How many deaths must line the comforts we enjoy? Are we enablers of death or do we put the force which life has given us behind the liberties which life demands? As Glenn Greenwald so forcefully expresses, those who fail to defend the framework of freedom are as culpable as those who attack the body of freedom directly.
"The common, defining political principle here — what resonates far more powerfully than any other idea — is a fervent and passionate belief in our country’s constitutional framework, the core liberties it secures, and the checks and balances it offers as a safeguard against tyrannical power. Those who fail to defend that framework, or worse, those who are passively or actively complicit in its further erosion, are all equally culpable. With each day that passes, the radicalism and extremism originally spawned in secret by the Bush presidency becomes less and less his fault and more and more the fault of those who — having discovered what they have been doing and having been given the power to stop it — instead acquiesce to it and, worse, enable and endorse it." - Glenn Greenwald.
Our Lord came to give us freedom, which can only arise in the rich soil of truth. The only time our Lord became violent was when confronted with those who collaborated with the imperial powers against his people. He called them "thieves", living in a den of robbers and drove out their agents with whips. Their descendants make a fine living diverting the passion for justice that wants to roll over the seats of power like a mighty river. Their job is to clothe the dominions and the powers in the costume of inevitability, seeking to cover the odor of decay. The deepest guilt lies with those who oil the passage of laws that bring torture, massacre, and devastation to millions of innocents. Their "compromise", "realism", and complicity lends the patina of justice to these crimes and maintains them in a way that naked power never could.
The death sentence was passed against Jesus only when he challenged the enablers of imperial domination in the temple of collaboration. When will we start to turn over the money changer's tables?
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