This is going to be a much sought after political style rambling that covers current events and hopefully brings us all back to answer the question - what kind of person do I want to be?
Oklahoma attempted a death penalty via lethal injection yesterday; I say attempted because by all accounts, including prison officials, the drug combination failed. And the man suffered through god only knows what for a period of time before dying of a heart attack. First let's understand - he died of a heart attack. Not heart failure. The lethal combination of drugs is meant to bring on failure of both lungs and heart. Heart attacks, as described by survivors, are painful. It's not your heart failing but your heart literally working too hard.
Family members of the victim often say things like "he didn't let me loved one die peacefully" or "she was callous and calculated in killing my family; I want the same for you." That's all well and good. I do not know what those family members have been through. But I do know what it's like to be the one that goes on after a shocking, unexpected death. It's fucking hard. I've described myself in the days after "X" as a vase thrown to the ground. Part of me still thinks I may never find all of the pieces but I have healed/glued areas of my life back together. Yes, it's awful and miserable and quite frankly shitty to think that I'm living and yet he isn't. That is my daily cross. But I ask myself daily - what would he want? And families of victims possibly ask the same.
I'll go ahead and jump into the death penalty issue here and now. My junior year of college, I took an "Intro to Criminal Justice" class and at one point, the class was broken into three groups - those in support of; those against; and those undecided about the death penalty. I fell in the last one - unsure. I thought it had merits but I wasn't sure. The two decided sides had the job of convincing us that theirs was the right way to think. And one thing stands out in my memory after all these years - those in support of the death penalty were aggressively debating their side; they were ANGRY that the other side existed and that I could be so 'clueless' as to not have chosen a side. They talked loudly, made gestures, and continually cut off the against debaters, only to have me answer the question of my title right there - I do not want to be one of them.
So who do we want to be? As a society. Do we want to be a society of vengeance, anger, hate, and contempt? Or can we, as a society as a whole, finally start learning what compassion is. Not only what it is, but what it looks like, or better yet, FEELS like. The justice system, for all of it's wisdom from the Constitution, is to be just that - the collective conscience of our nation. The Constitution itself protects us from cruel or unusual punishments. The death penalty, especially the death penalty with a drug combination that FAILS, is both cruel and unusual. And that conscience that speaks to all of us should see the wrong of it all.
