“The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword…”

Whispers of Satan

“…If you would take a man’s life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.”

“A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is”

— Eddard Stark. Game of Thrones, by George RR Martin

This is one of the most powerful quotes I have read in my entire life. It has influenced much of my views and thoughts on bravery, hypocrisy, and cowardice. To think that every day we cower behind people to do our dirty work. To think that we are all hypocrites in this way: too afraid to do what we think is right with our own hands. To think that we watch bombs drop day and night on people across the globe and call it legitimate, while too afraid…

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“The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword…”

“…If you would take a man’s life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.”

“A ruler who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is”

— Eddard Stark. Game of Thrones, by George RR Martin

This is one of the most powerful quotes I have read in my entire life. It has influenced much of my views and thoughts on bravery, hypocrisy, and cowardice. To think that every day we cower behind people to do our dirty work. To think that we are all hypocrites in this way: too afraid to do what we think is right with our own hands. To think that we watch bombs drop day and night on people across the globe and call it legitimate, while too afraid to do it ourselves. If we cannot bear to bring death to others with our own two hands , then perhaps those we think are worthy of death do not deserve to die.

Unless Obama was willing to explode a young teenager with his dad knowing that that was the only way to kill his father. Unless Bush was willing to shoot everyone of the hundreds of thousands people his pawns shot with his own AK-47: the innocent women, children, cripples, and clergymen that had no involvement in anything or no inclinations to violence. Unless President Bashar Al-Assad took chemical weapons with his own hands to fight the rebels of his country, or unless Mao Zedong lit fire to villages with his own matches….perhaps those people did not deserve to die.

The thousands that have been executed under our court systems, many of which died because of racism, failed court rules, or mistreatment from society, were executed behind paid executioners. The judges and the juries that sentenced them, perhaps, have forgotten what death is. The American Presidents that ordered massacres of villages and assassinations of children, perhaps, have forgotten what death is, just like the British Prime Ministers or the Saudi Arabian Kings. People like you and I, who voted in favor of this war or the other, or served in the military of this country or that: perhaps we have forgotten what death is.

Let’s not play the blame game, or equate this political leader to that one. Let’s not fight over things that happened decades ago or judge people for decisions you and I couldn’t make better. But let us remember. If you would take a man’s life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.

And I don’t know about you, but I cannot bear to do that.

Can’t Catch me, I’m the George Zimmerman!

Can’t Catch me, I’m the George Zimmerman!

What I say here might sound controversial (but nowhere near as controversial as stuff I may say later), but I hope you can get past emotions and see what I am actually trying to say.I recommend you read my last post on the Zimmerman Trial before reading this one.

What our justice system decided was that Zimmerman was innocent: of all charges. You can protest it all you want, but that was the verdict the jury decided. The jury that sat there for weeks on end, and debated for hours on end, and arrived at a conclusion, unanimously. Death threats do nothing. Torturing a man for the rest of his life – a man who has been declared free by the people who really know what happened – is horrendous. We can protest the verdict all we want, but we cannot change it. To take justice into our own hands is like giving a gun to a child: crazy.

Just as I sympathize with the family of Trayvon Martin, who has handled this situation with an incredible amount of tact and dignity, I sympathize with the family of George Zimmerman: a family that most surely thinks their relative is innocent (whether or not he is…). To torture a man for his entire life based upon your preconceptions is ludicrous. To do so is to dishonor the name of Trayvon Martin. How we act based on what has happened must be done in remembrance of who it happened to. Should we want justice, we must fight the laws that refuse to deliver it. We cannot end justice in the name of justice.

In light of Trayvon Martin

The tragic case of Trayvon Martin we’ve all heard about has spurned an extraordinary discussion on the inner racial tensions in this country. The President himself highlighted this point in his speech, but I wish he emphasized how the law played out in this case. The trial went on for over 4 weeks, and the jurors that heard it spent 14 hours discussing it behind close doors…who else has spent that much time with it? Every one of the jurors came back with the same decision: innocence for Zimmerman. There simply wasn’t enough evidence, and I liked how one person I heard said it: every witness to the case is either dead or biased. That in itself also highlights something that no one seems to be talking about: the failures of the American court system. Granted, I’m no lawyer, and one of the prosecutors of the case in a press conference admitted the mistakes of our system, but defend it as the best in the world. I think I could agree with that. How to fix a system where so much bias exists is a challenge, and I wouldn’t know where to start to accommodate for the failures of man. On an off note, the jury system is something that has also always baffled me. I certainly wouldn’t trust the justice for the death of my child to a random selections of six Americans…would you? But then again, would I trust justice to some old white guy that has never been out of a gated community in his life if I was from the hood? That’s another challenge for our system.

 

But back on to race: how important is it, really, to this trial? I find it difficult to believe that Zimmerman just shot Martin because he was black. Certainly, Zimmerman profiled him. He followed him, and the phone tapes show that he was an obvious racist. But what happened that night is speculative, and the thousands of protestors around this country have probably no better speculations than me. I think it much less fair to call out the jurors as racists. The prosecutors spent some serious time picking 3 of those jurors…why? Those prosecutors weren’t stupid. They had reasons. The media probably won’t just say, because when does the media ever explain things properly? That said, I don’t think protesting the trial changes anything at all. The protestors need to ask themselves: does screaming and flailing your signs around on the streets change racial tensions? There are better ways that they should involve themselves with. The justice system has decided, and there isn’t much else it can do.