Stoopid Stuff

Killing Tookie

On December 13th, Stanley "Tookie" Williams is scheduled to die by way of lethal injection in the death chamber in San Quentin prison. Our government is spending my tax dollars to kill a man who will never see a day of freedom no matter what, who counsels children not just to avoid gangs and violence, but offers them real practical advice on how to extricate themselves from a gang once they have decided they no longer wish to participate. This is a horrendous problem on two levels--One, the so-called "view from 50,000 feet", and the other, the view from street level.

There is no doubt that Tookie Williams is a bad guy. The co-founder of the Los Angeles Crips street gang, one could make the case that he helped create the "gangsta" culture so popular in American Inner City slums. There can be no doubt that in his life he has done much harm, hurt many people and caused much suffering. The question one must ask is now, finding ourselves where we are, what should we do about that? Will killing Tookie make the world a better place, or could a larger contribution to the general good be served by allowing him to live out his life in captivity, doing what good he can to offset the evil he did earlier in his life.

First, on the larger view, I am wholly and completely against the death penalty. It is appalling that in 2005, our government still indulges in barbaric acts of pointless revenge, shouting from the highest mountaintops that "Killing is WRONG" and then enforcing that message by killing. This is killing another human we're talking about, a rather serious act in anybody's book, so we'd better take it seriously and examine it honestly. It can be explained in no other way than as revenge, the ultimate revenge of society upon one deemed no longer fit to live among us. Oh, we use all kinds of code words, like closure and getting on with our lives, but it is truly nothing more than the most violent, base revenge. When one talks about "cold blooded murder", surely there is no more cold blooded act than an execution. We know what day, what hour, and by what method Tookie will die. We know who will kill him, who will be there, and what we will say about it. If a murderer on trial was shown to have this level of premeditation, this level of Malice Aforethought, the prosecuting attorney, in his summation, would call this the coldest, most viscious, most heinous crime he had ever seen. And yet, it is he who is committing it.

The way our system is arranged, it is neither cheaper nor more efficient to kill a prisoner than it is to incarcerate him for life. Capital Punishment is neither a deterrent nor an effective rehabilitation method. In fact, when you think about it, it is only one thing that life imprisonment is not--irreversible. If you have held a man in prison for, say, 12 years and you then discover that he is innocent, you can release him, pay him reparations and help him start his life over again. And as it has been shown time and time again, our system of jurisprudence is neither 100% accurate nor even 100% honest. Why should we allow our government to take the risk of murdering an innocent man in our name, ever, when it serve NO purpose under the sun?

But Tookie's case is special, even in the world of Capital Punishment. You see, Tookie is doing GOOD. He is making a real, genuine, measurable difference in the lives of kids all over the country. He is not spending his time in prison trying to beat the system, taking drugs, fighting, or even spending a lot of effort on his own legal issues. He writes childrens books that speak clearly, to them, about the choices they must make if they live in a place like South Central LA. He has made a small, but genuine contribution to the reduction of violence in our cities. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, he has done bad, but now he's doing good.

So now we have a choice. We could leave him where he is, locked up for the rest of his life, to do as much good as he can do from where he is, offsetting in whatever little way the harm he has caused. Or we can kill him. Stop the good. End any contrbution that he is uniqely qualified and completely willing to make. Kill him, burn the body, scatter the ashes, salt the earth. But I ask you: Where is the wisdom in that? To put it even more coldly, where is the cost/benefit analysis? What do we get if we kill him? What do we get if we let him live?

