It Ain't Necessarily So

A man learned in the Law stood up to test Jesus. "Rabbi," he said, "what must I do to attain eternal life?"

"What does the Law say?"

"It says to love the Lord with all your your heart and all your soul and all your might and all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself."

"Then that's what you should do."

"But who is my neighbor?"

"Well," says Jesus, "Let me tell you a story. Once there was a man having an argument with his girlfriend, and to tell the truth he was not a good guy and had been treating her pretty roughly, and she called the cops, and they came over to her place and shot him seven times in the back, which they later said was not to protect the girlfriend but to protect themselves, because he was threatening them with a knife, which seemed wrong to all the townspeople, for lo, if he was threatening them with a knife, how come they shot him in the back?

"For in those days a lot of guys were getting shot in the back by the cops, or crushed in the windpipe so they could not breathe, and they all did have skin of a dark color whereas the cops were generally pink, and injustice was verily abroad in the land, even all the way up to Jericho and Samaria and Antioch, and all kinds of people were getting pretty upset about it, and this particular guy, who should not have mistreated his girlfriend but that's not a a capital crime, survived but had to have most of his intestine removed, and they handcuffed him to the hospital bed even though he was paralyzed from the waist down and his quality of life was greatly damaged thereby.

"And the people were greatly disturbed and came to this town from far and wide, some to say that Black lives matter and to solemnly parade around the town asking the cops to behave better, and some to hang around after dark, with the cops or with each other, and set some 34 fires over the next three days, and one white teenager from Samaria with an AR-15 assault rifle, whose mom did drive him down there for no reason anybody ever explained, except he said that the gun looked cool, and he thought he was there to provide medical assistance, though he knew too little about medical assistance to realize he should have been carrying a much smaller gun or no gun at all, because those big guns will definitely get in your way if you're trying to tie a tourniquet or administer a dose of Naloxone. and he did mix it up with the nighttime crowd and shoot three white guys, killing two, and in all those three days of mayhem and property damage and fistfights he was the only one who killed anybody, and then he and his mom went back home, as the cops silently watched. He later said one of the guys was trying to cut off his head with a skateboard.

"And which of all these people do you think was a neighbor to the guy who was shot in the back?"

"Gosh, I don't know!" says the man learned in the law. "The kid from Samaria?"

Via.