Michael Brown's Eulogy: "This Is About Justice, This Is About Fairness"

This is about justice, this is about fairness. And America is going to have to come to terms with: there's something wrong. That we have money to give military equipment to police forces, but we don't have money for training and money for public education and money to train our children. 

How do you think we look when young people march non-violently asking for the land of the free and the home of the brave to hear their cry, and you put snipers on the roof and pointed guns at them? ~ Rev. Al Sharpton eulogizing Michael Brown 

For me, it is impossible to watch the video at the head of the posting and not hear ringing through it that insistent, plaintive call of the psalms and prophets, "God hears the cries of the poor." That refrain, which runs so powerfully through the Jewish and Christian scriptures, is not only about rooting the appeal for justice in the very nature and heart of God.

It's also about crying out for justice over and over again, in a fragmented, cruel world that over and over again denies justice to those treated as non-persons. To deny justice to the non-person is to deny God, the scriptures insist.

But if God is anything at all, God is the One who will not be denied — not as long as the cry for justice goes up unrelentingly from those crushed by the imperious, the callous, the wielders of power and definers of everyone beneath them. Who imagine themselves in the place of God to their extreme peril . . . .