"Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Come on talk to me
So you can see
What's going on"
youtu.be/TrKi67UsaFw?...

for compassion in our dealings with one another, for anything that will help all of us realize the fullness of life’s possibilities.(Parker Palmer)

Amen!

If we could all learn that lesson, in the words of Louie Armstrong, "what a wonderful world it would be."

This doesn't diminish the wrong committed by those who do evil, but it does blind us to the humanity of the perpetrator. Jesus didn't yield to that temptation even when he was dying on the cross. He asked God to "forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”

It's easy and convenient for us to impose our own theories as to why people do certain things or act in certain ways. If we're honest with ourselves, we are often projecting our own feelings and failings onto others.

We all need to change our disposition - our mindset - from one of hating the other to one of love of neighbor. The reality is that we can only change ourselves, so we have to work on us rather than them if we want to change the course we are on in this nation.

Love is not a distant point at which we aim with the expectation that one day we will arrive at it and then live happily ever after. Instead, love functions as a goal by directing all our day-to-day actions, even the little ones." (Roberta Bondi, To Love As God Loves)

To our monastic ancestors, love can be our goal only in so far as it is a disposition, a whole way of being, feeling, seeing and understanding, at which we arrive by a combination of God's grace, our awareness of what we want, and our own choices, which we make every day of our lives.

...and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means."
(Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays)

But, you can't ignore the hypocrisy here. The AG is considering felony assault charges for throwing a sandwich while the insurrectionists who brutally assaulted Capital Police officers have been pardoned, lauded, and even hired by this regime

feed their families, that all have access to affordable and excellent healthcare, that all live in housing that is safe and affordable." (Rev. Terri Hord Owens, Staying at the Table)