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An act of grace and tolerance seldom seen in an American courtroom.

American courtrooms are generally viewed as places of accountability but more often than not are places of vengeance, misconduct, and sometimes even bald-faced injustice.

But this week a courtroom in Dallas, Texas witnessed the brother of a murder victim give the former police officer charged with the murder a hug of forgiveness.

That hug is probably why the jury sentenced Amber Guyger to ten years rather than the harsher minimum of 28 years demanded by the prosecution.

It is easier to forget than forgive. People find all sorts of ways to bury in the recesses of their mind the very worst things done to them by other people.

But wounded people find it difficult, if not impossible, to forgive, to contain the bile of hatred that demands revenge.

When Brandt Jean asked Judge Tammy Kemp from the witness stand if he could give Amber Guyger a hug, he did so against the primal instinct to demand revenge instead.

It was an act of remarkable courage by Brandt Jean—a gesture badly needed at a time when Americans are polarized with racial division and even racial hatred among the ranks of too many people who have bought into the “white nationalism” social philosophy.

Some people are upset about the lenient 10-year sentence Guyger received.

Judges and jurors across the country are asked each day to consider the feelings of the victims of crime, especially violent crime.

That’s precisely what the Dallas jury did in the Amber Guyger case—and it did so without revenge in mind.

Revenge for the sake of revenge never produces justice.

The killing of Botham Jean in his own apartment last year was a tragedy. His death demanded accountability. Amber Guyger’s jury provided some accountability with its murder conviction and sentence.

Was it enough accountability?

Each person will have to decide that based on their own life experiences.

I will not second-guess the jury’s sentencing decision.

Ten years may seem a lenient sentence (and it is), but it is a long time for an ex-police officer, especially a female, to spend in an intolerant and unforgiving prison society. The very insidious nature of the prison experience will cause Guyger to endure more consequences than the average inmate.

That was the name of the penal health care provider before it changed its name to Wellpath.

According to a recent CNN investigative report by Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken, the medical delivery service, now owned by a multi-billion dollae investment firm, has government contracts to provide healthcare services to inmates in roughly 500 penal facilities across 34 states.

Outsourced medical services to penal facilities are much like private, for-profit prisons: corrupt, negligent, incompetent, and worst of all, totally unconcerned about the lives and general well-being of the inmates they are charged with caring for.

The American prison population is aging, creating a demand for more sophisticated health care services that for-profit companies are not willing to provide under any circumstances.

For-profit penal health care providers, especially those facilities operated by for-profit corporations, do not view inmates as human beings, rather as defective, sub-human specimens state and federal governments have delivered to them to cage and control.

The level of corruption and violence in for-profit prisons is staggering when compared to government run penal facilities. And the level of incompetence, indifference, and malpractice with for-profit medical delivery systems in penal facilities is just as overwhelming.

Profit does not care one plug nickel about humanity, especially a humanity disowned by organized society. Profit serves one purpose: more profit fueled by the demands of greed. People who worship at the altar of profit are basically worthless motherfuckers incapable of caring about humanity.

That’s why the for-profit prisons and for-profit penal healthcare providers hire the dregs in their respective professions. Most guards in for-profit prisons and penal health care providers, whether nurses or doctors, cannot find gainful employment in government run facilities or in the general community.

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of lawsuits pending in state and federal courts against these for-profit companies because of abuses and neglect of the inmates they are paid to care for.

Virtually all of the inmate lawsuits and administrative grievances will go unheard by the courts and penal administrators, just as the screams for help by inmates in cellblocks suffering from midnight guard beatings or chronic medical conditions will go unheard.

“They are killing me in here” will find no sympathetic ear, either in prison or outside of prison.

Fyodor Dostoevsky once wrote that, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”

NBC News anchor Lester Holt recently spent three days in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola. He found the prison to be clean and as peaceful as one could expect for such a facility.

If Lester wants to know the “degree of civilization” in our society, he should embed himself in a for-profit prison for three days in any state in this country. He would quickly come to believe he was living in the Dark Ages.

If you truly want to know the quality of a for-profit prison, just stand outside the facility during shift change. The guards are generally obese, unkempt, whining about one thing or another, and sharing crude, rude racist/sexist/homophobic points of view with each other. They hate the workplaces they are entering or leaving.

And thousands of inmates pay dearly on a daily basis because of the guards’ dissatisfaction with everything about their miserable lives.

It is said to be that quality in the human race that gives humans the capacity to love, be compassionate, be charitable, be kind and giving, and extend unconditional support to each and every human being on Earth.

But what man has in reality is the ability to use the written word, regardless of the language, to express what they would like humanity to be, all the while knowing that humanity does not get better, only worse as time relentlessly marches toward the ultimate calamity.

This is why man creates a make-believe humanity through great pieces of literature and poems and religions just to have the ability to cope with real humanity on a daily basis.

Take, for example, a CNN report today about parents in a rural area in India who buried their four-day old baby girl alive in an isolated grave because they wanted a son. Parents in India prefer sons over daughters so many times they bury unwanted baby girls alive in unmarked graves. Fortunately, the cries of this baby girl, who had been in the grave for roughly six hours, were heard by passing villagers who rescued her. Weighing just 3.3 pounds, she is now fighting for life in the ICU of an area hospital.

Then there is the report several days ago about the Sussex County, New Jersey man who terrorized his neighbors because they would not let him have sex with their farm animals, most preferably their horses and cows. A British news report in 2017 referred to these kinds of people as “zoophiles.”

