Don't Blame Me...

Yesterday I had the joy of driving all the way from my town in RI to Sturbridge, MA to pick up the youngest. What made the trip so great was having lunch at an Applebee’s. I don’t think I have had a worse lunch in a long time. I tried to play it safe with a soup and salad combo but the basil tomato soup tasted as if it were the leftover sauce from a Chef Boyardee can (this is not a good thing), and the spinach salad was so coated with oil and some other mystery substance that all of the leaves of spinach clumped together as if they were one. Bleh!

I read an article from a back issue of Newsweek about the guilt of an executioner. A major thrust of the article was that every time he killed someone who was then exonerated (to little to late) he felt that he was a murderer. Now, if we look at the idea of sin and responsibility, where does it fall?

Some may say that ultimately the executioner is to blame because he is the one who pushed the button (so to speak). Yet what of the judges and lawyers who pushed for the individual to be executed? Should they be held culpable as well? What of the detectives and other police forces who did not do a thorough enough investigation to find out all of the fact? What about the people, the lawmakers who pushed for a death penalty in that state? What about the people who voted for someone to keep the death penalty (or reinstate it)? What about the tax payers whose dollars support the death machine used to kill the convict?

Girard (yeah, him again) makes the point that the prison system has in large part taken the scapegoat out of the system, punishes people, and keeps a kind of calm in society. Albeit it is a faux calm, it is a calm nonetheless. But let us return to the question of blame.

We are all to blame, unless we move to a state that does not support a death penalty. Kidding. We are all to blame because we all are a part of the system whether we like it or not. If that is the case, then whenever an innocent person is executed we are all murders.

Yikes, that is a fairly macabre way to end!