“Sage Advice”          August 19, 2018               Dr. Roger Ray                      

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Proverbs 9:1-6
1 Wisdom has built her house, she has hewn her seven pillars.
2 She has slaughtered her animals, she has mixed her wine, she has also set her table. 3 She has sent out her servant girls, she calls from the highest places in the town,  4 "You that are simple, turn in here!" To those without sense she says, 5 "Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. 6 Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight."

I have spent a number of nervous hours sitting in court rooms with families who came to witness their sons being condemned to long sentences in federal prisons for the crime of having viewed child pornography on the computers in their bedrooms. Most of these young men were either bi-polar or on the autism spectrum; mental conditions which affected their impulse control, socialization, and decision making.

And yet I have heard prosecutors passionately pleading that the defendants’ mental condition should not be considered. I have heard prosecutors call these young men “animals” and “dogs” who deserved 15 and 25 years in prison. Once, when a mother was overcome with grief at the vicious words of the state’s attorney, and involuntarily let out a gasp, the lawyer turned and pointed to the parents and said, “I would have the parents serving in prison with him if I could for allowing this to happen.”

I’m not defending what they did nor am I in any way defending actual sex offenders, but these young men had never had sex with anyone, never touched a child, never paid for or produced pornography. They allowed their libidinal curiosity to lead them down a bad path and they are paying a heavy price for it with half or more of their adult lives in prison and when they get out, they will still be felons with very limited job opportunities and even very few places where they can legally live.

Compare that with a conversation our current president had with Howard Stern on a 2005 radio show in which he bragged about walking in to the dressing room of underaged beauty contestants in order to see them naked. He said: “Before a show, I’ll go backstage and everyone’s getting dressed, and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it,” he said. “You know, I’m inspecting because I want to make sure that everything is good.”

“You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. . . And you see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that.”

Folks, there are a 100,000 men in prison right now who have committed sex crimes that, in any rational context, are not as egregious as what Donald Trump not only confessed to doing but bragged about doing. I would even go so far as to speculate that many of those 100,000 men, in spite of their mental health issues and crimes, would be better presidents than Donald Trump will ever be . . . but that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong. 

We Americans like to think that our judicial system, despite all of its flaws, is better than the judicial system in most other countries. We’re America, right? But if our judicial system is better than other countries, then why is our incarceration rate so high?

The hard truth is that our political and judicial systems are corrupt. They are not a little bit corrupt, they are profoundly corrupt. Why is Donald Trump in the White House and 2 million people who have committed fewer and less serious crimes than he has are in prisons and jails and on parole all over this nation?

For the benefit of our podcast listeners who don’t see the pictures, may I ask you to just say it out loud? And not a small amount of money either.

Our system is corrupt in several ways. Clearly, brown and black people walk into a courtroom with a serious disadvantage over white defendants. But of the people whom I personally know who are in Federal prisons for sex offenses, they are all white men from middle class families. One family literally wiped out all of their assets and spent more than $100,000 in defense of their son and it did not make one day of difference in the sentence he received. In this universe, a $100,000 is not big money. 

There was a story in our local paper last week about a 75 year old man in Branson who was found guilty of possessing child pornography. William Walker had more than 174,000 images of children and nearly 5000 videos depicting children as young as 5 years old engaging in sex acts. But he is a friend of local billionaire, Pete Herschend, and he says that he has received treatment at our local “Six Flags over Jesus” church, James River Assembly of God, and the judge, my old friend, Doug Harpool, sentenced him to only 5 years in prison.

Now, I wrote to Doug earlier this year on behalf of a 19 year old man with Asperger’s who didn’t have 1% of that much porn in his possession but Doug said that due to mandatory minimum sentencing, that this kid had to go to prison for 15 years. The reason Judge Harpool gave in this newspaper report for this short sentence was in consideration of the age of the defendant. But I wrote to Judge Harpool last spring about an 80 year old man who was appearing before him on a charge of growing marijuana. This man had been in the country jail for three years, was horribly ill, and should have been released but, though he said that he hated it, Judge Harpool told the media that he had to follow the minimum sentencing guidelines and he sent this sick old man to a federal prison for more years than he could possibly live.

Apparently, letters from me don’t mean much to Judge Harpool and though he says that the age of the defendant in the sex offender case mattered, it sure didn’t matter in the case of the old marijuana farmer. Could it be having a billionaire friend?

It’s the money, isn’t it?

I guess that the law doesn’t apply to you if Pete Herschend shows up in court to say that you are a good guy. I’m not saying that Walker should be in prison longer than 5 years. I’m not sure that there is much to learn after a year or two of a prison sentence; but I think that young men with legitimate mental handicaps should get more consideration than a man who just happens to have billionaire friends. Oh, and getting treatment in a church where the pastors and the members think that they can speak in the language of angels is not legitimate treatment…. If you think that angels exist and that you can magically speak in their language, you need to be in treatment, you don’t need to be giving counseling to anyone else.  Again, that’s just my opinion,… I could be wrong.

I could talk all day about corruption in our judicial system but it really isn’t just that. Folks, I have sat in the board room at Cox Hospital where plaques on the wall declare that they are a non-profit Christian medical facility, and had to listen to conversations about incorporating their insurance company off shore in the Caribbean to avoid American oversight of how they leverage non-profit assets to create a for-profit insurance company, and I looked around the table at local business owners who had made themselves millionaires by awarding themselves contracts for services to the hospital without even having to go through a bidding process. 

If you steal a loaf of bread at the local market to feed your hungry children, you are likely to be arrested and charged with shop lifting. If you unethically take hundreds of millions of dollars out of a local hospital they will name a wing after you and put your statue up in the entryway. 

And if you commit multiple sex crimes against teenaged girls, you might get to be the next president of the United States if you are rich enough. 

