Life and Death, Defunding Police, and That Space Telescope

Science and Religion and Politics and Death are among the last things people want to ponder in summer months, but they dominate all the news beyond these stone walls.

July 27, 2022 by Father Gordon MacRae

Pay some attention, please, to the Scripture readings at Mass on the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time on July 31 this year. They are about life and death, though the latter is about the last thing anyone wants to ponder in this first summer after two years in a pandemic lockdown. We are just now beginning to live again. I have been especially struck by the Second Reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians (3:1-5, 9-11):

“If you were raised with Christ, seek what is above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not of what is on Earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ your life appears, then you too will appear with him in glory.”

I have long been both moved and perplexed by this haunting image. I have read it many times, but I only heard it in my heart for the first time a few years ago. When we had a weekly Sunday Mass in this prison (there has not been one for over two years), my friend Pornchai Moontri was recruited to be a lector. He did not want to accept at first because he was conscious of his Thai accent. After he finally assented, he would review the readings on the day before and ask me for correct pronunciations and the meanings of phrases.

Pornchai asked me to explain what St. Paul meant when he wrote, “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” I had heard this verse many times, but never fully pondered it until that day.

That single sentence drew me into a long and mystical pondering of the meaning of life and death. We have a point of reference for life. We live it every day and it is all we know. But death remains an ominous mystery, dreaded by most and hidden beyond time and space. Those we love who have died fall into total silence except in the recesses of our hearts.

If the dead are simply “no longer,” then how would we Catholics explain our very much alive prayers for the intercession of patron saints? It is a sort of heart to heart dialog that is inexplicable for nonbelievers, but very real for most Catholics and many other Christians. I find myself in casual conversation almost daily with two patron saints. I do not believe I could have survived 28 years of unjust imprisonment without their intercession and example. And yet, by the standards of this world, they have died.

The passage of St. Paul above was meant to convey that the messianic promises have been fulfilled in the death and Resurrection of Christ. It signifies the meaning of becoming a follower of Christ. To do so is to die with him, and to live with him while living here in the gap between the Resurrection of Jesus and the fulfillment of our lives in Heaven. This fulfillment is “hidden with Christ in God.”

While living in this gap, our true lives are hidden. It is a beautiful, but haunting image. It makes all things experienced here in the gap to be bearable whether they are loss, or illness, or alienation, or loneliness, or prison or death itself. The great challenge of our time is to actually live as though this were so. The pain of illness, loneliness, and loss can be either carried as the cruel burdens of life or as a share in the Sufferings of Christ. They become the tools of our advocates in spiritual battle, the Saints who are hidden with Christ in God.

Courtesy of Pete Luna / Uvalde Leader-News

The Ongoing Pain of Uvalde

After I wrote “Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas: When God and Men were Missing,” many people spent a lot of time pondering that awful story and its aftermath. It seems that just about everyone in Texas read my post, some several times. It’s unusual that I receive letters about a particular post, but I received many about that one, and most were from men. I am still in the process of responding to them. It has been heartbreaking to witness the losses those parents endured. We will be living in the wake of Uvalde for a long time to come. Please pray for them.

As that post mentioned, Texas Governor Greg Abbott spoke in defense of a longstanding Texas long gun policy. He said that 18-year-olds in Texas have been legally allowed to purchase and own long guns since the Frontier Days of the 19th Century, but only in the last two decades have these problems of school shootings emerged.

I also wrote in another post of a necessary focal point in this problem that our culture must find the courage to face and address. I wrote the post a decade before the events at Uvalde, but it seems to predict them and others like them. It was obviously already on our collective minds because it is the most-read post at this blog. It started showing up all across the nation just hours after news emerged out of Uvalde that day.

There is a lot to be learned from that post, but recent history tells us that learning it and putting it into practice are very different things. I have received mail from multiple communities urging me not to let the topic of that post fall by the wayside. It is “In the Absence of Fathers, A Story of Elephants and Men.”

