Wednesday, July 21, 2004
I might also want to check out journalspace. It allows post by e-mail, post by LiveJournal client (Palm!), and no ads. You can apparently even post photos to your blog from your phone. (Not that I have a camera phone, but still.)
Thursday, May 06, 2004
The Death Penalty
Wow. I just came from a talk by Mike Farrell, the onetime actor who played B.J. Hunnicutt on TV's M.A.S.H.. He is now — and has been for ten years — the president of Death Penalty Focus. The title of his talk, The Death Penalty: A Few Things to Consider, was mild-mannered enough and, for the most part, so was he. But the subject, his talking points, and his delivery really helped me crystallize some of my thinking on this.
It seems to me that we are increasingly a society of entitlement, on both individual and insitutional or societal levels. In this context, I view entitlement as a concept opposed to responsibility. For instance, we all want to be rich. (Well, maybe not all of us, but those of us who do are suspicious of those who don't!) Underlying this desire for wealth is a belief that, once we have the money we've earned we're then entitled to spend it on whatever suits our pleasure. The responsibility to "give back" to the society, to care for those less well off than ourselves, is not considered and then dismissed — it's not even considered.
I don't buy it. I believe that we have an obligation to each other, that human spirits are kindred, that we must always, in some way, take care of those who cannot tend to themselves. Easy to do (well, sometimes) when you're caring for your own child, understandable when you're giving to the poor or the homeless ... but what about those who are on the extreme fringes of society? What about the convicted murderers and rapists? Too often, maybe always, a death penalty conviction results in the dehumanization of the convicted. They are larger-than-life-and-worthy-of-death monsters, at least in the eyes of the law and the collective eyes of the public-crowd.
I don't buy it. One of the things Farrell said tonight (and I paraphrase) is that "a person is more than his worst moment." Murderers and rapists are people first, criminals second. And their basic humanity demands from those of us who have not yet been pushed beyond our breaking points into similar abhorrent acts a human, and a humanizing, response. There will always be those at society's fringes, but that's really all society has at the edge: fringes. There is no wall at the edge, no line which a criminal can cross and end up "outside" society, abrogating his basic human rights.
Several years ago I was called to jury duty and had to take home over the weekend a long questionnaire to become, among other things, a "death qualified" juror, as the case for which I was part of the pool was a potential death penalty case. I went into that process firmly believing in the death penalty, but came out of it a changed person. I realized that, although I was certainly entitled to my feelings for revenge against murderers and rapists, I was not entitled to act on them by sentencing someone to death. In fact, I had a basic human responsiblity not to act on them, to avoid becoming what I condemned.
The same is true for society as a whole. We are not entitled to kill those whom we fear or who have hurt us. We condemn killing, so we must stop killing. We have a responsibility to stop it. It really is that simple.
Wow. I just came from a talk by Mike Farrell, the onetime actor who played B.J. Hunnicutt on TV's M.A.S.H.. He is now — and has been for ten years — the president of Death Penalty Focus. The title of his talk, The Death Penalty: A Few Things to Consider, was mild-mannered enough and, for the most part, so was he. But the subject, his talking points, and his delivery really helped me crystallize some of my thinking on this.
It seems to me that we are increasingly a society of entitlement, on both individual and insitutional or societal levels. In this context, I view entitlement as a concept opposed to responsibility. For instance, we all want to be rich. (Well, maybe not all of us, but those of us who do are suspicious of those who don't!) Underlying this desire for wealth is a belief that, once we have the money we've earned we're then entitled to spend it on whatever suits our pleasure. The responsibility to "give back" to the society, to care for those less well off than ourselves, is not considered and then dismissed — it's not even considered.
I don't buy it. I believe that we have an obligation to each other, that human spirits are kindred, that we must always, in some way, take care of those who cannot tend to themselves. Easy to do (well, sometimes) when you're caring for your own child, understandable when you're giving to the poor or the homeless ... but what about those who are on the extreme fringes of society? What about the convicted murderers and rapists? Too often, maybe always, a death penalty conviction results in the dehumanization of the convicted. They are larger-than-life-and-worthy-of-death monsters, at least in the eyes of the law and the collective eyes of the public-crowd.
I don't buy it. One of the things Farrell said tonight (and I paraphrase) is that "a person is more than his worst moment." Murderers and rapists are people first, criminals second. And their basic humanity demands from those of us who have not yet been pushed beyond our breaking points into similar abhorrent acts a human, and a humanizing, response. There will always be those at society's fringes, but that's really all society has at the edge: fringes. There is no wall at the edge, no line which a criminal can cross and end up "outside" society, abrogating his basic human rights.
Several years ago I was called to jury duty and had to take home over the weekend a long questionnaire to become, among other things, a "death qualified" juror, as the case for which I was part of the pool was a potential death penalty case. I went into that process firmly believing in the death penalty, but came out of it a changed person. I realized that, although I was certainly entitled to my feelings for revenge against murderers and rapists, I was not entitled to act on them by sentencing someone to death. In fact, I had a basic human responsiblity not to act on them, to avoid becoming what I condemned.
The same is true for society as a whole. We are not entitled to kill those whom we fear or who have hurt us. We condemn killing, so we must stop killing. We have a responsibility to stop it. It really is that simple.
