If prosebox were a dinner party, and a case could be made for such, I have to complete my tri-fecta of poor manners. Death, politics and … religion!
I was pretty mild with death and politics. I might be even milder with religion. I won’t let it pass my notice, however, here in 2016 AD and as far back as written and oral tradition goes, those three sonsabitchs are all tied up in one another; death, politics and religion. Americans tend to have this false sense of security that they aren’t wrapped up in one another here because of the constitution or something, like separation of church and state is a magic talisman and if you say it three times while spinning and clicking your heels together …
To be fair it might be the same in the rest of the world, I haven’t been to the world for a while now.
I forget when exactly I learned the lesson, one I believe is universal but what the fuck do I know I drank the kool aid for myself I made the kool aid and then drank it, but I learned it. Huh. To unclutter that sentence, I just mean stuff I believe to the very core doesn’t mean that you do or should. The lesson started off fairly simple; You can’t save the world, but you can help one person at a time. What the fuck does that have to do with religion. Nothing really, sort of. It does have something to do with the concept of good and evil. See the thing about saving the world or one person is predicated on the idea that something external is attacking. Or, I suppose, internal, but that’s even more dunked in the sauce of good and evil.
Yeah, I had a job for a while that involved providing services to the needy, and if I were ever to discuss case histories, it’d be hard for most people not to think of evil. Um, that’d make me good, a concept I wholly reject and could get many a character witness to support my rejection. Also, I don’t think of evil as a living thing. Shit. Or a dead thing or a thing that exists or existed on it’s own. It’s part of why I’m an agnostic and not, say, a pocket Lutheran (yeah, I don’t know what pocket Lutheran means either but I like the sound of it. I just meant if I believed in good an evil as entities I’d probably belong to a church.).
But I think I learned the lesson earlier, it would have been a harsh baptism in fire to learn on the job. I mean I’ve seen that happen and it’s ugly. It’s bad enough seeing someone have a bad day in the service of the community regarding person to person offenses without seeing their entire belief system shattered and the dawning of recognition of how futile all their efforts are. I came to the gig knowing how futile all my efforts are. See? That’s how religion sneaks in; belief systems regarding good and evil.
I’ll talk about the office because it’s a smaller petri dish than the world and because I don’t have to nor will I set up back stories. 65 of us in seven different units separated by those portable walls that make up cubicles. Ringing phones, crying babys, and weighty decisions. Some of us were very religious, some very atheist and some didn’t talk about it. Ok, maybe that was just me.
Shit. Train of thought interrupted by phone. It’s ok I was just going into some verbose dull thing about the nature of the cases and good and evil. Fuck the office.
Throughout the course of my life I’ve seen a great many cruel, malicious deeds and a fair number of selfless acts of kindness, charity and good will. I can’t remember when it was that I stopped, but it’s been a very long time since I’ve thought a single act is the measure of a man (or woman if you are one). Huh. No wonder I was going to go all verbose. I mean each and every damn human being on the planet is capable of beneficial acts and detrimental acts on any given day, no matter how many of one or the other they have built up to date. What’s known as good and evil in my mind is like the toss of a coin. Every time you flip it the odds are fifty fifty for heads or tails. I know, folks get real excited when the coin hits heads twenty times in a row, doesn’t change the odds any (unless it’s a two headed coin then I guarantee something of value was riding on the last fifteen flips, and the final flip likely ended in at least a bloody nose).
I’m not going as far as the standard short version of atheism and say everything is random. I’m not even saying coin flips are random, I’m saying fifty fifty, that’s hardly a random or arbitrary set of odds. Like the basic form of religion here the justice system is overly concerned about provocation and circumstance. Part of the verbose stuff you didn’t get was that everyone had at least one case where the perp was shitty mean and did something evil because he or she was a shitty mean person and the opportunity presented itself on a particularly shitty mean day. Of course that would be a gross oversimplification just as calling him good or evil was. Why? The number of offenses and the unknown number of offenses not committed or not discovered. I guess I was using the office because people are overly sensitive to shitty things happening to defenseless children. As they should be, but it shouldn’t detract from shitty things happening to defendable adults. Just saying, it seems obvious, but it’s not.
Even in our entertainment, movies, TV, Novels, shitty things happen to the good guys all the time. We’re desensitized, even think less of an action movie where too few guys get the shit kicked out of them. Children however … abuses against children has the village running for their torchs and pitchforks. If there were such a thing as an absolute good and an absolute evil, the outrage should be equal. A lot of people believe in absolute good and evil, even people who don’t believe in the concept of God and Satan. Besides super-powers and a bad sense of humor the only thing left for anyone to care about with God and Satan is absolute Good and evil. Oh, and death I guess. A lot of religious adherents seem to have a guilty conscious about how evil they are or, I suppose, how good god is at judging such things.
I think people who confess they were jealous of a friend getting a promotion of them and lusting after a secretary … have too much time on their hands. In that context I have seen pure unadulterated evil. I still don’t believe in it. Oh, and I guess to bring politics back around, for a far left commie liberal it seems to be unusual for me to believe in the death penalty.
Ok, I have a few big reservations about the death penalty, like a seriously flawed justice system. I aslo know the recidivism rate for sex offenders; 97 percent. I know, most sex offenses are not capital crimes, but it’s a hard figure to ignore, and it only takes into account getting caught. It means for every hundred you release there will be a bare minimum of 97 new victims, or, I suppose, 97 new offenses some against previous victims. Like O.J. killing his wife a second time. I don’t think of capital punishment as a deterrent, I think that’s a stupid argument for capital punishment and is wholly unsupported. I think of capital punishment as the final word if the whole reason for a justice system; to protect the community and to protect the offender.
Yeah, I can support that but it’d be real verbose. Believe it or not a fair number of offenders have horrible remorse, not, in my opinion, of equal weight to damage they cause, but it still tears them up. Death would be a good way to keep them from shitty about themselves. The longer version is why a justice system itself thinks of itself as protecting the community and the offender, for all communities and all offenses. The ones that don’t feel remorse? Fuck em.
Another argument against capital punishment might be that killing is evil and wrong and we don’t want our government and tax dollars committing evil and wrong in our name. Except for the tax dollar part that’s kind of a good argument theoretically. Except the guy who we didn’t kill has no such compunction. Ahem, assuming, again with the flawed system, that he was guilty in the first place. I really don’t like the idea of coin toss odds when it comes to state sanctioned murder. But in my little ideal world, it’s euthanasia and protective. But, again, I don’t believe in good and evil. I do believe in suffering and think we should try hard not to allow it, not for our community and not for our offenders.
Jesus. Will somebody kick me out of this dinner party already?
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