When a crime is committed, when one human being has wronged, abused, violated, or otherwise injured another fellow member of the larger community, both people are victims: the latter as a result of the crime at hand and the former as a result of perhaps years of neglect, abuse, conditioning, and/or any number of factors that have contributed to the degradation of this particular soul, resulting in the current misdeed.
A truly compassionate society recognizes that both victim and perpetrator are in need of healing...each represents a wound at once proximate and distant that requires attention and care in order for the community to remedy a breech of trust and begin traveling on a path leading toward reconciliation and wholeness.
Would that we be such a brave people, a courageous nation of visionaries to look beyond the paradigms of guilt/innocence, victim/perpetrator, good/bad in order to embrace the underlying reality of our common humanity.
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