respected by or reflected in Jack Bauer's actions and motives. After all, the gospel of Christ calls on us to pray for those who persecute us, and do and say evil things to us (Matthew 5:9-12). Jesus Christ calls on us to love our enemies. As the Message puts it, "I'm telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true best selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best … to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. In a word, what I'm saying is, Grow up. You're kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you." (Matthew 5:44-48, The Message).

I do not expect Fox Television to affirm and cherish Christian ethics of love, mercy, and justice. I do not expect Imagine Television to offer programming that extols Christian generosity towards strangers and enemies. It would be admirable for that to happen, but I am not surprised that it is not the case. Fox Television is part of the commercial broadcasting industry which has long defined excellence and virtue by commercial profit-making, not justice, truth, and mercy. So I do not expect Fox Television to create a Jack Bauer who lives according to the grace and truth of Jesus Christ.

But I do expect worshippers who answer to the name of Christ to recognize that Jack Bauer is not Jesus. I expect people who fuss about biblical inerrancy to respect the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ enough to know that torture violates the essence of Christianity. I expect people who claim allegiance to the Great Commission (spreading the gospel of Christ throughout the world) to first honor the Great Commandment (love God and love neighbors—including enemy neighbors). I expect Christians to grow up in Christ when faced with terrorism, not become disciples of Jack Bauer.

Jesus described religious people who neglect justice, mercy, and faith with one word: hypocrites (Matthew 23:23). Rather than celebrating and concealing Jack Bauer-like conduct, followers of Jesus should condemn, expose, and repent about it. If we won't, we either pervert the gospel of Christ or have allowed the forces of empire to hijack it. We have no excuse when the world questions whether we truly know and believe the love and truth of God revealed in Jesus that we preach and sing about.

A National Day of Prayer worth Observing

On April 17, 1952, President Harry S. Truman signed a bill proclaiming a National Day of Prayer to be declared by each succeeding president at an appropriate date chosen by that president. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed an amendment to that law that provides that the National Day of Prayer shall be held on the first Thursday of May. Hence, May 7, 2009 is the date designated for the 2009 National Day of Prayer. The original intent was for this to be a day when persons of all faiths could pray for the nation in their diverse ways.

Sadly, this intended time of inter-faith prayerfulness, humility, and unity appears to have become a victim to religious imperialism and Christian fundamentalism associated with Focus on the Family, the Colorado Springs, Colorado-based organization founded by James Dobson. The National Day of Prayer Task Force (NDPTF) is a non-governmental organization created by the National Prayer Committee. However, its stated purpose is to coordinate events for "evangelical Christians." When one visits the NDPTF Internet site, one learns that Mrs. Shirley Dobson is chair of the event, and that prayers are urged to be offered for U.S. government, military, media, churches, family in keeping with the Judeo-Christian tradition.

As an ordained Baptist minister, I certainly agree that prayer is urgently needed for the United States and the rest of our world. With so many people in vulnerable situations on so many levels (physically, financially, emotionally, socially, legally, and otherwise), prayers of confession,intercession, and repentance are desperately needed. We should be coming together to pray for healing, humility, and reconciliation. We should be praying for our planet, people throughout the world who are suffering, and for wisdom to be instruments of hope, unity, justice, and healing rather than agents of violence (including militarism), self-centered materialism, and imperialistic opportunism.

Yet, the efforts of the NDPTF are disquieting for several reasons.

First, the NDPTF appears more interested in using the National Day of Prayer for recruitment to its fundamentalist notion of Christianity than unifying Americans of all faith and social backgrounds. Media Matters reports that in 2004 Shirley Dobson barred Mormons from conducting services during National Day of Prayer ceremonies. Wikipedia reports that the 2008 application for volunteer coordinators required that applicants affirm their belief in biblical inerrancy, and that a previous application for Task Force coordinators included being "an evangelical Christian who has a personal relationship with Christ" and an acknowledgment that the applicant was "working for the Lord Jesus Christ ..." Such emphasis on Dobson's brand of Christianity is plainly off-putting for persons who are not Christians. It also discourages Christians who respectfully disagree with Dobson about what the Christian faith is and means from participating in National Day of Prayer activities.

The Christian fundamentalist emphasis appears elsewhere in the NDPTF website. At various points, one reads that prayer is needed because the traditional notions of family and marriage are under attack. One wonders how persons who are divorced, single-parents, and how unmarried cohabiting persons (whatever their sexual orientation might be) can comfortably consider themselves invited to join in prayer for their families alongside people who openly deny that their families are legitimate.

I do not recall that the National Day of Prayer Task Force called the nation to prayer in 2000 after the Florida vote recount was mobbed by what we now know were political operatives determined to elect George W. Bush even if it meant disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of Florida voters. I do not recall the NDPTF calling the nation to pray for forgiveness after President Bush launched the nation into war in Iraq without any provocation from Saddam Hussein or threat to the security of the U.S. from his regime. I recall no calls by the NDPTF to confess that the U.S. led invasion of Iraq converted the suffering of that society from Hussein's dictatorial brutality to U.S. imperial brutality by occupying of that country with foreign soldiers based on reasons that were ill-conceived, if not deliberately fabricated. If the NDPTF called on the nation to confess the violence--including murder--against homosexuals, I am unaware that it did so.