Anti-terrorism vehicle acquired by the Keene, NH police force under a $286,000 federal grant for high-terror threat areas.

Support Your Local Police, But Not With Tanks

There is another matter in the aftermath of the tragedy at Uvalde that I want to address because no one else has touched it. A lot of ink is being devoted to the highly negligent response of local police that day.

After our recent post, “Dying in Prison in the ‘Live Free or Die’ State” by Charlene C. Duline, you might find it ironic that I am addressing fair treatment for police after all that she described. That was our fourth post in eight weeks to be endorsed and promoted by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights for which I am grateful. This blog received thousands of new readers after each of those posts were recommended by Catholic League President Bill Donohue.

Please be clear that I do not at all excuse, or even understand, the apparent inaction of Police in Uvalde as events unfolded on that awful day, but I believe there is a more panoramic view that we as a society must consider. Our political system, especially among its Progressive and Democratic wings, has bludgeoned police since the death of George Floyd in 2020. We should not forget the urban riots across the land in the summer of 2020 as the news media and Democratic politicians dismissed the horror we were seeing as “mostly peaceful protests.” There are no Congressional hearings to discuss the events of those days.

Calls to “Defund Police” became a mantra chanted across the land, promoted heavily until we approached another election year. Then the slogan became a clear electoral liability and was quickly abandoned. For the previous two years, however, police were openly vilified and demonized through the United States. Many in politics and the news media were guilty of the same sort of profiling for which they accused the police. The misconduct of specific officers became an indictment of all police.

We have to fix this. When police face an explosive situation with guns in hand, all the training in the world will not compensate for the political burden now imposed on them. They have been forced to second guess their every move, forced to learn the race of an offender and weigh in the spur of a moment whether their actions will land them on the evening news cycle as abusive cops.

The hesitancy and indecisiveness in Uvalde was the result of a leadership vacuum. It should never have happened and must never happen again. Police, even in light of that awful negligence, must have the support of their community. The politics of Defund Police must be silenced. I wrote about a path for doing so in “Don’t Defund Police.  Defund Unions that Cover-Up Corruption.” I wrote that in the awful summer of 2020 when our cities were burning and our police stood by and watched.

Officer Derek Chauvin had numerous complaints in his police personnel file for claims of using excessive force. Before his behavior resulted in the death of George Floyd those abuses were a secret kept from the public by his union.

There is one more important step that could be taken immediately to reform police departments. Over the last twenty years or so, there has been an ever-increasing militarization of police. Beginning with the Bush Administration, and then greatly extended under the Obama Administration, unused military equipment has been reassigned to local police forces giving them the appearance of military might at the expense of community policing.

The small city of Keene, New Hamshire that employed Detective James McLaughlin, for example, received an armored personnel carrier from the Obama Administration. If it was really the look the Keene police wanted, it worked. That small department has been plagued by abuse claims ever since the tank arrived.

Lost in Space

Perhaps it was too soon to venture into space, but one week after I wrote of Uvalde, we posted “The James Webb Space Telescope, and an Encore from Hubble.” I apologize for the jarring change of topic, but the Space Telescope was also happening just then and I felt we needed a break from tragedy.

Parked in a neutral gravity zone one million miles from Earth, the revolutionary infrared JWST began producing images from deep into our cosmic past and transmitting them back to NASA on July 12. Our editor has managed to send a few of the early images to my GTL tablet. They are awesome, and only the first of many to come. For the first time in human history, we will be able to look deeply through time to the earliest days of the Cosmos following the Big Bang some 13.2 billion years ago. When I first wrote of the James Webb Telescope, a few readers asked me to explain the difference between it and the Hubble Telescope which has been functioning in space for three decades. The basic difference is that Hubble is tethered to the Earth and in orbit around it. The Webb Telescope is in a fixed position one million miles away from the Earth, four times the distance from the Earth to the Moon, and along with the Earth it orbits the Sun. Its 21.5-foot diameter primary mirror is more powerful than any telescope in existence. Another reader asked me to explain what NASA means by the claim that the Webb allows us to look deeper into space, and thus further back in time, than has ever before been possible. The image you see below, the first taken by Webb and revealed by NASA, is a section of space the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. Within that space, Webb captured some of the first images of galaxies to come into existence after the Big Bang. Human beings are seeing these images for the very first time. The light that emerges from them took 13.2 billion years to get here. We are thus looking at the Cosmos in its infancy after Creation. I have long known about this theoretically, but seeing it for the first time was my “WOW” moment.

