Search This Blog

Headline News---Reflections and Sermons Blog

Thursday, December 24, 2009

When things don't Add up: When the Facts don't Matter: Reflection

Recently while watching a football game, I noticed that the audio track from a certain popular channel just did not match the video---boy did that ruin the game for me. Nothing like being a little delayed to rattle the enjoyment. When things just do not match up...there is a real sense of things being wrong somehow....things need to mesh to make sense in our lives.

Recently, in the political arena, something similar has occured.

There was a theft from a local school district that was discovered in July. Revealed to the public in November. Always need a little delay to model Edward Kennedy and Tiger Woods I presume. The theft was not revealed to local law enforcement it seems, no need to follow proper procedure, but sent directly to the DA, where it seems that the person confessed to $100,000 of theft, while in the alternative pleading "not guilty." We never really plead these days, but plead in the multiple alternative. Right at that point of the story, I hear the sound track going off the road.

But relax...it gets better. The person involved supposedly had a gambling addiction and a $200,000 gambling debt---but not one person, even the DA it seems, worried in the least of where the other $100,000 was. The school that had been stolen from reviewed two years of accounting and then declined to go further in history. They presumably felt so bad about the incident that they did not want to really know the facts...and well,....maybe the DA feels so bad that he does not want to know either.

And that is where we are today---in a place where the FACTS and the LAW do not matter....just the POLITICS and how we FEEL seems to be important.

As I see it there are two phases---determination of facts---as in the old Dragnet movie, the "facts and nothing but the facts" and then in a separate judicial section, the clemency or sentencing. The facts come before the sentencing...at least that is the way the texts teach it.

To do otherwise is to run the car off the tracks, or run the TV with the audio track off kilter---we have run amuck. That is how I see it.

No comments: