Living By the Sword

Yesterday marked an important anniversary in the United Kingdom.  It was on August 13, 1964, that the British abolished capital punishment. Today, the death penalty has been abolished in much of the world.  But not here.  The United States is the only industrialized country that (whenever a sentence starts with those nine words, you know it's going to be something bad!) engages in the spectacularly barbaric practice of killing people who kill people to prove that killing people is wrong.

Meanwhile, in Ferguson, Missouri, an unidentified member of the police force of Ferguson, Missouri is charged with killing Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, with an investigation pending.  The overwhelmingly white police department's refusal to identify the officer has the black-majority town (a black-majority town with a white-majority police force?  In what parallel universe does a situation like that produce peace and harmony?)  up in arms, with protests sparking violent riots, despite appeals for calm from Michael Brown's family and his family's advisers.

Killing people who kill people to prove that killing people is wrong doesn't jibe very well with trigger-happy policing that can leave someone dead.  This is all par for the course, though, for crime and punishment in these United States, where violence is increasingly the way to solve any problem.  

Just as troubling are the violent racial crimes in America.  Michael Brown was most likely killed by a white police officer.  Meanwhile, there was the case of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager shot to death by a white man of partial Hispanic origin, in Sanford, Florida, and, more recently, that of Brendan Tevlin, a young white male shot to death, apparently, by a young black male in West Orange, New Jersey.  You know, it's all good and fine for a racially diverse and harmonic America, but how are we ever going to have that if people of different backgrounds are ready to fill each other full of lead?

And what is being done about capital punishment? Authorities are trying to come up with different drug combinations to make lethal injections a more humane form of execution, which is like taking artificial coloring out of processed food to make it healthier.  America has been steeped in violence and a culture of death for so long, it makes me shudder to think where we're headed.  I'm sure my British friends living in America would agree.