They aren’t going to quit

They aren’t going to quit — ever.

You know who I’m talking about. Let’s stop kidding ourselves. Let’s stop talking in the abstract and get right to the point about this. The people who act with cruelty will never stop. They aren’t going to change. They aren’t going to be persuaded. They aren’t going to stop.

How do I know? Because “they” have been around for a long, long time. For all of human history in fact. This isn’t something new. Cruelty didn’t just show up when a governor decided to act cruelly and put people on a bus without any provisions of food, clothing for cold weather, or shelter or any plan of what to do with these folks when they arrived at their destination.

No, cruelty has been a part of the human experience all along.

Humans are experts at cruelty. How else do you explain the lynchings that happened on church grounds right after a church service and then photograph the event with smiling faces for posterity? That’s the epitome of cruelty. (Robert P. Jones recounts this event in his disturbing but necessary book “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity)

Or how about the plethora of other race related cruelty that could be listed. “I can’t breath.” Segregation. Jim Crow laws. Slavery. A justice system that I don’t even have words for.

Or how about the fact that we do nothing about mass shootings. We willingly allow them to continue. They aren’t tragedies anymore. They are cruelty.