Death Watch
Posted June 15, 2001
The headline last Saturday read, "Tim McVeigh Prepares Himself to Die." I have to wonder how one does that. How do you deal with the knowledge that you've seen your last Friday, your last episode of NYPD Blues, your last rainstorm? What do you think about when you are taking your last shower or shitting for the last time?
Of course, with someone like McVeigh we are not supposed to think about those things. What he did seems to exempt him from the human race. There is no amount of pain or fear he can feel that would even begin to equal the pain and fear he caused, and yet....
Just about everything that can be said about the death penalty has been said. We know it is not a deterrent and we know it is not cost effective -- that it, in fact, costs a whole lot more than keeping someone in prison for life. We know that mistakes have been made, that in many cases whether someone lives or dies depends on what kind of legal muscle they can afford; and that, as with much else in this world, it often comes down to location, location, location. Mumia, convicted of shooting a police officer in what could be described as a "panic situation" and in spite of a case with more holes than a pound of Swiss cheese, will be very lucky if he manages to avoid execution, whereas Charlie Manson, who gleefully and wantonly killed in a most deliberate and grotesque way, will live out his years.
For all the resurgence of spirituality, both of fundamentalist Christianity and less mainstream forms, America seems fairly committed to legalized vengeance. The former governor of Florida made public jokes about "Old Sparky," the state's sometimes malfunctioning electric chair, and Texas once executed a man who was so retarded he saved the dessert from his last meal for "later." That Karla Tucker had turned her life around and wanted to live so she could give something back to make amends for what she had done didn't cut any ice with anyone who mattered.
Beyond the right or wrong of capital punishment, however, there lies something deeper, something more fundamental. I think when we look at crime in general, the question we have to settle before any other is Do we want to heal or do we want to punish? Those are the underlying worldviews that are at war here. To execute or not to execute is simply an outgrowth of that question.
From a purely pragmatic point of view, my personal take is that the death penalty isn't what we need to be talking about. What I want to talk about is why in the most prosperous nation on earth, where the people have a Constitution based on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, is crime such a problem? Focusing so exclusively on what to do to the criminals strikes me as prestidigitation that holds our attention and keeps us from wondering why we have so many in the first place.
For me, it comes down to the old question "Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?"
"Do you want to extract vengeance or do you want to create a safer, less fearful society?"
Whatever we are doing now, it clearly isn't working, so I'd like to try something-- anything -- different, and then if that doesn't work, I'd like to try something else; and to keep trying, until we find something that does work.
From a spiritual point of view, I think forgiveness is healthier than revenge. I think it is a myth that victims require retribution to heal. From where I stand, the two concepts are antithetical.
I think institutionalized murder panders to something very dark within us. I spent some time reading the boards on this subject, just to see what we thought about this. Out of the 115 consecutive responses I reviewed, 68 were against capital punishment, 47 for it. What I found disturbing is that out of those 47 pros, 28 (or 59%) expressed radical hatred fueled by rage.
Here is a small sampling:
I'd pay a pretty penny to see the fear in his eyes as the executioner takes his life!!!!
Cut off one body part daily and feed it to starving dogs in front of him.
I hope he doesn't die right away and he has to suffer!
Someone should put him through a meat grinder while he's still alive...
I think Timothy McVeigh should be put in a building, have all the bones in his body broken, one at a time, and, then put some gasoline all over his body, and light a match...
Too bad there's no longer an electric chair!
He should be decapitated and his head should roll into a large tubing series of numbered buckets whereby the citizens of our country could gamble on which bucket his head rolls in. Part of the proceeds would go the families of the victims.
I would pay to see him swinging from a tree, kicking, trying to scream, but the noose around his neck chokes the absolute life out of him.
That kind of emotion scares me, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were somehow connected to the crime rate. In any case, I don't think it's good for the society that we feed it.
Then there was the cheery-voiced announcer on MSNBC: Tune in here for the Tim McVeigh Execution. Come with us to Indiana for interviews with the victim's families!
