Of course, it is easy to think we can end this horrifying cycle by a few more killings, in the form of a few select assassinations, but in reality this would only be perpetuating the cycle of violence. You know as well as I do that new cockroaches would fill the void. As one commentator noted, "Assassinating these criminals is like trying to cure smallpox by shaving off the pustules -- it's just makes things worse and spreads the disease around."
Another thoughtful commentator offered this alternative: "How about life imprisonment with high visibility so they can serve as a good bad examples? That would also allow them to see how the history of their administration is taught to school children!" To which I say, "Bless your heart, Sir; you have warmed my heart!"
Surely we must get control and refrain from our more primoridal evolutionary urges to end this tragic cycle by yet more tragedy. Violence begets violence. It always has and it always will. An eye for an eye eventually brings us to no more eyes. Even a blind person can see that much.
Three: We need these human cockroaches in prison for several rather pragmatic reasons. In addition to being examples for our children, as noted above, I should think we would all get more personal satisfaction from seeing these thugs have to suffer until their natural death, rather than putting them out of their misery. Why do them the favor of ending their misery? Let them live with what they have done, and in a manner similar to what they have deemed acceptable for so many others. Also, behavioral psychologists might learn much from studying these unique specimens, and perhaps we could see to it that no more children ever experience whatever they did growing up.
Four: We should not assassinate these creeps for the same reason we shouldn't kill bin Laden (as someone else pointed out). We don't need a martyr for the wrong cause. Which is what an assassination would make them.
Five: To join the mad fray is to lose hope. And I think this is the main reason one should not assassinate. C.P. Snow once wrote, "Despair is a sin." Yes, it is. I'm not sure how to avoid it sometimes, but with a little bit of will power we can simply refuse to give in and act on it.
The opposite of despair, hope, is indeed hard to hang onto or generate sometimes. But we must make the effort, and never stop making that effort. We must hang on to hope, even in the darkest of times, that somehow, someway, in the unknown future, our laws will somehow work; we must hold out hope that we humans can actually behave in a civilized manner (indeed, most of us do, most of the time); we must retain our hope for a brighter future, and not lose hope that our children will see a world without violence; we must hope that we humans will learn to live with each other and with the natural world that sustains us, in the very near future. Given that no less than millions of people all over the world are already working hard on this-generally without making headlines-and that untold millions of others want this-I am usually able to find some hope even in the darkest of hours.
Another commentator wrote: "We need a revolution. Assassinating someone will do nothing if you leave the same social system in place. Devote your efforts to electing a government that WILL make the United States a country where there REALLY IS liberty and justice for all."
I like that, but I would also point out that we already are in a revolution. A very real one, one that we have been in since birth, and will be in till we die. It's called the revolution of the earth around the sun, and it's the most real revolution we'll ever have. We need to wake up to that and to the simple fact that we ain't goin' nowhere, except around and around that nuclear furnace we call Old Sol.
Charles Darwin made a beautiful reference to this revolution in editions two through six of The Origin of Species: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."
If people could wake up to this simple truth, we just might begin to convert this little spaceship into one that-without violence-we could all live happily on and tidy up, while we learn to appreciate the unfathomable grandeur that is indeed all around us.
Footnote for peaceful warriors: I woke up at 3:30 because I had gone to bed too early-and I did that because I couldn't rent the video I wanted-all twenty copies of this new release were sold out (blessed be Utahns!). The title of the video, with Nick Nolte, is "Peaceful Warrior." I saw one scene from it, where Nick, a counselor of some sort, is teaching a young man how to "live in the now," by tossing him off a bridge. The enraged young fellow splashes out of the water and shouts at him, "You're out of your mind!" To which Nick says something like, "That's right. And I've spent my whole life getting that way."
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