Woosh. Ok. Took a nice long break... and it was good.
I need to get warmed back up so just one short thing today:
Timothy McVeigh is dead. I am very much up in the air about the death penalty, frankly. The code-of-hammurabi part of me sees it as fitting... the crunchy-granola part of me says that execution lowers us to the level of those we are executing. I don't know. I suppose if I believed our justice system worked a little better than it does I would be more inclined to pick a side. As things stand now, though, I'm not convinced that justice is being served.
McVeigh is a particularly interesting case. Very generally speaking people that kill others fall in to some categories. I'm not sure if there is a word for those members of society that think it's alright to take lives for whatever reason... regardless, it seems a bit psychotic to me so that's how I will refer to them. Anyway, most of these psychotics are broken in big and unsubtle ways. They kill people for some kind of short-term reward. It's easy to see that someone's very messed up when they are killing people by hitting them on the head with a hammer or whatever. McVeigh, on the other hand, did not set out with the sole intention of killing people... although he had to know that would happen. He was a zealot. He apparently considered the loss of life an acceptable bargain and that's what lumps him in to this category.
I suppose I think it fitting that we murder psychotics... but I'm not sure. I hear a lot of talk about how the families of the victims would never get any closure (let's be real here.... revenge, please) if he was was not executed. I think that to some extent I find this sentiment a little more disturbing. I don't guess there's really that much choice, though. Keeping him in prison is a drain on our resources (especially with the FUBAR prison system), rehabilitation is quite frankly a joke, and we don't really have any other mechanisms in place.
I guess, in the end it's just a wash. We killed him... which is probably fitting in a very simple biological sense. Killing within your own species for whatever reason is NOT productive. In a much more emotional sense the pain surrounding the death of a loved one is one of the worst we face in our lives... there is some very primitive justice in that respect, I suppose. Those people who lost family members won't get them back because we killed him, though. *sigh* Talk about your lose-lose situation. To put it on the bottom-line: too many lives lost (his among them), some monetary cost (property damage, etc), and countless hours of society's time have gone down the toilet. Suck.
Well, so now that we, as a society, have footed this tremendous bill and martyred him anyone know what he was trying to say? I read some of the trial transcripts and I don't remember or think I really got it. Was it something important enough that we should maybe think about it now that all is said and done? I have my doubts but I'm curious. Before anyone gets up in arms about this please consider this: even if the message is written in blood (as this one very much is) don't you have to read it before you can pass judgement on it?
Saw Shrek recently. It was funny and cute. I am puzzled, though. What was their demographic here? It's too young for most teenagers and adults in a lot of ways and too old for most kids. *shrug* I liked it anyway.
I was reading through all of the online wrapups of the E3 show this year and all I have to say is WTF? Ya know.. I think pretty graphics are great and strippers never hurt anyone and ya need marketing to sell games but in all of this CRAP where is the gameplay? Just wondering.
Timothy Mc Veigh... There's a name that strikes a chord of discontent with me. I was listening to the radio the day he was executed and for some odd reason I felt like crying when I heard he was dead. I had this inexplicable urge to cry, but then I remembered the day of the bombing and watching it on channel 2 in utter disbelief. I remembered the footage of the bomb site that made me cry the hardest: An older man, in his late 50's, climbing down the fireman's ladder backwards with the look of a helpless child on his face. He was so completely ravaged by this single event that he had reverted to a childlike posture. McVeigh is the man that caused this. He caused the deaths of so many people as well as the destruction of so many lives, but I still felt the need to cry when we, as a society, killed him. I agree with Loop when he said that there are different types of psychotics out there. There are men like Dahmer who got off on seeing his victims die in front of his eyes, and then people like Mc Veigh who didn't have to see the look in his victims eyes as they died. But what kind of statement was McVeigh making? He was dissatisfied (to put it lightly) with the government and as a way of showing that, he killed his victims the same way that our military kills our "enemies." We can push a button and kill an entire building full of people, but we don't have to see them die. It's almost like playing Nintendo. All Timothy had to do was drive up the van, get out and let the chemicals take action. Does this mean we shouldn't have killed him? Nope... He deserved to die just as much as Dahmer did, but I wish it could have come from nice "prison justice" like Dahmer. So back to me feeling like I had to cry: I'm pretty sure that was because we martyred him. If he had died in obscurity no one would have thought much about him. Instead, the media turned this into a three ring circus and helped to make him a martyr. I heard that one reason the families of the victims wanted him to go ahead and die was so that they didn't have to wake up every morning and have to wonder if they were going to hear something that Tim said that was going to hurt them again. If the media had truly thought he was the monster that most of us think he is to some degree, they wouldn't have wanted to talk about it. I know I don't want to hear about Manson anymore and he's faded away into obscurity. That's what I feel should have happened to McVeigh, but at the same time, I'm glad there's no possible way he can ever do that again...