I am sure anyone who has even glanced at recent news headlines has seen it:
the Pentagon is going to LIVESTREAM an EXECUTION!
I have to sit and ask myself, what do I think about that?
Not the politics ... the human implications. And not about whether the Fort Hood shooter should be executed (under either military or civil law). Honestly, as an very honorable soldier's daughter, I would not like to sit too long with what I think of an army PSYCHIATRIST who killed 13 brothers and intended to kill 23 more .... puking after finishing my breakfast skillet is not on the menu today.
At what point does a country, once again in some cases, cross a line it takes centuries to uncross?
Do we want this to become like the Tower of London, Tyburn, Newgate Prison? Will we go farther one day, hundreds of years from now, and gather for a random decimation when a company or community fails grossly ... I realize it is different but opening doors that were firmly closed.
Who is YOUR higher authority? Is it a spiritual being or something else? And what would that higher authority do (even if you answer only to your own sense of right)? Would they order the execution, watch it, do it themselves ... encourage an audience? For Trinitarian Christians, would God the Father and God the Son, as portrayed in the Bible, have the same actions on this?
How would Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo portray this?? ... yep, I went there.
A society wrestling with JUSTICE or drifting back towards SPECTACLE/ENJOYMENT?
Is this closure --- or a beginning?
And if you want to know if I will watch ... no.
I will approve of the execution, I can tell you that.
But I will not watch it.
A note on something people are calling inhumane: He is paralyzed from the waist down and likely in a wheelchair ... a bullet got him during the deployment center massacre. I wonder if his functioning brain has been wrestling with the fact that he was there to care for men who were likely already terrified at aspects of deployment. I wonder if posthumous charges for chronic PTSD were a thing ... oh, the places this country could go.
And maybe there needs to be a law, like for an honorable burial ... firing squad of his very accurate peers.
No comments:
Post a Comment