One searches the NDPTF website in vain for the slightest hint of repentance about torture and other inhumane treatment perpetrated against people of South Asian ethnicity and/or Islamic faith during the Bush administration's so-called "war on terror." Similarly, there is no evidence that the NDPTF considers the tragedies suffered by immigrants (including children of immigrant parents) because of state and national immigration policies and practices worth mentioning, let alone worth being prayerfully repentant about.

Thus, it appears that at some point that the NDPTF forgot (assuming that they ever believed) that the National Day of Prayer is not a sectarian or partisan observance, but a time of prayer for people of all faiths, political ideologies, and social situations. Given such glaring evidence of sectarianism, we should hope that most people of faith will not confuse the National Day of Prayer with James and Shirley Dobson, Focus on the Family, the National Day of Prayer Task Force, and an imperial Christianity agenda that tramples and marginalizes people who are poor, vulnerable, immigrant, or otherwise different from the majority of our population in the name of God and democracy. The National Day of Prayer is an American observance for people of all faiths and situations, not a forum for religious apartheid.

Finally, I agree with what Cornel West wrote in Democracy Matters when he warned that what he termed "Constantinian Christianity"--meaning a version of Christianity based on love of empire rather than a love of God for all humanity--"must not be the model of American Christian identity." As West observed, "Even the most seemingly pious can inflict great harm. Constantine himself flouted his piety even as he continued to dominate and conquer peoples.... [I]t is only with a coalition of the prophetic Christians of all colors, the prophetic Jews and Muslims and Buddhists, and the democratic secularists that we can preserve the American democratic experiment."

On May 7, I will join Americans of all faiths, colors, and backgrounds, family situations, and political ideologies (including ideologies I oppose) in prayer. I hope we pray humbly, reverently, and honestly. I hope we pray together in confession and repentance about our egregious ways of perpetrating injustice against the poor, weak, vulnerable, and unpopular. I hope we repent about our sins against the Earth and the other creatures that inhabit it. I hope we repent for our refusal to repent in years past of our glaring and our covert national sins. I hope we are thankful, hopeful, and unified in asking God to inspire our leaders to be wise, humble, compassionate, and devoted to peace through justice for all persons.

However, I have nothing but contempt for efforts to pervert the National Day of Prayer into an exercise in religious segregation, whether those efforts are taken by the NDPTF or anyone else. On May 7, I intend to be part of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. often termed "the beloved community" in prayer, not part of a neo-Jim Crow imperial version of Christian fundamentalism.

Fear, Faith, Love, and Justice

Reading the April 26 column by Frank Rich in the New York Times ("The Banality of Bush White House Evil") caused a question to resurface that has been brewing within me for years. Why did the American public, news media (for the most part), and national leaders in Congress permit torture, judicially unauthorized surveillance, and assorted other improper actions to happen?

We had no reason to believe that United Nations weapons inspectors lied or were incompetent when they announced that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. We had no reason to believe that Saddam Hussein's regime had anything to do with the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. We had every reason to be suspicious of claims that the security of the United States was somehow threatened by a land-locked nation led by a brutal dictator whose military we had already defeated and whose neighbors were willing to fight him.

We simply allowed fearmongering to take the the place of reason. We trusted our fears and the people who catered to those fears more than we insisted on facts. Fear of people who looked and worshipped different from others allowed too many of us to blindly believe the worse about them, and turn our eyes from the brutal things that happened to them.

Sadly, too many Christians did not challenge the rush to war, the unmistakable signs that civil liberties of people of South Asian ancestry and Islamic faith were being trampled, and that people were being kidnapped and tortured in the name of "national security." We behaved like the religious officials did concerning the beaten and bruised robbery victim in the story of the Good Samaritan. We passed by on the other side of the road. Just as no one in the Bush White House followed the noble example of Elliott Abrams (who resigned rather than obey orders to fire the special prosecutor involved in the Watergate scandal), few Christians in the U.S. openly challenged what the Bush administration did.

In the New Testament we read that perfect love casts out fear. This is true concerning love for others, justice, truth, peace, and love for God. Perhaps we did not resist enough because we did not love enough. Or perhaps, as Stephen Vincent Benet wrote, the loves we had (for others, justice, truth, peace, and for God) were much too small.

So the question now is whether we (from President Obama to the average American citizen) love others, justice, truth, peace, and God enough to demand justice for the victims of the falsehoods, policies, and practices that resulted from fearmongering. If our professions about loving our neighbor don't prod us to demand that justice, we will be poor representatives of God's love, justice, truth, and peace in the world. We will be poor representatives of Jesus.