It creeped me out. The whole nation was gathered to watch someone die, and we didn't seem to understand what we were doing. It was the modern day equivalent of selling peanuts at a hanging.
After the fact, NBC said McVeigh's lawyer did something the proponents of the death penalty would not like: He put this event in human terms. Interesting wording....
We all get angry. Anger is part of a healthy process when someone has caused us pain, but it isn't the part where we want to get stuck. I don't say that because I think anger is not a moral place to live out from. I say it because I think anger is not an
effective place to live out from.
effective place to live out from.
I'm against capital punishment for many reasons, but perhaps the primary one is that it relates to the symptom, not the disease. The problem is, we don't realize this. We think by having a death penalty and using it that we are dealing with the problem. It makes us think we are doing something about crime when we aren't.
You can say, "Yeah, but at least that guy won't kill any more people." My point is that had we dealt with the underlying social issues years ago, perhaps he wouldn't have killed the people he did.
Tim McVeigh saw life in terms of a military paradigm because that is how he was trained to see it. The US Army taught him that innocent people killed while pursuing an objective are called "collateral damage." It sounds cold as hell, but that was just his vocabulary; that is how the people he respected referred to the Iraqi children killed when he was ordered to pursue their objective.
I think he really could not distinguish any difference between what the government did at Waco and Ruby Ridge, what he did in Oklahoma City and what he did in the Gulf. That doesn't make it right. It was a god-awful thing -- but one no less than the others. What concerns me is that McVeigh seems to be a scapegoat blinding people to the larger reality, which is that we live in a world where life is becoming cheaper and cheaper, and if we don't fix that, there will be a lot more Tim McVeighs.
For example, I just read that in LA, uninsured Hispanic people are being charged five times more for hospital procedures than HMO's are being billed for the exact same procedures. Those who can't pay are being threatened with the INS or issued credit cards with interest rates as high as 30%. I see that as different from what McVeigh did only in degree, but not in essence. And the principle at stake (profit) is much less understandable to me.
People are downsized with that same mentality. Okay, being downsized so someone else can keep earning six figures isn't being blown to smithereens, but it is violence, and whether the term is used or not, the people who lose their jobs --their dreams and their children's dreams -- to that end are seen as "collateral damage" secondary to the pursuit of an objective.
When AIDs first came on the scene and people thought only homosexuals and drug addicts got it, those people were absolutely seen as "collateral damage."
And how about this one: The prices of the 50 prescription drugs most commonly used by the elderly on average rose more than twice the rate of inflation in the year ending January 2001, according to a consumer group report.
Synthroid, a synthetic thyroid agent, rose by 22.6 percent, eight and
a half times the rate of inflation.
Premarin, marketed by Wyeth-Ayerst for estrogen replacement, rose
12.8 percent, nearly five times the rate of inflation.
Glucophage, marketed by Bristol-Myers Squibb and used to treat
diabetes, rose 15.5 percent, nearly six times the rate of inflation.
Mind you, these are the increases over a single year, and for the people who take them, they are not optional.
What is the relationship of those diabetics to Bristol-Myers' announced goal of doubling earnings between 2000 and 2005? CNN says, "The seniors who rely on these drugs have been regularly and repeatedly hit with price increases for the medicines that keep them healthy." A full third of seniors have no insurance coverage for prescription drugs. Tell me they aren't collateral damage?
According to Geov Parrish of the Seattle Weekly, the reason we had a shortage of flu vaccine last winter is several companies cut back on production in favor of drugs like Viagra with a higher profit margin. People died of the flu. No one said it, but they were collateral damage.
I can have compassion for Tim McVeigh because I don't see him as an aberration. I see him as a reflection of the culture, and I see the culture as being in deep, deep doo-doo. I have compassion for him because I have compassion for us.
For more information on capital punishment check out:
Okay, let me have it! I told you when I came I was a heretic. <g>
