I’ve never
particularly bought into the standard liberal line, you see, nor do I do well
with the standard Puerto Rican line. Why? Because if you ask about the death
penalty here on the island, you will almost certainly be told: “only God can
take a life.”
Guys? Can
we just call it a theocracy and stop the pretense of separation of church and state?
I felt, for
most of my life, that there were some crimes so unspeakably heinous that a
nice, swift execution was the best thing to do. Consider these savory
characters, who come to you from Wikipedia’s article on Sister Helen Prejean:
In
addition to Sonnier, the account is based on the inmate Robert
Lee Willie who, with his
friend Joseph Jesse Vaccaro, raped and killed 18-year-old Faith Hathaway on May
28, 1980, eight days later kidnapping a Madisonville couple from alongside the
Tchefuncte River in Louisiana and driving them to Alabama. They raped the 16-year-old girl, Debbie
Morris (née Cuevas), who would later become the author of her book Forgiving
the Dead Man Walking[4] and then
stabbed and shot her boyfriend, 20-year-old Mark Brewster, leaving him tied to
a tree paralyzed from the waist down.
You’ll have
guessed—Sister Helen Prejean is the author of Dead Man Walking, and very likely you’ll have seen the movie. So it won’t be news to you—as it was to me—that Sister
Helen wrote Dead Man about her experiences with guys on death row. She
champions the abolition of the death penalty as ardently as the pope champions
priestly celibacy.
Here’s my
problem—I follow all the rules (well, mostly) and as a consequence am expected
to fork over 20% or so of my annual salary to the government. That money goes
to support guys who haven’t followed the rules, but who have committed crimes
that often have devastated the lives of innocent people. These people are
rotting in prison, doing nobody any good. Oh, and they don’t even want to be
there.
I
know—that’s not the way I’m supposed to think. But that 30 grand we spend annually
because “only God can take a life?” I’d really like to put that money to work
beefing up education, treating PTSD in our veterans, or supporting opera
companies. And those guys on death row? Well, couldn’t they be doing
something?
Am I
arguing for the return of the chain
gang?
Look, it
makes more sense than what we’re doing now….
OK—let’s
back this car up.
One of the
things about a blogger’s life is that you have to go sifting around, looking for
things to write about, and then things get tied together in ways that you don’t
expect. Because I had been watching—for reasons I no longer remember—a
remarkable video of an interview with Stephen Levine, who for many years worked with dying
people. And one of the stories he told was of an angry, bitter woman—a woman
who had driven everyone away.
It was a
problem—the woman was so negative, so hostile, that the nurses had to force themselves
to work with her. But it was hardly just the nurses; her own daughters were
estranged from her, and wanted nothing to do with her, even though she was
dying.
One
daughter, however, took on the challenge: could she go and sit down at her
mother’s deathbed and, with an open heart, accept her mother as she was. Could she wish her well? Could she—if
not forgive—at least move away from what Levine calls a “business model” of
human relationships? You give me love and nurturing and I’ll give you love back.
You hurt me and I’m outta here….
So the
daughter—a Zen Buddhist, and she’d have to be—sat and let her mother into her
heart, without expecting or asking or even wanting her mother to change. Which
was fortunate, since on the day of the mother’s death, she looked at her child
and said, “I hope you have the most miserable life ever!”
Levine’s
point? The daughter had done what she did for herself, not for her mother. The
daughter didn’t want to carry the anger, the bitterness around forever. And so
she had endured abuse up until the very end—in order to free herself of it.
As you’ll
see in the clip below, Dead Man Walking became an opera as well, and I can tell you that because, in my
nightly forage for carbohydrates, I found myself eating jellybeans and
watching—who else?—Joyce DiDonato.
I might as
well confess it—I am electronically stalking DiDonato. How bad has the obsession
become? Well, fully as bad as last year’s obsession with Martha Argerich,
and to tell you how bad that was, I give you the fact that the computer
has not put a red squiggle under Argerich. The computer, you see, not only
knows perfectly well who she is, but is totally bored with it.
Oh—another
fact. I’m so desperate for any new video of Didonato that I watched an
interview of her in French. And when was the last time I spoke French? Well, let’s
see, I graduated from High School in ’74….
So there I
was, looking at Joyce Didonato and Jake
Heggie talking about their upcoming—well, as of two
years ago—Carnegie Hall recital. And you know what? I am not going to
introduce the computer to Heggie, because I don’t like him.
OK—be fair,
I’m envious because, besides being handsome, intelligent, way-talented, and
having his opera Dead Man Walking presented over 40 times in five continents—I
mean, how much stuff can one have in life—he’s also a friend of Joyce DiDonato.
But here’s
where I’m at: if I were the relative, the father of a murdered child, how would
I react? Impossible to say—but here’s what I’d hope.
I hope—like
the daughter of the bitter mother—that I’d forgive, that I’d say no to the
hatred and the desire for vengeance. But on a societal level?
Damn, still
haven’t figured it out….
