Street Credibility

This morning in the Gainesville Sun there is a story about an aspiring rapper who robbed a store in Gainesville to gain credibility as a rapper. As part of his plan, he shot a store clerk in the temple with a BB gun. I admit to a flash of dark humor about the “silliness” of our humanity and what our nature and culture brings us to do.

Yet there is also an internal flutter of discomfort and sorrow that says “this is not just this one man, or the rap culture, or street violence, this is in all of us.” To gain status, to gain acceptability, and to ease our fears we commit acts of violence or domination throughout our days, perhaps mostly in small ways.

If the spirit of the universe could look down on our spinning blue boat home form afar, she/he/it might also be struck with sweet sorrow about our kind. I also know that seen from afar, that the Spirit of Love’s heart would swell witnessing the countless acts of kindness committed on the street – someone waving someone else into a parking spot, another helping an elderly person across the intersection, and people offering words of comfort, solace, food to the homeless who call the streets and the woods their home.

Somewhere deep in us there is a place of choice, where we can act out the hope that we can offer life-giving acts throughout the day in the smallest of ways. In this fashion, we gain credibility with our own selves, and began to also see the beauty and power of us to live and breathe the beloved community in every moment.