Warnings: If You See Something, Say Something.

This has been our government’s warning to us for over a decade, since September 11, 2001.  And because of folks who heeded this warning, we have saved lives.  

I see something – and I want to say something, and it’s news from a courthouse in Philadelphia, news that our press simply is not covering. In this corner of my garden, wanting to be more winsome than whiny, I wonder how to say what I see that is at best upsetting – and at worst, disastrous.  I will use others' words:  

·      A journalist who saw that few of the American press were covering the trial, and  reported on the Pennsylvania authorities who ignored serious health and safety violations for almost two decades.  And he described what happened in that clinic. The link is not for the fainthearted: What I Saw at the Gosnell Trial .

·      Andree Seu Peterson wrote, of this trial, “The shocking part of the Kermit Gosnell trial isn't only what's illegal.”  (Another link that that shocks: Courtroom Horror)

We can roll over, and ignore the alarms that some people are reporting, remembering the doctor may be exonerated.  

But, what then?   

How that jury rules will tell us more about them and us than about Gosnell.

Still we have to ask:  How could such monstrous practices go on for so long? How could people be kept quiet?  How could medical malpractice procedures not ever be instituted? (Gadfly’s Muse: The Pathway to Kermit Gosnell )

I’ve been known to sleep through alarms, to ignore many obvious warnings – believing nothing bad could happen. But now, the warning I hear is old -- reverberating from somewhere in the tenth century B.C.  when Solomon warned his son get involved in saving people who are being butchered:

Deliver those who are being taken away to death,

And those who are staggering to slaughter, Oh hold them back.   

If you say, "See, we did not know this,"

Does He not consider it   weighs the hearts ?

And does He not know it who keeps your soul?

And will He not render to man according to his work? . . .

(Proverbs 24:11-14 emphasis added)

Wake up O sleeper – and listen to what God said to Esther through her uncle:

Mordecai sent her this message: “Don’t think that just because you live in the king’s house you’re the one Jew who will get out of this alive. If you persist in staying silent at a time like this, help and deliverance will arrive for the Jews from someplace else; but you and your family will be wiped out. Who knows? Maybe you were made queen for just such a time as this.” (Esther 4:14 The Message)

May God lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil – the evil that is smack dab in front of us, and of our making!

WORLD Magazine May 4, 2013