pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SITUATIONAL ETHICS? Someone once remarked that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. My friend Leigh got mugged leaving work Wednesday night. A large man rushed her as she walked to her car, grabbed her purse, and started punching her in the face. She tried to fight back, but she's a small woman with scant upper-body strength. She is also an actor who knows how to project though, and so she screamed . . . and tried to run away . . . and pounded on her office door . . . and screamed some more . . . until she finally managed to break free and run. She eventually made it back inside, but her jaw is broken, one eye is swollen shut, one side of her forehead has a huge, painful-looking goose egg on it, and her opposing shoulder is scraped and badly bruised. Her lawyer husband cannot bear the thought of one of his colleagues defending her attacker and so wants the attacker's lawyer appointed from another district. (If they find her attacker, that is.) On Thursday, a bunch of us met Leigh and Pete at a pub where local actors hang out. We celebrated her escape, shared some drinks, and offered support as she tries to adjust to living in a different world. Leigh counsels addicts and is fairly certain that her attacker is a client in her building. She went into counseling because she wanted to make a difference but, these days, she just feels jaded. Most of her clients never escape their addictions and their children grow up just as damaged as they are. She works grueling hours on a state employee's salary and cares enough to stay late in an effort to be sure that all of her files are current (hence, her leaving the building after everyone else had gone home). But, these days, she has resigned herself to the fact that she will probably not make a difference in most of her clients' lives. Dennis, who works with Leigh, said he used to be a card-carrying liberal who opposed the death penalty in all cases until he heard about the local teenager who pounded a claw hammer into an old lady's skull just so he could steal her finned Cadillac and show it off to his pals. He says he has met too many people like that boy-child who have no qualms about killing another human being for a joyride, and has come to doubt their humanity (although he recognizes that the particulars of their worlds may not have provided the possibility of much humanity). These days, in such cases, he believes that, if the evidence is overwhelming and the murderer is found guilty by a true jury of his or her peers, then we ought to just give the foreperson a gun and get it over with. (Wonder what he will do with the fact that, yesterday, SCOTUS abolished the death penalty for minors?) A colleague at a peace and justice organization where I worked during graduate school spearheaded an umbrella group that worked to free Mumia and end the death penalty, and she and the radical priests and nuns and I spent many hours talking about our beliefs, our experiences in the world, why we believe what we do and lend our time and money and energy to what we do. And I was the only one of us who could not say with absolute conviction that I am one hundred percent opposed to the death penalty. I struggle with this issue and we talked about my struggle a great deal. I understand that our justice system is blatantly racist, that innocent people are executed not because they are guilty, but because they were born poor and desperate and have so few options. I understand that guilty people who can afford unlimited representation often get away with murder because they can afford to fund spot-the-overlooked-technicality research. And I know that plenty of people are in jail because they grew up angry about a world that they have every right to be angry about and then became the embodiment of that Audre Lorde poem that describes the angry, disaffected teenager who becomes ticking time bombs that come due. I know there is money to be made from prison privatization and that locking up whole segments of the population is a despicable form of social control that is allowed to happen because, as a society, we have decided that some people are expendable. I know that plenty of people perpetuate this fucked system because those privatization dollars pay the mortgage payments on the houses they purchase in some gated community. But here's my problem with being one hundred percent opposed to the death penalty: I have listened to cassette tapes of a woman being raped and tortured to death and have stared across the room at the man who did this to her—a man who wore a pink Mork and Mindy T-shirt and who, in another circumstance, might be the guy pulling up behind one of us at an otherwise abandoned all-night gas station where we are filling up. And I observed his victim's autopsy. This man had already served a seven-year sentence for kidnapping a nurse and cutting her nipples off with a butcher knife. And he had only been out of prison a few weeks when he kidnapped the woman whose autopsy I observed—a woman whose body he left in a field for the wild dogs to find. This man was fascinated with pain and tape-recorded her pleas and screams and sobs and hiccups as he raped her. And then he cut off her digits one knuckle at a time before skinning her alive. That was apparently not enough pain for him though, so he then poured salt onto her exposed subskin and recorded her response as she lay there gasping and howling and screaming and sobbing and hiccuping and bleeding to death in that field. Later, he lay in bed listening to what he'd done to her and several other women, remembering. Because of happenstance, this monster and I wound up sitting across the room from each other in the ER. He was sitting in an orange plastic chair, handcuffed, and, like I said, he was wearing a Mork and Mindy T-shirt. And I recognized his eyes. They are the same eyes that I saw on too many people when I visited my mother in the violent wards of the state mental hospital. Goat eyes. One-dimensional. Eyes gone flat. Dead eyes. Dangerous eyes. Those eyes scare the living shit out of me—especially when I see them on people walking down a public street. Some people on the violent wards are obsessed with their excrement and hurl it against the bars or fingerpaint the walls with it. They bang their heads into the bars until they are put into straitjackets, bark and howl and reach through the bars for you as you walk by. And, in some cases, after who knows what the world or biology did to them—as is the case with the Paul Coons and Jeffrey Dahmers of the world—whatever it is that makes most of us compassionate, empathetic human beings appears is just plain gone. Maybe their violence is an outward projection of self hate or hate for their parents or for a society that abandoned them—internalized or displaced anger—or maybe their genetic makeup determines who they become. Whatever the source, what they lack is connection. Instead, they embody what seems to be an unquenchable will to violence. And, if someone is unfortunate enough to encounter these people at an inopportune time, then she or he will become the next victim. The first things early colonists did when they settled new worlds were build a church and a jail. The colonists recognized how fragile communities are and the necessity of creating institutions that sustain and protect our fragile human connections. They also recognized that some acts are so damaging to these connections that the people who commit these acts must be separated in order to protect everyone else. (Of course, they also accused women of being witches and drowned our asses, but just bear with me for a few more lines here. . . . ) Seventeenth-century Western literature, written at a time when one world view was displacing another, fascinates me because I believe that we live in the midst of a similar paradigm shift. My studies and the fact that I am a poet sometimes cause me to think in symbols and microcosms. I imagine our country as one such microcosm, a single fragile colony of interconnected, disparate individuals existing in a fragile, destructible world where the violent results of such crimes can potentially untune our whole friggin' spheres.
My sometime objection to the complete elimination of the death penalty has nothing to do with revenge or the cost-to-profit ratio of the appeals process versus permanent incarceration or the psychological study of what destroys the human component in the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world. Instead, I worry about the potential annihilator in the rest of us. I worry that the risk a torturer's potential escape poses to our society, the potential havoc that it can wreak on our fragile connections, on our faith, is too great a threat for us to allow for that possibility. 9:17 a.m. - 2005-03-02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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