“The glory of the stars is the beauty of heaven, a gleaming array in the heights of the Lord standing like sentinels on high.”

— Sirach 43:9-10

“When I look at the heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and stars which you set in place, what is man that you should be mindful of him, and the son of man that you should care for him.”

— Psalm 8:3-4

+ + +

Editor’s Note: If you have assisted Father Gordon MacRae with personal expenses and the cost of this blog, please note that we have a new Paypal address for this purpose: FrGordonMacRae@gmail.com. You may also consult our Contact and Support page for further information.

Please visit these related posts linked in this one:

Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas: when God and Men Were Missing

Dying in Prison in the ‘Live Free or Die’ State

Don’t Defund Police. Defund Unions that Cover-Up Corruption

The James Webb Space Telescope and an Encore from Hubble

Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas: When God and Men Were Missing

Facing the truth about the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas will require courage. Something has gone terribly wrong in our culture and Pornchai Moontri knows it firsthand.

June 15, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae and Pornchai Moontri

Note to readers: Fr. Gordon MacRae interviewed Pornchai Moontri in Thailand for this post. Pornchai’s most recent post was “A Night in Bangkok, a Year in Freedom.”

+ + +

A dense, dark cloud has been hanging over America since the recent inexplicable and shocking murders of 19 elementary school children and two of their teachers by 18-year-old Salvatore Ramos in Uvalde, Texas. The close knit community will feel the effects of this trauma for decades to come. A lot of soul searching has gone on about what could have triggered such an event, about how it developed, how it might have been prevented, and what could have been done differently by responding police.

The tragedy at Uvalde was devastating, and was preceded just a week earlier by the racially charged rampage of another 18-year-old shooter brandishing the same sort of weapon. He killed 12 people — ten of them targeted for being African American — at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.

After the shocking but unrelated stories unfolded, half the nation went immediately for the guns and political talking points. President Biden’s loudest and most immediate response was, “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? Where in God’s name is our backbone?” They were not exactly the words of consolation the nation and the people of Uvalde needed in the moment. The politics should have waited.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott explained rationally that 18-year-olds in Texas have been able to own long guns (not hand guns) since frontier days while only in recent years have these mass shootings occurred in schools. That is true, but it is also true, as Governor Abbott added, that there are currently many reports of a burgeoning mental health crisis among young people that did not exist a hundred years ago. Why does it exist now?

After both stories dominated the news media, I reached out to our friend, Pornchai Moontri in Thailand. I knew that when he learned of these accounts, he might relate them to his own offense at age 18 at a supermarket in Bangor, Maine 30 years ago. During a parking lot struggle with a much larger man, 18-year-old Pornchai killed him. It happened on March 21, 1992. Pornchai never saw freedom again until almost 30 years later.

The major difference between that incident and the two young assailants in Buffalo and Uvalde is that Pornchai never set out to harm anyone that day or on any day. He carried a knife for self-protection. Having been torn from a rural village in Thailand at age 11, Pornchai was abused and tormented in Bangor, Maine until he escaped into homelessness on the streets of a foreign country. As the only Asian in town, he was often the subject of racial hatred, hunted by a Bangor street gang.

