America the Beautiful, Part 1

My husband and I have recently returned from a road trip to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. Usually on road trips a favorite praise song runs through my head, becoming a sort of theme song of the journey. This time the song that kept returning to my mind was “America the Beautiful.” We saw no shortage of amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties, but it was not the familiar first verse that ran through my mind so much as the later verses.
​     America! America! God mend thine ev’ry flaw,
     Confirm thy soul in self-control,
     Thy liberty in law!

​We are full of flaws. We’ve seen so much violence lately by and against the police. What we need is self-control, holding back our anger until we can be sure we are exercising it in a responsible way that leads to justice and not to more pain for the innocent.
 
On the trip, I read Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. (That may be part of why Katherine Lee Bates’s prayer for our country kept repeating in my head.) Stevenson is director of Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), an organization in Alabama that assists the incarcerated who can’t afford representation. The book weaves stories of death-row inmates, children incarcerated as adults, and mentally handicapped prisoners with a blow-by-blow account of the case of Walter McMillan, a black man who spent years on death row for a murder he could not possibly have committed. Stevenson provides statistics about the rise in incarceration rates for non-violent crimes, the unjust proportion of poor black and brown inmates, and the number of children condemned to life with no opportunity for redemption, but the strength of the book is in showing us the real people behind those statistics—broken people, resilient people, people in need of hope.
 
Because of poverty, an amazing number of those whose death sentences Stevenson works to stay had previous council that was later disbarred for incompetence, yet courts refuse to hear arguments for how their rights were violated because “it's too late to file.” You're kidding me. You are prepared to kill a human being because he missed the “due date” for lack of anyone to tell him there WAS a due date? (Don’t tell my library!) Incarceration of a juvenile with adults inevitably leads to repeated gang rape, a punishment that reminds me of ISIL, not American ideals. Although Walter McMillan was eventually freed, no restitution was made nor were there consequences for those who committed numerous illegal acts because their prejudices made them eager to pin an unsolved crime on a black man. There is still much work to be done in our society. The book is highly relevant in this time of increasing distrust between the police and communities of color. I think of the people I know involved in jail ministry and the people I know who work in the system, and it leads me to more fervent prayer.
 
     America! America! God mend thine ev’ry flaw,
     Confirm thy soul in self-control,
     Thy liberty in law!
 
(For more thoughts on "America the Beautiful" come back tomorrow to read part 2. For a much lighter look at our journey west, including lots of pictures, see my travel blog, Wide-eyed Wanderer. Use the archive in the right sidebar to find entries from September and October 2016.)