What Would Jesus Do?

It's hard to pin-point the moment that my disbelief really began. Like most who don't affiliate with a religion, it wasn't necessarily a specific moment as much as it was a series of moments in conjunction with my environment that lead me to where I am now. Having said that, I do remember moments in my childhood that shifted my paradigm. Small cracks in the veneer of my youthful suspensions of disbelief. The shooting massacre at Columbine occurred four days before my tenth birthday. It was a Tuesday and that night I remember my parents trying to explain what had happened in whatever way you explain something that horrible to a kid that age. Later that week, I remember sneaking into the TV room late one evening after my parents had gone to bed, I watched re-run news coverage and I just sat there; stunned, confused, and scared.

Colorado seemed physically very far away from my small town in Washington State, but the idea of a fellow student walking into my school and roaming the halls with weapons I’d only seen in the movies seemed very real. The weeks after that, daydreaming at my desk as my teacher gave a lesson on Lewis & Clark, I remember looking across the room at the small window on the door to our classroom. Shrouded by black hoods and trench coats, I could imagine those empty eyes peering through the window at me, plotting and hunting. I had wondered what the kids in that town in Colorado were doing. How were they going back to school? If I was feeling scared hundreds of miles away, how were the kids feeling who had actually heard the gunshots, and had actually seen the bloodshed?

To use a cliché, I don’t remember what I ate for breakfast this morning, but these kinds of moments I remember. I remember because they are so massively impactful, and that’s why 20 years later I can still not only recall the details, but I still get the same nausea I did back then, I still look out the closest window. I still get sad. I get angry. I feel hopeless, and I feel disappointed.

Now, in the years that followed, unbeknownst to be, these moments were shaping me, like they shape all of us. Watching news coverage of Timothy McVeigh being executed. Watching a plane fly into the World Trade Center as my mom frantically called my grandfather and I packed my bag for my second week of seventh grade. I remember as a freshman in high school, watching a fellow student cry upon hearing that her sibling had been killed in a war I didn’t really understand. Then, I remember seeing on Facebook, photos of kids I’d cut English class with holding assault rifles behind boulders in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan, and I wondered if maybe they’d be dead soon too.

I landed in Seattle at 18 and I remember thinking, THIS is my kind of city. The collective soul of the city seemed evolved. The ideals largely on a parallel line with my own. I spent much of the past decade intoxicated by the sweet liquor of local progression, proudly holding up my cities progressive victories like a flag waving proudly upon newly conquered soil.

The reason I tell you all of this is because while encompassed in the progressive bubble of the Northwest, I was not totally blind to the atrocities of my fellow human. Whether it be crooked politicians, or wall-street illusionists, terrorists from afar and of the homegrown variety. Despite my lack of religious affiliation, I often found myself asking a question that used to get tossed around those Sunday School services and youth group meetings.

What would Jesus do?

If Jesus had, “cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple,” what would he do if he walked onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange?

If Jesus said, “All who take the sword will perish by the sword,” what would he say if he heard the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre say that the right to bear arms was, and I’m quoting here, “granted by God to all Americans?”

If Jesus said, “If we treat a person with contempt, we are mistreating somebody in God’s image,” what would he have had to say to our forefathers who participated in genocide in order to acquire this land, and then in slavery to build it up? What would he say to people who have worked tirelessly and nefariously to strengthen the continued disenfranchisement and abuse of women and minorities?

I may not follow the word of the Bible, but I've always been able to appreciate some of the values that are written within it. The question I find myself asking most often nowadays is; how are we still so easily fooled by a wolf in sheep's clothing?