WisPolitics Budget Blog

India’s freedom fighter Mahatma Gandhi said, There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience.

The collective conscience of America was displayed to the world this month when our country reached back into history to do the right thing.

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. - Former Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen will spend the rest of his life in prison for his part in the murders of three civil rights workers here in 1964. Circuit Court Judge Marcus Gordon sentenced the 80-year-old Killen to 60 years - 20 years on each of three counts of manslaughter. Killen was convicted of orchestrating the June 21, 1964, murders. Attorney General Jim Hood said Killen, who appeared unremorseful during the trial, would have the rest of his life to reflect on his actions.

Call it karma, good mojo, or serendipity, but it does feel like divine intervention that the murderer of those slain civil rights workers was brought to justice the same month as the Juneteenth Celebration; the commemoration of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

Atonement is a never-ending process. And atonement is as important for America as it is for us, as individuals, because it is individuals who built the system of justice we live under.

Sadly, American history is riddled with examples where justice failed. But our humanity, our conscience, the life God breathed into us as He sent our souls to earth, will inevitably bring us back. We remember, or re-member, ourselves to a greater good.

I hope at some point he'll get to that realization that you don't get to heaven unless you admit what you've done and ask for forgiveness, Hood said.

Amen to that.