Good Samaritan, 2016 Edition

Note: I began this post in 2016, before the election, and before the Church came out with a truly inspired video that is a modern retelling of the story.

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I’ve been thinking about the parable of the Good Samaritan. If the Savior were telling it to us today, who would fill the role of the priest, the Levite, the wounded man, the Samaritan?

Maybe the priest would be a businessman well-known for his charity work, who is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at a conference beginning in less than an hour, and his alarm clock did not go off.

Maybe the Levite would be a popular preacher headed to that same conference, running late because not enough people had shown up to help feed the homeless at the local soup kitchen that morning, and he had stayed to help clean the kitchen.

Maybe the wounded man would be a Syrian refugee who lost his wife and children to mindless violence in his homeland and brought his broken heart to America, where he has been beaten and left for dead by thugs who use the xenophobic rantings of a talk show host [2019 - you could insert duly elected President here] as excuse to follow their basest impulses.

Maybe the Samaritan would be a transgender man or woman who understands all too well how it feels to be despised and feared as Other.

We tend to think, two thousand years after the fact, that were we in the same situation as the priest and the Levite, we would certainly stop and render aid.

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And that's where it ended in 2016. Now we have children in cages on the border and a Congress that can't or won't work together to fix the immigration system and get more judges to work with the backlog, and the kids are scared, and the ICE staff are overwhelmed, and Health and Human Services are overwhelmed, and liberals protested when a furniture company sold a bunch of mattresses that would make some of those kids a little more comfortable while we try to untangle this mess, and a Protestant figure whom I generally respect went down there with some other preachers, and they said the press was lying, and I'm thinking "Potemkin village" and I think my friend Alison's post on Facebook was brilliant. In short, every single Democratic contender for President in 2020 should troupe down to the border, camp out at one of the camps, refuse to use this for personal gain, and guilt the media into reporting the actual, verifiable truth.

I'm not a huge proponent of shame, which is why I said guilt. Guilt tends to produce positive action. Shame just increases the problems. (Brené Brown, I've been paying attention.)

I think I'm done ranting for the moment. Welcome to the 2019 update. It's been a good year for me, by and large, which only makes me more livid about the innocents who are not having a good year.