Do we have the courage to love, or are we still imprisoned by our fears? Fear is never a valid excuse for injustice. Justice is love in action. It always demands faith. Do we have the faith to demand justice?

April 26, 2009

A few quick reflections ...

My wife and I enjoyed meeting and hearing Brian McLaren Friday during his appearance at the Spring Conference of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Arkansas (CBFAR). Brian's remarks around the subject "A Tale of Two Gospels" were refreshing, insightful, and heart-warming. I encourage people to read his work.

The seminar I led ("Law and Cultural Competency") at the William H. Bowen School of Law of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock went well. I am grateful to the students for their interest, energy, and ideas as I begin planning to lead the seminar next spring.

I attended Dr. Raouf Halaby's workshop ("A Palestinian Christian's Perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict") yesterday as part of the Spring Conference of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Arkansas. Dr. Halaby, who is professor of English and Art at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, was born in Jerusalem and educated as a child and youth in Jerusalem and Beirut. Contact him about speaking to your groups if you want to open your mind.

Does anyone other than me find it ironic that the United States refused to attend the United Nations Conference on Racism again? The U.S. boycotted the Conference when Secretary Colin Powell was Secretary of State, and has not attended it since that time. How odd, that a United Nations Conference on Racism would be boycotted by the democracy that prides itself for respecting freedom of speech, thought, and willingness to hear and debate diverse perspectives and that the boycott would continue during the presidency of President Obama?

Tortured Morality

Like many people around the world, I have paid close attention as President Obama's administration wrestles with how it will deal with our nation's recent experience concerning torture. I rejoiced as Obama renounced practices such as water-boarding within his first week in office. More recently, I was pleased to see the Obama administration release previously classified documents and legal opinions issued during the Bush administration concerning torture.

President Obama has often declared that subjecting vulnerable people to inhumane treatment violates our sense of morality and humanity—as people, not merely as Americans. Our nation has already tried and punished enlisted military personnel for inhumane treatment of people held in their custody. The accepted justification for doing so is that our security forces in the uniformed services know—even at the lowest ranks—that this behavior is wrong, unjust, illegal, contrary to our values, and therefore inexcusable.

So, if U.S. enlisted military personnel have been punished for failing to obey this fundamental rule of decency, why should political officials and intelligence operatives receive immunity from investigation and punishment for secretly ordering, advising and engaging in similar or worse conduct? Why shouldn't the Justice Department investigate and determine whether these actors violated laws intended to protect vulnerable people from hellish treatment? How is it somehow commendable that President Obama has signaled to the intelligence apparatus of the United States that acts of inhumanity and torture allegedly counseled and practiced during the Bush administration will go uninvestigated and unpunished? When did it become just and morally defensible to excuse inhumane treatment and torture committed under orders from White House and Pentagon lawyers?

We should be concerned by President Obama's statement that he is more interested in looking forward than backward when it comes to addressing allegations of inhumane treatment counseled and perpetrated by political officials and Central Intelligence Agency operatives. Moral leadership holds morally accountable actors responsible for intentional misconduct, including misconduct perpetrated under the pretext of following orders. This was one of the signal lessons of the Nuremberg War Crimes trials that followed World War II.

If the laws that prohibit inhumanity and torture are just, then they should be obeyed by national security personnel and enforced by the Chief Executive of the United States. If the Chief Executive believes that violators of those laws deserve leniency or pardons, then our justice system can accommodate those concerns. But it is neither just nor otherwise morally right for the Chief Executive to say that we deplore and reject inhumanity and torture in one breath, then claim in the next breath that we should not and will not investigate and punish people for counseling and committing acts of inhumanity and torture.

The Watergate and Iran-Contra investigations concerning scandals that occurred during the Nixon and Reagan presidencies also show that President Obama's "looking forward, not backward" position is historically inaccurate. H.R. Haldeman, G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, John Poindexter, and Casper Weinberger were investigated for their respective roles in those situations. The investigations did not hinder governmental operations. If anything, the investigations made official statements about no person being above the law—or beyond the law—credible. North and Poindexter eventually saw their criminal convictions overturned on appeal, and Weinberger received a presidential pardon from President George H.W. Bush after his indictment. However, their actions were treated as proper subjects for our justice system.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. often said that an unjust law is no law at all. Every member of the U.S. military and national security operative knows that one is duty-bound to disobey an illegal order. Thus, the claim that anyone who counseled or committed acts of inhumanity or torture in the challenging aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks somehow relied on orders from the White House, the Pentagon, or any other authority is immoral. The issue for President Obama and the nation is whether Americans have the integrity to demand that inhumanity and torture counseled and perpetrated in our names be investigated, prosecuted, and punished. A just society will investigate and punish inhumanity and torture.

We grope like the blind along a wall, groping like those who have no eyes; we stumble at noon as in the twilight, among the vigorous as though we were dead. We all growl like bears; like doves we moan mournfully. We wait for justice, but there is none; for salvation, but it is far from us. Isaiah 59:10-11, New Revised Standard Version