Helping no one, diminishing all

How many people have you seen die in your life? Not many, if you’re lucky. Maybe you were present at the bedside of a dying loved one. Or maybe you’ve witnessed terrible things. We’re soft, compared to a lot of things that whir and rip in the world. Maybe you’ve seen horrors.

I know what I’ve seen. Just the aftermath of carnage. Just the eerie stillness of the fresh corpse. Not the moment of crossing over. Not the extinguishing act itself. I’ve seen murder victims and suicides and a man who was mangled when an airplane landed on top of his sleeping bag. I never wanted to witness an execution. Maybe that wasn’t brave of me. Maybe I should have been willing to watch, to fill up a notebook with poignant details. To notice the light—or lack of it—in the eyes of the condemned.

We’ve all seen killing simulated tens of thousands of times on various screens. And not simulated on the news. If you want to see someone die, there’s always YouTube. We have these urges in us, eros and thanatos—we’re fascinated with sex and death. Some of us really want to look. So we get snuff films. We get a pornography of death. We’re sophisticated that way.

Maybe our brains can’t really tell the difference between what is real and what’s simulated, between what’s happening in front of us and what’s happening in two dimensions on a screen at a remove in time and space. Maybe the exposure works on us, inures us to the horror. You can get used to the idea of killing; like the old gunslingers (who never existed) say in the movies, the first one is always the toughest one.

We evolve. We’re better at killing now than we used to be. In World War II a lot of soldiers had trouble trying to kill the enemy. Experts estimate that only around 20 percent of the troops fired their weapons in battle. Our military folks found this to be a problem. And by the time of the Vietnam conflict, 95 percent of American soldiers were firing their weapons during combat.

How did the military improve the firing rate? By teaching soldiers not to think of the enemy as human. Instead, they trained them to think of them as targets. They didn’t practice their marksmanship by shooting at bull’s-eyes but by firing at human figures that flopped over when hit. They were given a language of euphemism; they were not “killing” other men like themselves, they were “engaging an enemy target.” Much of the clinical, technical jargon of Vietnam was an intentional device to detach soldiers from the reality of what they were doing, to remove the emotional component of battle, to overcome the natural psychic resistance to killing, to bust the taboo. Turns out, human beings are pretty malleable. Those same techniques of desensitization— these ways of operant conditioning—are at work in our society at large. If you spend hours watching people being killed, maybe your natural disinclination to kill weakens a little. If you spend hours attending to shout shows where people attribute the worst motives to anyone who disagrees with them, maybe you start to take a Manichean view of the world. If you spend hours on social media, maybe you adopt the gruff grammar of the troll.

If you spend hours playing realistic video games where you hold a weapon that kicks in your hand when you “fire” it, where realistic human forms drop, twitch and bleed at your synaptic command, you’re mimicking and rehearsing murder.

Sure, it’s not the same thing. Intellectually you and I know that. But does your lizard brain?

To live in civilized society is to be a hypocrite. I’m not saying don’t do what you want to do. I’m saying maybe think about it. We are what we do, and what we do is profoundly influenced by the images and ideas we consume. Consider how you may be changed by what you expose yourself to, what you allow your kids to be exposed to. Death is where we’re all headed; it’s an intractable fact. It’s what makes life precious. We shouldn’t cheapen it.

I know I’m not going to change anybody’s mind. If your mind is going to change, it’s going to be because you gather enough courage to reconsider beliefs you consider self-evident. And you may be right: Some people don’t deserve to live. This world manufactures monsters none of us should have to abide. But this isn’t about them. This is about the rest of us, and the way we can make the world a little better, a little less fascinated with killing. It’s about sparing the people charged with carrying out these fast-tracked executions, about eliminating the possibility that something will go wrong with the procedure. (No one here has participated in this ritual in more than 10 years— everybody’s rusty.)

It’s about choosing not to indulge in retribution, to deny ourselves whatever small catharsis is available in strapping a person—who, as corrupt and criminal their actions, is in that moment helpless—to a gurney and administering a problematic cocktail of drugs designed to stop a heart.

I’m not saying the state has no right to take an individual’s life (though it’s chilling to think how blithely some would grant it that right). But I live in the real world and know no action is without consequence. There are reasons that some populations are imprisoned and executed at higher rates than others, there are reasons that our criminal justice system works better for some than others.

There are reasons it’s getting more difficult to obtain the drugs used to end lives.

There are reasons so much of the world is horrified by the carnival of killing our governor has proposed.

There are reasons they have trouble getting volunteers to witness these acts.

An execution doesn’t make anything better. It diminishes and desensitizes the society that carries it out. It makes us crueler and meaner.

Maybe, if you’re the governor of a state like Arkansas, you figure you have to kill people, because even though you understand that soon, maybe decades, maybe sooner, we’re going to follow the lead of every other nation we’d call fair and just and discontinue the ritualistic death-dealing, people won’t vote for you if you don’t. Maybe you don’t think you can afford to be brave.

I understand. I wasn’t brave either. And I’m not running for anything.