A couple of nights ago I was reading TIME magazine's cover article: "The War Next Door: Why Mexico's drug violence is America's problem too." It stated that in Juarez, just over the border, 3,200 people were murdered just last year. Drug wars have made it the most dangerous city on earth. And here's the reason:
According to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Americans consume $65 billion worth of illegal drugs annually, roughly what they spend on higher education, and most of those drugs are either produced in Mexico or transit through it. The U.S. is also a primary source of weapons the cartels use to unleash their mayhem: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives estimates that 70% of the guns seized in Mexico in the past two years were smuggled from north of the border. "The current flow of weapons," Mexico's ambassador to the U.S., Arturo Sarukhan, charged last year, "provides the drug syndicates with their firepower." (TIME, July 11 2011, p 26, 27)Do we realize the significance of what we've just read? This means that the argument, "What I do in the privacy of my home is my business and doesn't hurt anyone," is finally exposed for what it is: sheer self-centeredness that in reality costs someone his or her life.
This means that this country we love is complicit in Mexico's human tragedy on so many levels. The addictions which we pursue in our self-indulgent "freedom" finances the narco-economy that lures in the poor and greedy alike. And to add insult to injury (or, more accurately, deadly injury to insult), we supply the majority of the guns with which they blow each other away!
Freedom is a wonderful thing. We value it highly, and rightly so, for it gives us the freedom to worship and to live as we see fit. And therein lies the rub. So many of us use our freedom, to quote Paul, to indulge our flesh.
You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather serve one another in love. (Galatians 5:13)Don Carson, in a book I read earlier this year, helps us understand that our cultural definitions of freedom can often be a far cry from what Scripture means by freedom. In Christ and Culture Revisited (2008), he writes:
The democratic tradition in the West has fostered a great deal of freedom from Scripture, God, tradition, and assorted moral constraints; it encourages freedom toward doing your own thing, hedonism, self-centeredness, and consumerism. By contrast, the Bible encourages freedom from self-centeredness, idolatry, greed, and all sin, and freedom toward living our lives as those who bear God’s image and who have been transformed by his grace, such that our greatest joy becomes doing his will (p.138).