While it is beyond all understanding why we are confronted with this dillema in the twenty first century, when this sort of barbarism and arbitrary governmental behavior should have been left in the dustbin of history, confronted we are. And let us make no mistke--his blood will be on all of our hands if we allow this. Its time to tell our leaders that we'd prefer they use our tax dollars to protect us, not kill us. And that means locking people up when they commit unacceptable acts. But as we like to say, killing is an unacceptable act. And voluntarily ending a life being spent on the public good is more than illogical--it is bad government.

posted by mikey @ 8:50 PM 2 comments

Willie Pete

Now, I love to see this administration taking it's lumps for their brutal, criminal actions in Iraq. But unlike them, I insist on using facts, not made-up interpretations. It's an imaginary and very dubious assertion that White Phospherous is a Chemical Weapon, as we have come to understand the term. Look, pretty much ALL weapons are made from chemicals. High Explosives are nothing but chemicals that react "energetically" to certain conditions. A ballistic projectile, whether a rifle round or an artillery shell, is launched on its parabolic path by the energy created when some version of gunpowder "deflagrates" and creates the energy that pushes the round down the barrel. Chemicals themselves make up pretty much everything we use as weapons of war, so the fact that a weapon is comprised primarilly of "chemicals" cannot in and of itself make it a "Chemical Weapon".

It is also true that we do not outlaw "Chemical Weapons" primarly because of their horrific effects on human beings. I keep hearing how White Phospherous is a horrible weapon because it burns the skin off babies. Yes, that's horrible. But a 500 pound aerial bomb dropped on that same house that blows off the same baby's leg, causing the baby to die slowly, in cold shock, terror and pain by way of exsanguination is, to my way of thinking, equivelently horrific. Weapons are weapons. They hurt, maim and kill. And dead, ultimately, is dead.

No, we outlaw and proscribe the use of what we have classified as "Chemical Weapons" not due to their horrific effects, which are undeniable, but due to their indiscrimenate nature. A rifle round, an artillery shell, an antitank rocket, even an incindiery like White Phospherous, is targetted at a specific area. Even if it misses that area, it's effects are confined to a limited area. When true chemical weapons are used, be they irritants like Tear Gas, Blister agents like Mustard and Phosgene or lethal agents like VX and Sarin, their effects cannot be controlled. There is no way to confine their effects to a limited target. Once they are released, there is nothing anyone can do to control or mitigate their effects. At the mercy of meteorological variations at the smallest level, these horrble weapons can drift into civilian areas, causing tremendous suffering. The other reason the world recoiled in horror from the use of chemical weapons in WWI was the horrible physical effects on the survivors. The sores, the infections, the blindness, the respratory damage, the pain and misery suffered by litterally thousands of survivors caused the world to back away from the use of these weapons.

But ask yourself one thing. The amputations, the burns, the incredible physical and emotional damage done to combatants and civilians alike in warfare, aren't these horrible things also? Put another way, if the chemical weapons used in WWI were more discriminate, more controllable, more effective, with most of their victims buried rather than hospitalized, would we have had the same reaction to these weapons? Probably not.

My main point here is not that Willy Pete is a good thing. It's that ALL weapons are a bad thing. When I say killing is killing and dead is dead, I'm not encouraging killing. I'm saying that those people who rail against the use of White Phospherous or Napalm or Cluster Bombs are missing the real issue. We need to stop shooting. In Iraq, all of our killing is wrong. If our security as Americans was truly threatened, I don't think we'd hesitate to use anything at our disposal to protect ourselves. But here is a case where we needlessly invaded a sovereign nation and are occupying it under force of arms. WE ARE THE PROBLEM. It's not that we should stop using White Phospherous, or dropping bombs, or shooting machine guns. We need to get out. Now. We are the reason for the killing, the target of the killing, and the source of the killing. We are no more right in shooting a civilian with an M16 than we are wrong firing a round of Willy Pete into a bunker.

Iraq is a waste of lives, and of treasure. Every death there is a murder, as horrible as a murder can possibly be. And all that blood is on the hands of the American Administration. It is not a specific weapon that is somehow evil, it is the military occupation and use of force altogether that is evil. You can't blame our soldiers for using whatever is available to them to fight to protect their lives and each other. And you can't blame our leadership merely for the use of White Phospherous weapons, or for torture of detainees, or of political and economic manipulation. They are responsible for the whole disaterous mess, and MUST be held accountable.

posted by mikey @ 7:50 PM 1 comments