A Gnawing
December 9, 1999
7:43 a.m.
The state of Indiana put a man to death yesterday. I heard about it on the radio, just a passing story. My day was really busy. I had a meeting to discuss a new tool, and another to talk about a test plan for checking fixes we've made in another tool. And a meeting to sort through a server transition and to get the skinny on what I needed to be paying attention to in regard to transitioning the second tool to production. I had lots of stuff to do throughout the "quiet" times, too. I rewrote a story over lunch. I was surprised, though, to find my thoughts occasionally stray back to that radio broadcast. A man is dead. I'm not really a very political person. I don't follow the papers much. I have no idea what crime he performed. Maybe he's really guilty. Maybe he's not. I wouldn't know. I occasionally listen to various CDs at work, and in the silence between one of the songs, I thought of this man I didn't know. It was like his ghost was following me, getting under my skin. Let me say that I do believe capital punishment is a deterent to murder. Now, I'm sure you can find studies that will say it isn't. I can only speak for myself and my opinion, and note that I don't think being a deterent means it will really stop murder all the time. But I think most people will think twice about killing someone if they know they could lose their own life for it. I also know that a key word in that last sentence for a lot of people is "most." Still. Whether it's a deterence or not, I just kept coming back to the fact that the state has taken the life of a human being. I pay the salary of the people who did that. I'm not a religious person, either. I consider myself quite spiritual, but I've somehow found it difficult to handle about anything that tries to be an organized religion. More power to you if you manage it, I say. But religion as a process just bothers me. So I speak to my God in my own way, and I hope things work out all right for me. I don't believe it is right to take a man's life away. Yeah. I understand wars. I understand self-defense. I understand the need for justice. I understand the emotions and feelings of the people whose lives have been destroyed by the man who died last night. Yet ... I was thinking about it again as I drove home. It was dark, and the headlights were swooshing past me. The radio was playing music this time. No story. The man's been dead for nearly twenty-four hours. I paid the salary of the man who injected the man who is now dead. Capital punishment can't be the only deterence, can it? I think there has to be something better.   Many Thanks to Shannon Wendt for her award   All query. No answer. Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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