There is a play being scheduled for the Curious Theatre this month about homeless people. There was a film released, which will be shared again with the public this Summer called, "Where God Left His Shoes." There is an art show across the state called, Arts of Recovery." It focuses on the lives of profoundly mentally ill people not living in boxes of prescribed lives of desperation and misery. The Platte Forum regularly has art works of the Colfax Community Network, people from the Alternative 1 Charter School, and youth across the region who have been homeless.

The reason that these genres of art and these efforts is to raise the banner of care and relationship to profound and basic human efforts to transform the society in which we live. In 1996 my youngest child, Leila, was nearly murdered by a driver who was high going through a red light at sixty miles an hour, plowing through the intersection and killing her boy friend who was driving and a childhood friend in the back seat. It left Leila, not yet sixteen years of age with major trauma to many parts of her body.

In writing to the court to Judge Richetti, presiding over the case of the twenty-two year old, who had no remorse and who was unscathed in the catastrophe, I stated, that "while I had not lost a child in this ordeal and that I was in pain for the sheer magnitude of the impact of this on all of the families involved I was not pursuing vengeance in this case and recommended that the perpetrator go through training and education to learn the consequences of his behavior." It is of no use to throw away another life because two are dead and two more traumatized by the ramifications of such tragedy.

Judge Richetti read the content of the letter to the court at the time of sentencing and decided to place him in two years of treatment and probation for this crime. You can say that in terms of social justice that this judge sided with me in deferring judgement on the whole of this man's life as a result of this egregious error, but you can also discern that life is sacred and that there is no one who has a right to curtail the life of another based on the problems and limitations that we suffer with.

I urge people of all places and ways to learn more about the disenfranchised of the earth and instead of raising arms to bear against another human let us open our hand and mouth and learn to share the gifts which we have been offered.