PERSPECTIVES ON GANGS : Victimizers Call Us to Compassion, Too : For all our demonizing, the perpetrators of violence and senseless deaths are still human beings.

Some years back at Folsom state prison, I told my students, “Define your terms.” We had been discussing Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” They liberally threw around the words sympathy, empathy and compassion. I wanted to know what they meant in each case. One lifer quickly tackled sympathy. “It’s when your homeboy’s mom dies and you say, “I’m sorry.” “Empathy,” chimed in another inmate, “is when your homeboy’s mom dies and your mom died recently, too, and you tell him, ‘I know what you’re going through.’ ” “And compassion?” I asked. There was an uncomfortable silence. Finally, after much cajoling and shifting in seats, the most weathered inmate serving a life sentence made an attempt. “Now compassion,” he began, “that’s something altogether different.” He considered this a bit more and finally stated, “God is compassion.”

When I read the report of Stephanie Kuhen’s death, I was rushing out the door to bury my 51st young person killed by this disease called gangbanging. She was a 16-year-old named Selissa. She attended our parish’s alternative school and was the afternoon receptionist in our job referral center. Time and time again, I have buried kids I love only to discover later that they have been killed by kids I love. The deep pain of loss at a young life gunned down too soon, mixes with rage and a stomach-turning disbelief.

I often ask these kids who have murdered, “Who dies first? The one who catches the bullet or the one who pulls the trigger?” Few fail to get the point. They know that they are the first to go. Suddenly, I recognize that I must make room in my grief for not only Selissa and Stephanie but for those broken, wounded people who died the second they fired their guns.

There is no shortage of heartache here. Victim and victimizer alike call us to compassion. For all our demonizing, the perpetrators of the senseless and tragic deaths of these two girls were human beings. No amount of name-calling, despite our understandable rage and fear, will ever alter that fact. Human beings are involved here. In the end, we are all diminished and our own humanity enfeebled when we create and maintain a high moral distance between us and them. The highest religious and spiritual ideals of any faith would invite us to a compassion for all lives destroyed by the violence that plagues us.

And yet, these are difficult times in which to speak of violence among our urban poor youth. It is especially problematic to address the root causes and contributing factors that give rise to such incidents. No one wants to hear that violence among our young is a symptomatic indicator, pointing beyond itself to deep problems, which, for our neglect, have made these symptoms worsen with each year. No one wants to hear this now. To do so, is to make yourself vulnerable to charges that you “excuse” criminal behavior or in some way become an apologist for gangs. My office has received numerous death threats since the tragedy in Cypress Park. To help re-direct the lives of at-risk, gang-impacted youth through employment, counseling and alternative education becomes “fraternizing with the enemy.”

A larger issue, however, confronts us. If “animals” and “monsters” killed Selissa and Stephanie, then we don’t ever have to deal with “them.” They aren’t like us, after all. So we crack down and build more prisons and lower the age at which a juvenile can be tried as an adult. Apart from the insignificant effect this approach has on the problem, we are all lessened by the creation of this gulf between us and them. The more we distance ourselves from this event and its perpetrators, the less likely will we be to ever respond compassionately. The highest hallmark of a civilized society is not the rapidity by which it exacts vengeance, but its ability to hold victim and victimizer in its compassionate heart.

No one can minimize the pain of this time nor explain away the mindless loss of young life. Needless to say, no one could condone nor ever justify such murderous acts. Even gang members have been horrified by young Stephanie’s death.

There is indeed a high degree of difficulty for us, as a community, to be compassionate. It is no small achievement for us to find room in our grief for a three-year-old innocent as well as for the lost and broken person who ended her life. Yet doing so doesn’t just make us better, civilized and holy people. It also leads us, inextricably, down a path that promises a greater chance at solving this grave and urgent problem.

Our best selves tell us that “there but for the grace of God . . .” and that, in the end, there is no distance really between us and them. It is just us. Our best and noble hope is to imitate the God we believe in. The God who has abundant room in God’s grief and heart for us all. God is compassion.