Love for Order, Love for Fairness
It’s no secret that Cassie liked things in her life to be secure. Schedules should be figured out well in advance. People should be where they say they are going to be. If something is built to do X, then it better do X. The world was supposed to be reliable and dependable.
That made celebrating her birthdays a little easier. There was no worrying about trying to keep big surprises a secret because there were never big surprises. That’s what was fair and loving to Cassie. If she was happier with security and confidence in a plan, then we made a plan well ahead of time.
And we always believed in what’s fair and loving to people.
Not Her Year
Suffice it to say, Cassie would NOT be a fan of the year 2020. It has been surprise after surprise and tragedy after tragedy. There’s been a lot to reflect on just in the first half of the year alone. There’s been a lot of problems to speak up about too.
I’ve used this kind of blog post (the If Cassie Could Sing kind) to talk about Cassie’s dreams, bucket-list items, and how I worked on seeing them through. Just like Cassie protested human trafficking (an ongoing issue that deserves attention in its own right), one of Cassie’s desires was to join in a much larger protest.
Everyone who knew Cassie would tell you that she was scrappy and always down for a fight. But she was also always ready to fight for what she believed in. She was always ready to use her rights, her body, her voice to fight for others. She was eager to use her first amendment rights to stand up for the rights of others.
I could talk about my little bit of involvement in protests over the last year. But because her voice was taken from us, I thought I would honor her birthday by using her voice to protest. Luckily, Cassie’s birthday fell right, smack-dab in the middle of the year. It seems like a perfect time to reflect on how the first half of the year was going and to remind you how Cassie, loving as she was, might see things.
Surprises in 2020
January! We kicked off the year with the threat of WWIII. Did Cassie support wars? No. Did she support violating international law by way of killing foreign officials? No. Would she have supported any of the other threats to destroy a people’s ancient cultural history because of a foreign government’s anger over extrajudicial killing? Nope!
Still in January! There was the earthquake swarm in Puerto Rico which destroyed thousands of homes and even more buildings such as schools. Months later there were still thousands of people living outdoors despite the fact that Puerto Ricans are American citizens. Roughly 60% of Kissimmee is Puerto Rican—Cassie’s neighbors, co-workers, friends, and children she ministered to were Puerto Rican. Would she have said something about the lack of resources made available to those thousands of people? Yes! Just the same way her heart broke for Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.
February! I don’t need to remind anyone how much Cassie loved people, plants, and animals. So would Cassie have an opinion on the Australian bushfires? YES! (Granted, those started in 2019 but seemed to peak in February.) If it broke my heart that 46 million acres burned, I can only imagine Cassie’s heart break for the situation. The amount of apathy by the Australian government for the 10,000 buildings destroyed was incredible, not to mention the apathy towards plant species and entire populations of animals either going instinct or approaching the brink of it. When international help was called for, little was received. Over 400 people were counted as dead, either directly or indirectly from the fires. The smoke was so bad that it blanketed parts of New Zealand 2,000 miles away and even reached South America nearly 7,000 miles away. Call Cassie a girl after Steve Irwin’s heart, but she would agree that this was an ecological disaster demanding our sympathy and support considering experts say the environmental impact may never be fully reversed.
March… I’m not sure where to start with the pandemic. Did Cassie respect the science behind public health care? Considering she had a husband working in public health research when she passed, I would say yes. Did she care about the elderly? They were her favorite people to serve in the church and her favorite parts of our families. Would she wear a mask to protect them, if not any of the dozens of other vulnerable people in her life with heart disease, respiratory disease or compromised immune systems. Yes. Would she have told you to wear a mask? Yes.
April! With an economic recession (that is almost starting to look like it could turn into a depression if people don’t actually try to stop the virus taking over our nation), I don’t think Cassie would have even tried to get involved in protesting economic policy. However, would she have petitioned for continued moratoriums on evictions and rent suspensions during a pandemic and during the highest unemployment rate in generations? Yup. Especially as much sorrow as she felt for the huge homeless and housing-insecure population in Kissimmee. Especially as traumatized as she was after being housing-insecure as a small child.
May… and June. Oh, these contentious months! Would Cassie have spoken against the Georgia DA who covered up the murder of Ahmaud Arbery by White Nationalists? Yeah. Would she have spoken against the extra-judicial murder of George Floyd when his offence was forging $20? You bet. Would she have spoken against the murder of Philando Castile at a traffic stop when he was following an officer’s orders? Yup. Would she speak against the shooting of Rayshard Brooks after he ineffectively discharged the only round of a non-lethal weapon and continued to run away? I think so. Would she currently be speaking against the lack of justice for Breonna Taylor considering her killers’ case was clearly the least defensible? Absolutely. Would she protest the militarization of police and the unjust and hurtful sentencing laws in our criminal justice system? 100%.
How do I know? Because together we grieved the deaths of the two Kissimmee police officers who were killed just a couple miles away from our church in 2017. I know because we also grieved and prayed over the fact that the incident became a rallying call for increased policing and arrests in the low-income, largely Black neighborhood where it occurred INSTEAD OF a rallying call to care for veterans suffering from PTSD like the perpetrator, or instead of a rallying call to suspend weapon licenses from people suffering mental illness with homicidal thoughts like the perpetrator was known to have. Cassie stood up for victims before standing up for any political beliefs. At one point she stood up for cops who were victims. But she also cried out to God for the vindictive and discriminatory practices that further tore apart the lives of those in that neighborhood.
I know this misses a lot. It misses the Supreme Court decisions coming out, it misses the deaths of children in ICE custody, it misses the riots, it misses legalized discrimination against trans people in healthcare and homeless shelters, it misses locust swarms and impending famines, it misses the conspiracy theories, it misses the Trump impeachment, it misses the murder hornets that would ravage American ecosystems, and it misses so much more… But you can only say so much at once.
A Voice
The tongue has the power of life and death.
Proverbs 18
Cassie always tried to use her voice to bring life to people. That life-giving voice is something I pray we don’t forget.
