An evening of joy; a morning of tragedy: will we ever wake up?

Well, I can name a few things that won’t:

• More repressive governmental actions.
• More violence.
• More hatred.
• More walls.
• More isolationism.
• More, “I will take care of my own and I don’t care what happens to you.”
• More guns.
• More paranoia.
• More economic and societal inequality.

None of these have ever worked in the course of human history and none will work now.

We need more bridges, fewer fortresses.

We need more jobs, fewer prisons.

We need more hope, less hatred.

We need more “I will lay down my life for my enemy” theology and less “rapture me out of this mess” theology and .

We need more politicians saying, “I will actually do something for the good of our entire society across partisan lines, no matter what it costs me personally” and fewer politicians posturing about how great they are or how they predicted this tragedy.

The more I read and analyze what is happening, the more I conclude that societal forces that insist on a permanent underclass will eventually so crack our civic foundation that the entire edifice will come crumbling down.

I do not say: “get rid of the ridiculously rich.” Those uber-wealthy have a strong societal purpose and many use their enormous wealth for the common good. Again, history shows that bringing them down does not permanently solve this deep inequality.

I do say: one of the most basic of human needs is for personal dignity. And one of the most basic ways to create human dignity is to have work that satisfies the hands and makes provisions for a larger family grouping that includes safe spaces for the young and for the elderly.

Look again at the brilliant analysis of the human soul we find in Genesis. After the initial creation story, we see in Genesis 2:15 that the Lord God puts this newly formed earth creature in the center of the garden with the instructions to tend it.

Think about it: we are made to work, to “tend” our gardens. Anyone who gardens knows the deep satisfaction that comes from “tending” it. We look at the work of our hands and say, “It is good.” From this work, we reflect most fully what it means to be made in the image of God: we create.

That’s what work is: doing something ultimately creative with our hands, minds and souls. Societies that deny ways for people to work in a way that builds human dignity doom themselves to chaos and violence.

To return to the horrors of the Dallas tragedy: they didn’t emerge from a vacuum. They emerged from too many years of hopelessness, too much hype for violence, hate and division as solutions, and too much systematic stripping of human dignity for the most oppressed of society.

Do we really want to do something about this? Then we need to remember to actually take care of the least among us in a way that offers dignity, not disgrace.

• We must do something about the disastrous state of education in our inner-city schools.
• We must provide absolutely top-class day care for all who need it, particularly single mothers. We need this far more than we need free tuition to universities. Without a good start in the earliest of infancy, higher education is useless.
• We’ve got to figure out a way to manage health-care so it is actually affordable and accessible. Poor health, especially when caused by poor diets, so strain the body and soul that the achievement of any sense of hope in anything is nearly impossible.
• And we need churches filled with motivated individuals who understand basic economics, who are willing to do mission that is less, “I will come and build something for you” and more, “let me listen to you and learn your world so we can figure out what you need and how we can tap into your creative energies to make it happen.”

In the meantime, let us weep together over yet one more set of senseless killings, more sets of grieving families, more societal splits, more fomenting of hatred that poisons our national soul.