And then there is today’s report about the three assisted living facility workers who forced elderly patients with dementia to fight each other as part of their “Dementia Fight Club.” Investigators discovered one filmed staged fight between two elderly females, a 70-year-old and a 73-year-old, who were encouraged to hurt each other by the charged trio. In another filmed fight, an elderly woman being forced to fight is heard begging, “Let go, help me, help me, let go.”

Self-described humanitarians will rush to the defense of humanity, saying these are aberrations in human behavior.

Really?

Just watch the local and national news each day which features one report after another of man’s inhumanity to man through wars, atrocities, poverty, starvation, mass human displacement, crimes, schemes, frauds, and that is just touching the surface of the inhumanity barrel.

It is both ironical and paradoxical that prior to national news reports about “Inspiring America” or “America Strong” we must watch an SPCA commercial showing terribly abused, beaten, starved, neglected and abandoned animals by human beings.

Humans are destroying each other at a record pace while they engage in unchecked activities deliberately designed to destroy all life itself on this Earth.

But I have faith in the Earth. Nature will eventually intervene with a plague or some catastrophic war that will virtually wipe out all of humanity.

And perhaps, just perhaps, peace and goodness—the kind the Earth knew before humans polluted it with their “humanity”—may return to the natural existence of life.

This is the New Normal term cult leaders and followers use to discredit their detractors. The term parallels other favorite cult terms like “traitors,” “spies,” and “rats.”

It is no coincidence that the term in movie-land is used by robots to describe the humans they are trying to eliminate.

The literal use of the human scum term represents one person’s deep-seeded hatred and disgust with anyone who dares to question their actions, beliefs or motives. Human scum name callers believe they are the best, most superior, and most powerful of all humans. Their entitlement to hate and their privilege to express revulsion toward others makes them feel good, righteous, and even religious.

And it should not be surprising that the human scum name callers in this country offer up bombastic praise for world leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korea Supreme Leader Kim Jung Un, and Turkey President Recep Erdogan—all three of whom murder, assassinate, imprison, and torture those who dare speak against their corrupt authoritarian rule. These three leaders are in the top ten of human rights violators.

Put it this way: these murderous dictatorial thugs are now considered by many to be better than the “human scum” who dare question the political leadership in this country.

Americans throughout the history of this nation have coined derogatory terms to dehumanize racial and ethnic groups they hated. Most of those terms have fallen into social disfavor and are now spoken mostly on Bubba’s front porch or in the privacy of group gatherings where birds of a feather flock together.

It’s “human scum’s” time in the nation’s history to be utilized to dehumanize others. Those who embrace the human scum ideology are like the two Bubbas who wore t-shirts to a political rally last year boasting that they would rather be Russian than Democrat. In other words, Putin is better than Joe Biden, Kim Jung Un is better than Elizabeth Warren, and Erdogan is better than Bernie Sanders.

What was that we use to say in school, “sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me.”

That was a school yard myth.

Names do hurt—not only do they hurt the people subject to the name calling but they do irreparable harm to the society at large who have people that love dehumanizing others through name-calling.

“Why can’t we all just get along?”

Don’t know, Rodney, but do know that we all can’t.

Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host.

This morning the news carried reports that Ellenborough Lewis, the beautiful little marsupial rescued from the catastrophic fires that have ravaged New South Wales, Australia, was euthanized at a local vet clinic after doctors determined he could not recover from the wounds he suffered in the fires before being rescued.

Tears welled up in my eyes as I heard the little marsupial’s pitiful cries of pain as flames encircled it before a heroic woman rushed into the flames to save the defenseless creature.

Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, lives on to enlighten his Fox News followers that he is a fan of Russia and hopes the Putin goons defeat Ukraine in the military conflict now raging between the two nations.

It should not be surprising that Carlson is flying a Russian flag.

One of those flags is currently flying over an American military base in Syria after U.S. forces fled from advancing Turkish troops on orders from their superiors. Russian troops quickly moved in and claimed the base, mocking and laughing at the American retreat.

Putin and Erdogan then raised wine glasses to toast the American betrayal of the Kurds and discussed all the benefits they would split up on the heels of that humiliating U.S. “withdrawal.”

Putin inherited the reins of power in a country that deliberately starved to death 3.3 million of its people between 1932 and 1933 and Erdogan inherited the reins of power in a country responsible for the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians between 1914 and 1923,

And let us not forget that during Russia’s “Great Terror” campaign in the 1930s, Putin’s hero, Joseph Stalin, summarily executed 386,798 of his own citizens in the “Kulak Operation” before adding 682,691more to the death toll in the “Polish Operation” during that campaign.

And let history not forget that Stalin managed to kill off another 247,157 people in ethnic cleansing actions during the Great Terror while another one million people died in Russian gulags between 1934 and 1953,

People like Mr. Carlson would excuse these atrocities by reminding us that Russia saved the world from Nazism during WWII.

Horse pucky!

Stalin saved his own ass after Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941—some six months before the U.S. formally declared war on Japan after which the Axis declared war on the U.S. The British, who declared war on Germany in 1939, had managed pretty much on its own to keep Hitler’s troops off its soil before the U.S. got into the war.

Put simply, Hitler would have been defeated by the U.S., Britain, and the European resistance without the help of Russia; and, in fact, it was the allies who saved Russia’s ass by keeping Hitler tied down on the Western front and in North Africa.

Nothing has changed about the Russians. They are the same people who waged the Great Terror campaign—just as Putin maintains power through terror to this very day.

So while Ellenborough Lewis, the beautiful little koala is being put down, butt-faced ugly Carlson is celebrating that Russian flag flying over an American military base built at taxpayer expense.

Perhaps Carlson is preparing for the day when the Russian flag is flying over Washington, D.C.