Mogadishu on the Bayou

Umm, I'm a little confused, Armchair Pessimist. So if my ears are burning, you were talking about me. So am I the "milksop, pc-whipped governments that cannot or will not supress it"? I'm a sovereign? Or did you mean I'm just a milksop and PC whipped? Believing that everyone carries the image of God is politically correct? Really? Or are you saying I'm a "milksop" because I'm not willing to get a gun and prepare for the barbarians at the gate? If so, I'm fine not sharing a worldview where your strategy is a virtue.

Giittv wrote above, with bold added by me: What the community in NOLA needs (and I'm not talking out of my ass here, 22 of my family members lost the material goods they couldn't carry out with them in Katrina) is leadership from the bottom up. They need a person or people to whom those struggling to make it can look up. People who know the area, know the struggles the working poor and the unemployed face down there who can inspire more than the "me-firstism" the the government/business alliance engenders. In short, what they need is a martyr. I'm serious, and at the risk of hyperbole, deadly serious. Such a category of person is present in nearly every community, and as individuals they epitomize the ethical value of treating others not just with respect, but with the notion that they, too, deserve to live there in peace. So, hypotheticating from the story of the murdered boy, what is needed is a neighbor of that mother with the gun getting in the mother's face and telling her that not only is she wrong, but that she is teaching her son evil. A possible consequence of that action is getting shot by the mother. It all must be possible, it all must happen. That is the essence of bottom-up in this ethical context. Naturally, I do not hope that martyrs are made. I would hope that people will respond constructively to that sort of leadership, but the reality is that there is an entire set of generations who consider violence a valid response to nearly any situation. It will take more than symbolic leadership to negate that.

Apology accepted, Armchair Pessimist. Although I suspect you'd still find me a "menace," and I'm still confused. What did I write that made me sound lukewarm? That I saw all people, even defendants, as bearers of the image of God? I said these cases are hard to listen to, and I needed prayer. Pretend I'm a judge. Should a judge find these cases anything but tragic? A judge is supposed to dispassionately apply the law. Otherwise, he or she would be an activist judge. I don't understand how prayer or seeing "these people" as children of God gets in the way of protecting the public (although technically, the representative of the people is the prosecutor, not the judge).