Friday, May 3, 2013

What's Your Price?

Recently, a pedestrian was struck and killed by a motorist in Indianapolis.  No one has come forward with information on the driver, who fled the scene, so reward money is piling up.

For me, this raises several questions.

What is the price of justice in our society?  That is, how much reward money must be pledged for someone who knows what happened to step forward and say so?

What is the price of betrayal?  That is, how much money does someone have to offer you for you to turn you back on family and friends that obviously, you won't rat out simply because it's the right thing to do?

And what is the damage to the heart that there is a price at all?  That is, what can you put your trust in?  Can you put your trust in justice?  Or in friends?  Or in family?  Or in trust itself?

Tough questions.

Which is why this story bothers me on so many levels.

There used to be integrity; I'm young enough to remember when that started to trail off.  Somebody somewhere knows the someone who hit this woman walking down the street, but there's no sense of absolute right any more and no commitment to justice.  It's not worth it to this person to come forward and tell what they know.

Who cares about a little old woman any more?

My heart breaks for justice.

And yet, this same person who would not come forward now might possibly consider coming forward when the purse gets big enough.  It's into the tens of thousands of dollars now, and I would be disappointed to see someone come forward.  There was a time in this world where you didn't do things because of what you could get out of them.  Now, we wait until we can suck every last benefit out of everything we do, and then we do what's "right" and call ourselves "noble."  It's despicable.  It's reprehensible.  

My heart breaks for our brokenness.

And there are people in this world who you can trust more with your confidence than with your conscience.  That troubles me.  It bothers me that we're looking for people who will have our backs when we do wrong instead of surrounding ourselves with people who will demand we make things right.  It's nice to have a good friend, and all, but how good of a friend is it who is willing to let you mess up - even mess up big - and get away with it?

My heart breaks for relationships.

I don't know what the answers are.  I'm just asking the questions today.  I am burdened for something upright in our world, and I long for the days gone by when such things seemed so much easier to come by.  I ache for the next generation, and I hope we are able to teach them something.

And I'm wondering what actual good we could do with all of the reward monies in the world if we could just do the right thing with them instead of using them to bribe other people to do the right thing.

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