absolutely chilling stuff. every day lately, it feels like I watch more and more seemingly ordinary people say horrifically cruel and dehumanizing things with a grin on their face and no shame. I saw it when the director of ICE said they needed to treat the operation "as a business, like Amazon Prime but with human beings." I saw it with every justification of throwing hundreds of innocent Venezuelans into a torture prison for the rest of their lives with no trial. I see it with every tweet from the official White House mercilessly gloating at whatever grief and pain the istration leaves in its wake. and here, you see it every time a Zionist settler opens their mouth and claims with matter-of-fact certainty that Palestinian people do not and should not exist. some of the things said on camera with a smile in this doc sent shivers down my spine.

how do we bring back shame? how do we re-instill a sense of wrongness to saying and doing the things that are being said and done?

everything in me wants to say that the answer is turning to God, acknowledging a transcendent universal morality that governs us all and asks us to love our neighbor as ourselves because we're all made in the image of the divine. to accept that like the trinity, we can be different and yet we can be one.

watching this documentary, I don't know how to square that deep-seated belief with the reality that some of the people who perpetuate the most horrific dehumanization also somehow claim to follow God. and yet I still feel deeply that the belief in the Image of God in every human being—the Imago Dei—is all we've got.

well, the Imago Dei, the character of a loving God, and expectation of Judgement Day. when I was a child, the idea that God would someday judge us all for our actions felt like bad news. but in the face of so much injustice, righteous judgement increasingly feels like something to hope and plead for. may we all find healthy shame and repentance before then.