Blue Lights and the Matters of Lives
Blue Lights Are a Sign of Difference
July 2016 has been a very difficult month, for any life of color. Furthermore, if you happen to belong to the police or autism communities, for whom blue lights hold special significance, there is even more of an urgent connection. The annihilation of any life, or any person of difference, or any person who “makes a difference,” is never easy to understand or reconcile.
Since we are all comprised of some type of colorful element, this makes the taking of black lives, blue lives, and any life a very critical issue to review.
Blue Lights and Black Lives Matter
There is plenty of hatred, prejudice, and blame to go around. So let’s put that aside for a moment to take an outsider’s look in at what is going on. As we hang our heads in grief, shake our heads in disbelief, and raise our voices in protest, it begins to dawn on us. We kill people out of hatred, fear, and any number of physical and divisive reasons.
Anyone who has ever wielded a weapon knows with that power comes great responsibility. It does not have to be a firearm. A knife or TASER has just much lethal force when misapplied as a gun does. Perhaps we have reached critical mass when we fail to recognize the preciousness of life, and when it can be removed so callously.
Frustration: Feeling Caught in the Middle
The most recent, sensationalized news story from Florida centered on the shooting of an adult male, laying on the ground with his hands up, within reach of another man. The other adult is a person with autism, and the first was his caretaker. He may as well have been his parent.
The only harm that came, by all reports, was from the police. The spin, by the police after the event, was that the officer was aiming to shoot the autistic man. Far be it from me to sound the warning bell of fruitlessness, but will any training ever get through to someone on the other end of a gun if they have in their head that a person with autism, or any other disability, deserves to be shot first?
May We All Find Balance
There is no justification for it. Sorry I missed the memo before having three children who are on the autism spectrum. If there was any inkling that “this” was the world into which they would be born, well…. Who knew?
Yet it falls to us all to find a solution, doesn’t it? The natural world always holds itself in a certain level of balance. We could look to nature for guidance; if nature itself was not so off-kilter thanks to man’s interference in the natural order. If we read the signs of nature and change correctly, we would know to embrace persons of difference. In the natural world, it is all good.
Rather than shoot-to-kill or shoot-first-ask-questions-later, the safer alternative stares at us from the trophy walls. There is no “evening out” or balance when loss occurs. Sure we can come to realize, often too late, what the right answer is. The scariest part is putting that kind of big change into action.
When Lives Are in the Balance
On a personal level, would I trust my son with light-it-up-blue autism or a ‘man in blue’ who walked into my house with a gun? Knowing either of them might serve to “protect” me, the deciding factor is the firearm–and its possible use against a loved one. So for me, the answer is an easy one.
We may even see a faint light ahead at the end of the long, dark tunnel. But at this point, it looks like that light could be blue. Do we take our chances in the dark or step out and take decisive action? Perhaps you would like to join with my fervent, daily mother’s prayer:
Heaven help my son if he ever steps outside.
