I do not know about you but my greatest disappointment with President Barack Obama is really disappointment over a collective failing of all of us. The failing is our collective blindness to the barbarity and moral corruptness of justified state vengeance, as the worm deep in our cultural gut that poisons our thoughts and our actions. The most recent display of this failing was shown by the first anniversary celebration of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. I should say triumphal celebration. Republicans praised the action and attempted to limit Obama’s credit for making the decision. Democrats fought hard to give the President much credit. I was appalled that any moral, civil human being would want to claim credit.

My disappointment or sadness is that the substance of this issue is not even being raised to visibility by hardly any one! This assassination and many other such actions in the US is a huge, out-there display of our moral corruption. Much of our criminal justice policy and practices and our foreign policy and practices grow out of the blind acceptance of the correctness of state exercised vengeance. That is what makes me sad.

We can learn from Biblical scripture and the ancient writings and practices from many cultures around the world that humans have been struggling with this question of justified vengeance for a long, long time. Overwhelmingly, the conclusion from these thousands of years of consideration is that vengeance – particularly individual vengeance – is morally wrong. In Romans 12:17-19 one translation is as follows:

17 Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone.

18 If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.

19 Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.

This basic wisdom concept of leaving consequences to God, to Nature, to the Tao, to Karma reappears frequently in diverse cultures. And it has been ignored for thousands of years in almost all of those cultures, despite the fact that there are alternative approaches to achieve justice and peace. And vengeance is totally ineffective at achieving either peace or justice and is very, very costly.

The People of the Book (Jewish, Christian, and Muslim) seem to have finessed this wise prohibition against vengeance by declaring that the humans who are in authority and their agents are divinely chosen and therefore their acts of vengeance are as if The Lord is the architect. Romans 13:4 says as follows:

4 For he is the minister of God to you for good. But if you do that which is evil, be afraid; for he bears not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, an avenger to execute wrath upon him that does evil.

There is good historical evidence that Roman Emperor Constantine influenced which of many hundred year old (at the time) writings were included and which were left out of (what we now call) The Gospels. Constantine would favor the kinds of texts that tout imperial divinity and obedience to authority.

A careful reading of this compilation of ancient wisdom would reveal that Jewish prophets from the Old Testament (the Torah) and Jesus (in the New Testament) frequently challenged authority. This rejection of the unjust actions of leaders cannot be denied and the authorities are not justified in their persecution of the prophets or their use of capital punishment. The finesse by deification or by giving special dispensation to the conquerors and usurpers took a thousand years to break down when kings and presidents were found to be no longer divinely ordained. Why then (another thousand years later) do so many of us still think that vengeance is justified when it is meted out by the state!?

More than 200 years ago, Quakers in the US and England presented strong organized resistance to state vengeance. In addition to their opposition to wars and their efforts to end slavery, they were some of the original founders of the penitentiaries as alternatives to the jail system that existed at the time. Repelled by the vengeful bodily punishments such as maiming and branding, they had envisioned a quiet solitary place where individuals that had committed anti-social acts could sit and exercise their penitence. In 1820 they helped establish Western and Cherry Hill Penitentiary in Philadelphia. “The Quakers hopefully and naively assumed that an inmate’s conscience, given enough time alone, would make him penitent (hence the new word, ‘penitentiary’).”

Unfortunately these reformers did not take into account the mentally debilitating nature of forced solitude or the unyielding nature of the wish for vengeance that led to the undoing of Quaker reformers’ good intentions. It was our primitive clinging to vengeance that turned the original concept of a penitentiary into another place for punishment and vengeance no different than a jail. Currently, Quaker and other reformers are strongly advocating an end to the death penalty and the substitution of restorative justice for retributive justice – with little help from Obama or very many of us.

In a recent episode of This Week With George Stephanopoulos, while discussing the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, Tavis Smiley reminded viewers that President Barack Obama has a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. in the Oval Office. Tavis stated, without response or comment by any other panel member, how hypocritical it was to consider MLK a personal hero while helping to exact violent state vengeance. This reminded me of the hypocrisy of Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize just before he sent a surge of troops into Afghanistan.

The best that I can say for our President is that he is a capable politician – better than most. But, he lacks the wisdom of the ages. He is not the prophetic leader that would challenge the moral corruptions, like justified vengeance, which eat at the gut and heart of US society. He is not MLK and he never will be. We cannot look to Obama for moral leadership; after nearly four years it is obvious that type of leadership cannot be found in the White House.

We are all – each and every one of us – called to become leaders in our own right anywhere and any how you can stand up for human dignity and human wisdom. That is the only way that the abomination of vengeance both personal and state will be curbed.

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator, Wilson Riles, is a former Oakland, CA City Council Member. Click here to contact Mr. Riles.