Saturday, April 22, 2017

The Death Penalty, again, really Arkansas?

                         

As Arkansas and Kansas battle each other to be the US sibling we most want to hide in the basement as company arrives, the rest of us should thank them for providing us with a picture of the end result of our collective national stupidity.  These conjoined twin states are fighting each other to be the poster child of amalgamated national dumb. (Wisconsin gets a little time off from this competition for now.) Kansas did it by proving (again, only at a state level) that trickle-down economics is a thinly veiled myth dreamed up to transfer wealth to the wealthy.  Arkansas did it by showing us what killing people (to prove that killing people is wrong) really looks like.

The beauty of Arkansas’s twisted desire to kill 8 people (to prove that killing people is wrong) was thwarted by their own (and the nation’s own) hypocrisy.  In spite of our love affair with guns and how precious they are, Arkansas will only shoot death row inmates as a last resort.  After all, it’s not the killing them (to show that killing is wrong) that’s the problem, that’s inhumane, or cruel and unusual, it’s just HOW we kill them that’s so horrible.  We Americans can’t stand the thought that someone we’ve condemned to death at our hands might experience a few moments of suffering before they actually expire.  What a bunch of pussies.   You can’t take my guns, but you also can’t shoot someone we say must die with them!

And then there are the pharmacy companies and THEIR moral limits.  That’s right, the folks who have made deadly-overdose-leading opiates their number one sellers.  The folks who marked up epipens 700%.  The folks who lobby to keep marijuana illegal while advertising addictive pain killing products directly to consumers with no medical or pharmacy degrees.  The folks who take tax funded grant money to “experiment” with “new uses” of their already highly profitable, market-cornering drugs.  The folks who take and take and take from US consumers, only to move manufacturing overseas to avoid taxes and fair labor and environmental responsibilities, but who enjoyed our stability and military protection while growing rich enough to put that whole dodgy deal together, but who couldn’t bear their civic responsibility when it cut into their cash flow… yeah, THOSE moral kingpins object to their drugs being used in capital punishment! 

I guess it’s OK to advertise and promote addictive drugs that ended up killing 50,000 Americans by overdose last year, but not to use their anesthetics to kill 8 convicted death row inmates.  Makes perfect sense.

So yeah, in a country who loves our guns, and loves believing in the myth of infallible justice, we won’t shoot death row inmates, and only when our Drug Lord Pharmacy CEOs express some misgiving, do we stop and think.  Hmmmm, maybe killing people isn’t the best way to demonstrate that killing people is wrong.

But here’s the bigger point:  if we’re gonna keep the death penalty as a humane option, then we should worry only about the speed with which it happens, not how we do it.  We’re willing to sacrifice anyone who breaks into our home by arming every man, woman, child without a background check, licensing, or even the most basic instruction in how to safely use, store, maintain firearms, but we’re not willing to shoot the people we condemn to death?

What a bunch of spoiled children who can’t think beyond the immediate results of our incompetent misinformed daydreams.  We’ve been so trained by the oversimplification media that we’ve forgotten how to actually think beyond something that sounds good when you first hear it.  We’ve forgotten that arguments continue to build out of premises, that one idea connects to the next, and that eventually a conclusion must arise out of the non-thinking haze.

So here we are in Arkansas, torn between a state trying to prove how committed to justice they are by racing to kill 8 humans, and the moral high ground of an industry that killed 50,000 people with ONE of their products last year, and who continues to hold our nation’s healthcare industry (and elected officials) hostage with their lobby money.

Here we are, a nation who still pretends we believe so much in our justice system’s output that we insist on a permanent sentence (8 of them in one week in Arkansas) while saying with our other face that we don’t trust our government to the point we’ll elect a clown in protest.

Here we are, a nation of gun nuts who lack the balls to use those guns to carry out the death penalty we all insist demonstrates our commitment to the sanctity of human life.

What a bunch of confused, frightened children we’ve grown up to become.

Luth,

Out