Or ‘rehab’ as we laughingly call it, isn’t exactly the kind of place you want to go if you’re feeling all judgey about drug addicts, gangsters, alcoholics, whores, drug dealers, bank robbers and the generally more damaged and dangerous elements of society. Of course, whilst I use Obi-Wan’s withering observation facetiously (particularly when it comes to the place I’m at right now), there is an element of truth to it when it comes to places like this. Seriously, if you have judgement about someone who’s killed someone else in a drunken car crash, done jail time for violently robbing a bank or made a career burgling other people’s houses then, whatever your own problems might be, rehab might not be the place for you.
Speaking personally, in this context, I couldn’t care less what people have done and, if I did, I don’t think it would be possible for me to recover fully and move on. Morally, like any normal person, of course I believe it’s wrong to rob banks, or drunkenly plough your car into a family of five or whatever it is. But when it comes to judgement on such matters, I honestly have more of a problem with society’s finger-waggers than I do the perpetrators. The reason for this lies not in some mimsy liberal notion that criminals should be treated softly, but in a simple parable that even found the approval of the militantly atheistic writer Christopher Hitchens. As the unfaithful woman, is jostled and harangued by a murderous mob, a calm presence from the crowd steps forward, speaks up and utters the words which, as Hitchens says, ‘Have entered our literature and our consciousness’:
He that is without sin, let him cast the first stone.
Hitchens goes on gleefully to recount ancient local folklore, which explains Christ’s actions just prior to the immortal moment, where he is said to ‘write in the sand’. According to the stories, not explained in the Bible, what Jesus was hurriedly scrawling in the sand were the names of the numerous male adulterers lurking with stones ready to hurl at the loose and broken woman before them. As far as tales of quick thinking, streetwise action under pressure go, it’s a hard story to beat.
And so, when I look around me at a room of people who have done things that society says are wrong, and that the pious say are ‘evil, that’s what I think. Have a word with yourself first I say and ask, ‘Who am I really, and what have I done that gives me the right to cast that stone?’
Be the first to comment