Most people who read this blog know Pornchai’s story. It is told in multiple places, but the best source is a widely read article at Linkedin. If you read it, you may wonder, as many already have, how one young man could endure so much and ever trust life again. The article is “Human Trafficking: Thailand to America and a Cold Case in Guam.”

In the Absence of Fathers

When I asked Pornchai for his thoughts about what might have driven 18-year-old Salvatore Ramos to this end, he put his response in the first person:

“I didn’t care about anyone; and then someone cared about me. If I did not find God, and you, and acceptance, and Divine Mercy, I might have stayed on a road to destruction. It was all I knew or expected. Hatred left me when something came along to replace it. Do you remember your Elephants post? It makes total sense. The one thing missing from my life and the lives of those two kids in America was a father. Without one, a decent one, a kid is at the mercy of dark forces and his mind just breaks.”

The “Elephants post” that Pornchai referred to was a Fathers Day post I wrote in this same week in 2012. It was a huge eye-opener for many people and began a serious discussion about the crisis of father absence in our time and the retreat of good men from engagement in the public square. The post was “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.”

It is interesting that, ten years after writing it, that post began appearing in search engines all over the United States just hours after news struck about the horror in Uvalde, Texas. I had also made the same connection and decided that I would share that post anew on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. When our editor looked at traffic reports that day, even before we shared it, the post was showing up everywhere.

Despite the story and research covered in that post being suppressed in our agenda-driven mainstream ne ws media, people instinctively know the truth of it. There are two factors, both speaking loudly and clearly, about the burgeoning mental health crisis among the young that is now clearly evident in our culture. Those two factors are the growing and spreading of fathers from the lives of struggling young men and the diminishment of faith and hope as our culture separates itself from God. Along with this, incidents of violence and other criminal behavior among young men have increased 1,000 fold in two decades, and deaths by suicide and accidental opioid overdose are now the number one killers of young men ages 15 to 30.

I live with many who live without hope. For year after year, this prison sees a steady stream of lost, fatherless young men trapped in adolescence and unable to developmentally move on. They are 35 going on 12 emotionally, they suffer from panic attacks and other critical anxiety states, and they are subject to fits of overwhelming emotion. Over ninety percent of them grew up in the care of single mothers with absent fathers. The steady stream of social weapons aimed at men in recent decades — such as the #MeToo movement — has further diminished manhood and, by extension, fatherhood.

In the Name of the Father

Once God and Fatherhood are cast aside, only the feminine remains. That may sound great for the causes of radical feminism, but in the psyches of young men it wreaks havoc and chaos when coupled with the diminishment of fatherhood. The results are all around us: a marked increase in transgender ideology and great political pressure to embrace it, chronic gender confusion, identity confusion, self-medicating drug abuse, and the breakdown of identity and self-awareness. The great psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson predicted that adolescence cannot end until the crisis of identity is resolved. Our culture has extended that crisis to engulf a lifetime.

Before the election of 2020, then nominee Joe Biden said in a news conference “if an eight-year-old boy wakes up one morning and wants to be a girl, he should be given all the tools and medical support necessary and parents should have no say in it.”

That is not verbatim, but it is the context and content of what was said. Media heads were bobbing as they took notes.

Dr. Paul McHugh, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center and a widely recognized expert in this field, has stated that most transgender people suffer from a mental disorder and the idea of sex reassignment is simply mistaken — and leaves much psychological damage in its wake. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is now finalizing plans to require transgender treatment under healthcare plans. Catholic League President Bill Donohue recently addressed this in “Transgender Mania Grips the White House.”

These developments have all come about as a natural result of removing God from the public square. One of the last bastions of faithful witness has been the Catholic Church, but the sexual abuse crisis, though in too many ways real, was also hyped and manipulated to remove a Catholic voice from public discourse on moral issues. Gone also are the Boys Scouts of America. It is actually a hopeful sign that pro-abortion groups are attacking Catholic churches right now. It’s a sign that the Church is still perceived as being on the front line in the defense of life. Still, the eradication of God has made inroads that deeply affect young people and their ability to hope through hard times.

