Last night I heard an interview with a nun who wrote a book called "Dead Man Walking". In the interview she described her experience of providing support to a man who had been sentenced to death in Louisiana, right up to the point where he was executed.
Two points came out of this interview for me.
The first came out of something the man said as they were walking together to the execution. He said, it seems strange that he had to go to prison, to be sentenced to death, to find someone who loved him the way this nun did, in a way that meant she promised to sit by him until the very end, to be the last thing he saw. (He didn't want her to stay - he didn't want her to be scarred for life by seeing him die.) I wondered about that. There are so many people in the world, and yet so many of us feel unwanted, unloved. Yet these things are transformative. They can make the difference to the life of an abandoned child, a discarded pet, a dead man walking. Why is it that it is often only in extremes that we find these things? Where are they in the every day, where they would make the difference between abandonment, discard and death?
The second was the question of who it is that bears responsibility for the gruesome death to which that man was put. You might say that it was his responsibility, or rather his fault, for doing something bad enough that he was awarded such a penalty. Or you might say it was the responsibility of the people who strapped him into the chair and flicked the switch. Or those who raised or failed to raise the man properly. Or the legislators who allow such things to happen. Or the lobbyists who successfully have such laws enacted. Or the media who whip the public into a frenzy over the issue. Or maybe it is the fault of all these people. But here is the problem - if they all bear responsibility - if responsibility is so diffused among them that most of them don't feel it, don't even realise it's happening, aren't (ironically) directly accountable for their action - it doesn't feel right, but what do we do with it? It's like those who would be vegetarian if they had to kill their own meat, but because they don't they happily eat chicken burgers and beef steak and drink the milk and eat the eggs for which thousands of animals suffered. That's the problem today - we are so beautifully sanitised from the effects of the evil that we do that many of us don't know that we're doing it and so continue in the same old way, happily avoiding the ugliness we created or at least failed to stop...