A DAMAGED-GOODS WORLD

Fallen, Jamestown, NC

We’ve become very good these days at skirting the grim reality of the world around us by using creative words to describe it. Those words increasingly turn up in the news. Some words are simply satiric if we don’t take them too seriously, like the recent peaceful protests that devolved into rioting and looting in cities around the country that were described as “undocumented shopping”. But innocent civilians caught up in the never ending wars around the world are referred to as “collateral damage”. And then there’s the growing issue of mental illness and those individuals that are living among us on the streets that don’t quite qualify for institutionalization until they snap and commit a horrendous crime against society. The examples are legion.

Australia generally just languishes down under and minds its own business. But within the past week it was the center of a hostage crisis where two innocent hostages were ultimately killed. And then a mother of eight innocent children was found with stab wounds while all of her children were discovered with fatal knife wounds. The police are not actively looking for a suspect.

A lawyer of the gunman who seized the hostages described him as a man of “ideology …so strong and so powerful that it clouds his vision for common sense and objectiveness”. He went on to state that the lone-wolf radical who considered himself persecuted by the government for his political views was “a damaged-goods individual” who had numerous issues.

That first Christmas Eve was anything but a “silent night” and a multitude of people around the world still do not experience one. At this hopeful time of the year, it’s time to pause and unite in action and prayer for a peace on earth and goodwill towards all mankind here and now, as we individually work to make a difference into the New Year in a broken “damaged-goods world”.

P.S.
And now we must deal with the assassination of two New York City policemen by an unstable man who was quite likely influenced by all the recent rioting and cop-hate rhetoric, who then committed suicide.