S & H Green Stamps or Blue Chip Stamps, anyone old enough to have lived it, will remember those days. Receive so many stamps for your purchases in participating stores, collect and paste them in a booklet provided just for that purpose, add them up, and Walla! You’re ready to redeem. Take them to your local S & H or Blue Chip redemption store and exchange these stamps for actual goods: toasters, toys, games, lamps, children’s books, and so-on and so forth. Worthless anywhere else, useless for any other purpose, you could go to a redemption outlet and use these stamps to redeem any item on display or in their catalog, providing you had the required amount of stamps on hand. That of course was the catch. The most valued redeemable items required many hundreds, even thousands of stamps for the exchange. One had to do a lot of stamp collecting in order to redeem the nicer things.
“Redemption,” to “redeem,” do we hear these words very much anymore? To redeem something is to rescue, deliver, or salvage it from bondage or capture—for a price! It also carries the idea of re-purchasing (buying back) something of great value that was sold reluctantly, out of necessity as in most pawn-shop transactions. By extension, the word also includes the idea of renewing, repairing, or restoring something, making it useful again or making something old like new again, giving back new-life.
It’s a good word. It speaks of restoring lost value, getting back what was considered lost, releasing what was held captive or held in ransom. But redemption is never free, indeed, can often be quite costly even. And so the item, the thing being redeemed, is also viewed as worth the cost; it is that valuable. Thus, the word is commonly used in Christianity for describing the work of Christ for humanity: He redeemed us, bought us with a price (His life) by dying on the cross to free us from our guilt, delivering us from our sin.
But today we live in a throw-away society. We often find that it is cheaper to buy-new than to re-new. Things are generally no longer worth “redeeming.” Repairing or fixing old and used, worn-out items is now often far more costly than purchasing a brand-new replacement. It’s just no longer worth it. The trouble is that we have extended this “throw it away, it’s not worth saving” mentality to our fellow human beings!
“Lock them up and throw away the key,” is what we say about criminals. Mandatory sentencing, take the decision out of the hands of the judges and funnel all cases through the same set of rules, no exceptions, no qualifiers, no modifiers, no more chances. In short, throw them away! As in, “they are irredeemable, not worth saving, recovering, or restoring.
This kind of attitude is why our prison population continues to increase, and why we continue to require the building of newer and larger prisons, and why it is that in a cost-cutting political and governmental environment our State government here in PA is cutting everything, everything BUT the revenue that goes to pay for the maintenance and expansion of our State Correctional Institutions. Our prison costs go up and up and we taxpayers pay it without question, while our lawmakers scale down all other “unnecessary” (?) expenditures like educational costs. Apparently we no longer believe that these men and women in prison are redeemable or that it is worth the cost to redeem them!
Yet, the majority of incarcerated people within our prison system are there as a result of addictive behavior related to drugs and alcohol and other types of addictive substances. If we thought these lives were valuable and therefore worth the cost, we’d funnel money into prevention care and/or redirection and recovery care. The fact is that if we were to spend good money on recovery and renewal instead of imprisoning them, it would not only save us a lot of money—the cost of housing addicts in our State Prison System is far, far more expensive than rehabilitative and prevention care—we’d also be saving/redeeming lives.
Our habit of voting and our government policy on crime virtually says this: “It is better to spend and waste a lot of money locking up ‘users’ and ‘addicts’ time and time again, than it is to spend far less money on rehabilitating them by focusing on redeeming them from their addictive behavior.”
This is sad, especially when one considers that the majority of Americans believe in God and most Americans identify with the Christian faith. It is Christianity that teaches us the great hope and value of redeeming humanity. When it comes to human beings, it is a waste NOT to redeem. Human Beings are, and always have been, worth the cost of redemption.
Ignoring their need, throwing them away, assuming that they are irredeemable and thus dehumanizing them, is not only a great waste of human lives but is always far more costly to society as a whole and has far more deadly consequences in the long run. And when it comes down to it, which one of us has never needed the precious act of redemption in our own life?
No comments:
Post a Comment