Our politicians are largely controlled by their super wealthy political donors. Our court system is corrupted by decisions made based on race, class, political connections, and whose palms get greased in the process. Our healthcare system, our penal system, and even the Federal Communications Commission, are organized to serve the wealthy and the powerful and most of the rest of us are just the serfs who serve the financial interests of the .1%. 

The number one thing in my job description is to stand up in public and tell the truth. Not just any truth, but the truths that our oppressors do not want said. So, if you couldn’t tell already, I showed up for work today. But I have not said anything that most of you don’t know and feel every day. The world is unjust and the rich have a wholly unfair advantage over the rest of us. And maybe everything I have said today leads up to a case for a revolution in this country.

But I want to take you back to that courthouse hallway for a moment. As I said, I have spent a lot of hours sitting with families, often times with church members, waiting for their time in court. It gets crowded and you can’t help but hear the complaints of people who are there for drunk driving charges, for drug possession and sales charges, for domestic violence, and more than anything else, divorce and child custody battles. 

A local attorney told me that 90 cents of every $1 paid to a lawyer in Greene County is paid for work on family issues: domestic violence, divorce, or child custody cases. That’s a lot of money, and, I will argue, money that we should avoid getting ourselves into a situation where we have to pay those bills.

I don’t want to make light of this in any way but do you remember that old 1970’s show, “Hee Haw” with the doctor who, when you told him, “Hey doc, I broke my arm in three places,” he would hit the patient with a rubber chicken and yell, “Well then stay out of those places!”

Again, I am the last person on earth who wants to make light of this topic, or to blame the victims, or to be dismissive of corruption in government, corporations, health care, or the judiciary, but I will say that it is possible to live in a way that generally avoids putting your children’s future into the hands of an indifferent judge.

I am sure that you have also heard black fathers talking about the “talk” that they have with their sons these days, giving them painful but important advice about what it means to be black in America, what it means when police lights come on behind you . . . when holding your hands up in the air can still get you shot, when submitting peacefully to arrest can get you shot, when simply being put into a police van can get you killed, or you can be beaten to death in a police station. 

The talk is not an acquiescence to an unjust world. It is not acceptance or surrender, but it is a talk about survival. Ours is a racially diverse but still majority white congregation just as our community is still about 95% white, so most of the people that I go to court with are not minorities, still, the injustice in America is not just racial, it is also economic, it is a class division, so consider this to be my “talk” with black, brown, and white people. Do what you can to avoid confrontations with the police. Try to stay out of court. Do not assume that the healthcare system or American democracy will save you. In fact, it is best to assume that it will not.

Prison sentences for drug abuse is just wrong. Addicts need treatment, not punishment. Still, avoid buying, using, or selling heroin, meth, or fentanyl . . . please. Family court in divorce and child custody cases can be insane, but please, strive to avoid living with, marrying, or having children with abusive or unstable partners. And for goodness sake, don’t drink and drive. There are websites you can look at on your smart phone in which you enter your age, gender, and weight and how much you have had to drink, and it will tell you if you need to call an Uber. This doesn’t have to lead to a disastrous abdication of your rights and freedom. Addiction tends to get worse. Alcoholism is a progressive disease. Spouse abuse tends to get worse and often ends in murder. Porn addictions tend to get worse. Don’t give in, get help, not at James River, of course, but you know what I mean. 

I realize that you may think that I am entirely ignoring our wisdom lesson today but honestly, it is all related. I don’t often defer to the Jewish and Christian scriptures these days, but I took our wisdom lesson from the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, the book of Proverbs.

If you read Proverbs the way that they were written, not as words from God written by a divine finger, but more as sage wisdom passed on from an experienced wise person to a new generation, then what you find there is just advice about how to live a decent life. You always have to qualify that with being advice from a culture that is removed from ours by both continents and dozens of centuries, but still, a lot of it is basically a very humanist look at how to live to keep yourself out of the clutches of a corrupt government, judicial system or health care system.

The writer of Proverbs personifies wisdom as a woman who is literally calling out to those who are tempted to follow a wayward path towards drug or alcohol abuse, pornography, or a host of unhealthy habits which can be said to be eating too much junk food, not exercising enough, and not physically taking care of yourself, so wisdom calls out to the foolish to come home and have dinner and act like a grown up. 

I want prison reform. I want judicial reform. But until we get that, I want you to stay out of the court house. I want a massively better program of addiction and alcohol treatment programs in this country but we don’t have that right now so I am forced to quote my elementary school counselor, Mr. Mackey, 

Drugs are bad, so don’t do drugs, mkay?

I understand that most people use drugs and alcohol to self-medicate and, believe me, since the November election in 2016, we’ve all had reason to reach for the anesthesia. No one follows their curiosity up stream to look at illegal porn in order to become an addict who one day has their house surrounded by a SWAT team that breaks down your doors and takes all of your computers, tablets and smart phones but I can tell you that it happens thousands of times every year. It is not a path you want to go down. 

What often starts as a celebration with friends, or a needed release from bad news, ends up in a jail cell. Addictions tend to escalate but the good news is that there is a program that can restore you to sanity and their meetings are free and open to anyone who wants to leave crazy town. Just live in a way so that you stay out of the back seat of a police cruiser or the hallway outside of a courtroom. 

No one is perfect, and everyone makes mistakes. When you are in trouble you know that I will be on your side but before we get to that point, let me tell you, the justice system is corrupt, the penal system is insane, and non-profit hospitals will take everything you own under the guise of helping you. We want to work together to make the world a better place but recognizing the serious holes in the fabric of society, please, live in a way that does not surrender your freedom to the whims of lawyers, judges, and insurance executives. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh7l8dx-h8M