This morning the United States put one of its citizens to death. The first federal execution since 1963.
How do you feel—Relieved? Sad? Proud? What?
Me, I feel ashamed. I just don’t need any more evidence just now of how little we’ve progressed in 205 years; and how far we have to go.
Killing anyone—for any reason—is wrong. Period. And McVeigh’s blood is on the hands of every American citizen.
What McVeigh did was wrong. That’s not in question. What is in question is how we, as a people, deal with even the most heinous crimes and criminals. Capital punishment is the big-scale equivalent of teaching your kids not to hit by paddling them.
Timothy McVeigh was apparently lost long ago, and we need to look at how that happened, but we also need to look closely at the process by which he managed to make killers of us all.
There is little reason to believe McVeigh was innocent of the charges brought against him. That’s not the issue. The issue is that innocent people have been executed by our government in the name of justice. Like it or not, our justice system reflects our culture and is heavily biased against anyone outside the mainstream with regard to race, class, belief, and behavior.
It’s disturbing to read the mainstream editorial accounts of this action. Without exception, the mainstream media has been preparing our defenses for weeks. And it shows in their editorial pages this morning. The New York Times clearly believes that McVeigh got what was coming to him, that his life led him to, quoting William Carlos Williams, “a final and self-inflicted holocaust.” And then the paper of record has the balls to declare that it’s an issue of faith: “As a society, we must value life more than he valued the lives he destroyed. That is a faith that Timothy McVeigh was unable to reach but which still lies within our power.”
Faith in what? The power to kill one of our citizens—in pre-meditatedly cold blood—for “justice”?
What about compassion.
A few weeks ago I went to hear several addresses by the Dalai Lama. He quietly told a story of a lesson in compassion he had learned from one of his teachers. She had witnessed the treatment of the Tibetians at the hands of the Chinese and she was very worried. Her concerns were not for her Tibetian family or friends, but rather that the Tibetians would lose their compassion for the Chinese.
Which kind of a world do you want to live in? American-style justice or Tibetian-style compassion?
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