No Happy Endings

Before I begin, I want you to look at this picture.

Victims, left to right: Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, his wife, Yusor Mohammad, 21, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19.

Remember these faces.  Imagine the successful, vibrant, endearing qualities of these three young college students.  They are not murderers.  They are not our enemy.  They are our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends, and family.  They are the people that make a difference, for the better, in America.

Oh, yes, and they’re Muslims.  Well, they were, before they were coldly murdered by Craig Stephen Hicks, in Chapel Hill, NC, yesterday.  The jury is still out regarding his true motivation to kill the trio (an interaction supposedly deriving from a parking dispute), but his background and his known bias all point to one thing: a deep-seated hatred, and fear, of the followers of Islam – a hatred that has been perpetuated by the hands of the United States government, mass media, and social networking.  Sorry to say, he’s far from the only one.

Years of the United States’ “war on terror” have eroded the public view of Islam.  Numerous terroristic acts all over the globe have been carried out by Muslim extremists, which in part led to this “war”.  As such, we’ve sent our soldiers to fight in regions of the world where Islam is the religion of the majority.  Fuzzy logic and a clash of cultures turned Islam into the face of our enemies, and the two are no longer differentiated.  Citizens cling to this, and blame these atrocities, and the subsequent loss of lives, not on the mad men who perpetrate them, but on the claimed religious core of their disjointed, bastardized beliefs.

Further exacerbating the situation are tactics used by governmental agencies to supposedly root out terrorism, such as the passage and abuse of the Patriot act, TSA discriminatory search practices, hundreds of cases of entrapment perpetuated by the FBI against Muslims, and even the mapping and tracking of Muslim communities by the NYPD.  All these avenues, and many more, have been used to normalize the practice of Islamophobia.

The disease spreads like wildfire on social media, where tensions run high on a text-filled, soulless platform; trolls flourish, fear and misinformation prevail, bigotry knows no bounds, and sheep blindly follow the wolf.  Sensational headlines, pushed by fear-mongering news anchors and publications, invoke irrational thoughts in their subscribers by emphasizing buzzwords.  Muslim.  Islam.  Extremist.  Jihad.  The religion is gutted, and twisted.  Its followers are demonized.  Neilson ratings rise.

And so evolves the cycle of bigotry, and an escalation to the breaking point.  Death threats and ill-wishes for Muslims in general abound.  Incidents arise such as in Europe, where dozens of mosques have become the target of vandals using firebombs, guns, and even pig heads.  Three innocent Muslim college students are murdered, seemingly for discriminatory reasons.  Tensions run high.  The media ignores the signs, underreports the facts, and perpetuates the propaganda.  Government officials stand idly by, and say nothing.  Thousands of innocent Muslims are oppressed by both government forces and non-Muslim citizens, all across the globe.

It’s a pattern of escalation we’ve seen once before in recent history that’s hard to ignore – the implications of which are frightening, to say the least.  Much like anti-Semitism spread far and wide in the 1930’s, anti-Muslim sentiment has taken a stronghold in the 21^st century.  Sadly, it’s just a matter of time before we reach the tipping point: Islam’s Kristallnacht.

I don’t foresee a happy ending to this story, either.

America’s Final Solution

We love to hate criminals.  The worse the crime, the more we look down upon them. We view them as deeply flawed, permanently damaged individuals with no soul. Remorseless. Scum of the earth. We love to kill them, too. Legally, of course, but to what end?

As an expansion upon the 2002 ruling by which mentally disabled people cannot be legally executed, the Supreme Court handed down the 5-4 decision that death row inmates with IQ scores that fall within 5 points of the previously established 70 marker must be allowed to show alternate proof of disability.

The real injustice here is against the poor guy who scores 76 on the test. Guess he isn’t too stupid to die.

It is death row, though. You can drag out appeals for years (nearly 15 on average), to the point where you have a 1 in 4 chance of dying from natural causes, anyway. It sure makes for a nice place for accomplished criminals to retire.

Please, lay down. We’ll be with you in 7,882,329 minutes.

In his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito said the court has no evidence that relying on test scores just above 70 is unreasonable, and should not be held as unconstitutional. You know, because, un-science.

Meanwhile, Tennessee decided to bring back a classic, in their revival of the use of THE CHAIR™. Republican Governor Bill Haslam signed a bill into law last week allowing the state use of THE CHAIR™ in the event they can’t get their hands on some good drugs… uh, you know, for the execution, dude.

Many states have been running into problems obtaining drugs that were never officially approved for use in life ending measures, mostly due to a boycott of drug sales for executions, as well as the 2011 discontinuation of the manufacture of sodium thiopental (the good stuff) by Hospira. And when you just can’t get a hold of the good stuff, well, that leaves you with Clayton Lockett.

After having a hard time finding a place on his body to start the IV, the curtains went up at 6:23 p.m. on April 29, and the procedure began. The Oklahoma death row inmate was injected with midazolam, to induce unconsciousness. Ten minutes later, he was formally declared unconscious.

Three minutes after that, Lockett raised his head and noted that something was wrong. He started convulsing, groaning, shaking, and the curtain quickly went back down and the microphone was cut off. Behind the shade, he died of a heart attack shortly after. Witnesses of the execution were visibly disturbed by the horrific scene.

Upon review, Pharmacology professor Craig Stevens of Oklahoma State University said, “Veterinarians in at least one state are barred from using a three-drug formula used on several inmates, including Clayton Lockett” because the drug combination used is considered too painful to euthanize animals.

If this happened to any other human, it would be universally accepted as a travesty. But because the victim is a convicted criminal, it’s as easy to dismiss as muck under our boot that needs to be wiped off. And this is where society, and the justice system, fails.

There are only around 3000 convicts on death row in the United States at any given time. It’s a statistically insignificant population, yet capital punishment remains one of the most dividing topics within our country. The primary motivator behind such resentment of these caged animals? Fear.

The concept of rehabilitation is foreign to the penal system in the United States. However, programs like the one covered by John D. Sutter of CNN in his article, The Rapist Next Door (http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2014/02/opinion/sutter-change-alaska-rape/), are far more effective at treating the issue and reducing the rate of recidivism than the average prison stint.

This is not to say that everyone can be fixed, but mandatory euthanasia certainly doesn’t afford such opportunities.

It especially doesn’t help when studies come out to conclude that 1 out of every 25 death row inmates may actually be innocent. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows the data, and reveals that from 1973 to 2004, 1.6 percent of those sentenced to death in the U.S. — 138 prisoners — were exonerated and released because of innocence.

Uhhh… oops?

Capital punishment is not a wholly legitimate or viable solution. It’s merely a cop-out designed to feed the ego. Once a criminal threat is stopped, by means such as imprisonment, it is no longer a threat. At that point, like it or not, we are only committing murder via execution, an act as reprehensible as those perpetrated by the criminal. That’s called vengeance, not justice.

There is no moral or ethical reasoning that affords us the right to end the lives of fellow humans as we see fit. An eye for an eye is an archaic belief, with the implied supposition that someone can become so far removed from the sanctity of personhood, the only solution is to eliminate them.

And that is exactly how the Nazis felt about the Jews.