Bad Guys

What about bad guys?

That's the rebuttal in my head to my post on the immorality of the death penalty. What about people who commit truly heinous acts and have no remorse? What about those people who have chosen evil as a way of life? Don't they deserve to die? Wouldn't society be better off without them?

There are people in this world who have chosen the path of evil. These are the people who, like the southerners say, "need killin'." I can buy that on both an emotional and intellectual level--that certain people will never change and to protect us from them, they need to be removed from our midst.

Still, I can't quite embrace the death penalty, for two reasons. First, I can't ever seem to let go of the hope of redemption for sinners. Like Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in A Vindication of The Rights of Men, "No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks." I hold onto hope for the possibility of reform, of healing what is broken in someone who has chosen evil as his good. If we kill the evil doer, there is no possibility of healing.

Second, I still think that those who commit violence, even to protect the innocent, suffer a cost. I feel protective of those who protect us--the soldiers, police officers and other first responders who put themselves in harms way so the rest of us don't have to. It's an uneasy relationship I have with people in these professions. I'm not sure I would willingly take their place unless forced to by circumstance, yet I am grateful for the relative safety they help provide while feeling guilty for the mark of Cain it leaves on them.

Cain, if you remember your Bible, killed his brother and was forever marked by God as an outcast. While not everyone has an uneasy a relationship with the enforcers of the peace, those who "protect and serve" the public often find themselves feeling alienated, misunderstood and sometimes mistrusted by the very people they have pledged to protect. They can feel like outcasts from the very civilization they are trying to sustain, while their own standards of behavior blur to resemble that of the criminals and terrorists they fight against, leaving the rest of us to recoil in horror.

Clint Eastwood made a brilliant study of this aspect of our society in his movie, Unforgiven. I hate violent movies but I totally recommend this one. He explores how a society both depends on and recoils from the people who use force to protect it, and the cost of that violence to their humanity. He also shows how the more downtrodden and powerless members of society are, the more they rejoice in vigilante justice, especially when directed at corrupt stakeholders in the power structures.

It's really an endless cycle. The rebel succeeds in his revolution and becomes the next tyrant to be brought down by the next rebel. It's that cycle I think Jesus was trying to break when he talked about "turning the other cheek." Nevada Barr, the mystery writer and odd Christian writes in her memoir on faith (that I can't remember the name of) that Jesus meant that in turning the other cheek we are saying we will not retaliate, that the violence ends here.

I guess I believe in that principle. I've heard it said that while violence can stop aggression, it can't bring about peace. So, while the death penalty can stop one violent person's life, it won't stop the cycle of violence in our societies or make them peaceful. It is peace I hope for, for all of us clinging to this planet that is the only home we'll ever know. I've also heard it said that all violence is family violence. To execute a criminal is to kill our brother, and even if he "needed killin'," I think it still leaves the mark of Cain on each of us.