In a fine commentary by Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal, she added the obvious, that it is one thing for an 18-year-old to have a gun to shoot rattlers in the 18th Century. It is quite another to allow an 18-year-old to buy a military grade assault rifle in the middle of a mental health crisis. Some common sense and compromise are likely to eventually prevail, even in an election year. Ms. Noonan went on, however, to point to a far deeper crisis and contributing factor to such tragedy in a recent column, “Let Not Our Hearts Grow Numb,” (WSJ, May 28, 2022):

“I continue in a kind of puzzled awe at my friends who proceed through life without faith, who get up and go forward without it ... I tell the young, I have been alive for some years and this is the only true thing, that there is a God and he is good and you are here to know him, love him, and show your feeling through your work and how you live. That is the whole mysterious point. And the ridiculous story, the father, the virgin, the husband, the baby — it is all, amazingly, true, and the only true thing ... Consolation is not why you believe, but is a fact of belief and helps all who have it live in the world and withstand it.”

I share with Peggy Noonan the consolation that the good people of Uvalde, Texas at least have that. This is part of our collective crisis. Too many have been robbed of the consolation of faith because of the relentless progressive assault on faith over the last few decades.

And she is also right about the crisis of mental health among the young. Signs of it are reported everywhere, and it is much exacerbated by the government enforced Covid lockdowns of the last two years.

I admire Peggy Noonan also for her unapologetic faith the absence of which is also a crisis among the young. It is the most common prayer request I receive from parents — a hope that their teen and young adult children will return to faith. As mentioned a week ago in these pages, Saint Paul famously wrote that only three gifts have lasting value, Faith, Hope, and Love. To impart Love without also imparting Faith and Hope diminishes love as a shallow and empty affair.

Among the Refugees of Thailand

What happened in Uvalde deeply impacted me. It made me double down on my own commitment as a father to Pornchai Moontri — even as he now lives many thousands of miles from me. When I asked him if he could explain Salvatore Ramos, he said, “I didn't care about anyone either; then someone cared about me.” He talked at length about my post, “In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men.” Pornchai never knew his biological father, and then ended up in the hands of a sadistic abuser who did great harm to him mentally, spiritually and physically.

He vowed that he would never again be anyone’s victim and would never trust anyone again. When he finally took that chance, life fell back into place. Divine Providence steered the circumstances of our lives until they were on a collision course, and Pornchai courageously let me in.

Some readers have asked me what Pornchai is doing for work to support himself in Thailand. We are simply not there yet. American money goes a long way in Thailand so I manage to support Pornchai for just a small amount of money each month. A few good friends who understand that effort help me with it. I believe it is a necessity and I have dissuaded him from finding a menial job just to support himself right now. This is because I have a fully informed sense of what Pornchai has been through in life, of what others took from him.

So I have asked him to spend his time restoring his life by facing openly the traumas of his past without having to worry about where his next meal is coming from. He spends his days in learning, and when the need arises he spends whatever time is left assisting Father John Hung Le in caring for the Vietnamese refugees in Thailand.

This is of great importance. By caring for others, Pornchai is caring for himself just as the Father in his life taught him. That is why the photo below is so very special to me. In his last sixteen years here with me, at my urging, Pornchai sought the help of a therapist in the prison system to work through a lifetime of trauma and grief and loss. When the therapist saw the photo below, she said, “No one could have accomplished this but Gordon. No one else!”

I had little to do with it. It is God who directed this path. It required only sacrifice from me, and men need to be reminded that sacrifice is at the very heart of fatherhood.

+ + +

Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading this post with an open mind and heart, and for sharing it. It can only accomplish some good if others see it.

Please visit our SPECIAL EVENTS page and these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men

Human Trafficking: Thailand to America and a Cold Case in Guam

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

No Child Left Behind — Except in Afghanistan

+ + +