When you grow up LCMS, you memorize scripture, such as this one:
“You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth.
“You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.
And that’s the sort of verse that’s trotted out to say, “see, the God of the Bible is just as evil as the God of Islam,” along with stories of Joshua and his army killing the people of Jericho.
But the Tribune featured yesterday an extended report on the life of Laquan McDonald, which if nothing else reminds us that the punishment of the next generation is not God’s doing at all, but simply the consequence of sin. (Click here for a google-search hit.)
Should Laquan McDonald have been shot by Jason Van Dyke? No, of course not, presuming that the facts are as they appear to be, that the teen was no immediate threat to the police, since he was running away, and that Van Dyke didn’t perceive him to be a threat to others, either, but was just angry. But the fact remains that the teen was high on PCP, and was burglarizing cars and slashing tires, when he was confronted by the police.
The teen had a long history of arrests, stays in detention, probation, mental health diagnoses and treatment (though he rejected medication), a daily pot habit funded by drug dealing, truancy, and school suspensions beginning with throwing a chair at a teacher in 4th grade. Yet, the Tribune reports, ” There was something about McDonald, it appeared, that made people want to give him another chance” — including, shortly before his death, release from detention, despite multiple reprimands for fighting, and enrollment in an alternative high school.
He never knew his father.
His mother was 14 when she got pregnant, and by the time she lost custody of him for the first time, when he was three, she’d had a second child as well. He lived with his great-grandmother from age 5, except for a few further stays at foster homes, during one of which he reported abuse, leading to his return back to his great-grandmother. (The timeline’s a bit unclear on this point: was he old enough to understand that a claim of abuse would return him back to his great-grandmother?)
And his mother? She herself was in foster care when she got pregnant: “The state took her into protective custody months earlier because of a caregiver’s drug problems,” the article reports, which implies that even prior to this point, she was living with some guardian or another, not her own mother. And nowhere further in the story does McDonald’s grandmother appear.
The great-grandmother, on the other hand, is described as the family matriarch:
Goldie Hunter was a retired laborer and widow with a seventh-grade education who managed to care for at least 12 children, some her own and others from the family’s later generations, including her great-grandson.
which certainly suggests, though without further details, that there were more troubles in this extended family. And, though one imagines that Goldie Hunter did her best, a 78-year old (her age at her death in 2013) cannot be expected to respond to a teen like McDonald.
Now, all the adults in the story, cited in various court documents, expressed hope that he would turn his life around, and blamed trauma, PTSD, and the like for his troubles. And I’m not going to speculate on the question of when a person, living the life he lived, has to be held to account, or what the right way of “fixing” such a teen is, particularly if he doesn’t want to change.
But is story is not one that can be told in isolation. The well-meaning great-grandmother aside, the iniquities of the fathers (and mothers) were visited on the children, and on the third generation.
I don’t write about this much, not out of indifference, but because I simply don’t have any answers to offer, so this is mostly offered as a discussion-starter. Thoughts?
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