XXXIV. Death Penalty
The death penalty, this capital punishment, is something I embraced in the past because of disturbing crimes. The crimes didn’t scare me, they just made me angry. The Holy Bible says an eye for an eye, but who gets justice and who doesn’t is selective in this Country.
Living with my mother, she had a righteous paranoia about the world because the evils of some people were real. During my youth, she didn’t want me to go anywhere, so my room; those rooms, were turned into a sanctuary. The condition of those rooms, the timing of living like this caused me to self-reflect and think about what was important to me and what I truly needed in life. I found my strengths, killed my weaknesses, distractions, and embraced wisdom and intelligence, which helps one decide what they truly want in their life. In your space, no matter how tumultuous, you come to know your path and go forth. In time, these rooms came to an end, and of course, because growing up we move into adulthood.
But just like many of us, circumstances that are natural and unnatural that are caused by something or someone can stop us, derail us, confine us again. During this time, being in a room wasn’t a comfort, couldn’t make it comfortable no matter how much I tried and I was staying with family. The negativity, the emptiness, the hopelessness, the past offered no education, bad memories, and then here comes your conscience talking entirely too much. It was easy to see the time to live like this was over, and if I had continued to try to live like that, crazy may have set in or worse.
When the death penalty came back to mind, it was after watching a true crime movie on Netflix about a mass shooting that occurred in Norway. It involved the murder of 77 people mostly teens. The perpetrator, mass killer, didn’t die. They didn’t give him a death sentence. His punishment for this horrendous crime was to be locked away and confined to a cell.
At the time, my feelings screamed not enough. Then later, when that room came back to me, it reminded me of all the many ways four walls can be unrelentingly exhaustive and brutal. Not on the body, but on the mind. Silence becomes very loud after a while. And here comes that need for humanity, that need to have someone to share something with, that need to communicate something, and after a while this need gets louder and it starts to erase things like paper, or a radio, or books, and leaves only a window, a bed, a shower, soap, a washcloth, a towel, a shirt, pants, socks, undergarments, and your own inner dialogue to keep you company. Everyday a person will come by and pass food to you through steel doors. No one will offer you anything or talk to you about anything. Time, and that space, is all one would have. Some people may appreciate a room with no one in it but themselves, but only because given time they would be able to leave.
For me, art was always a mental and physical house. In those rooms, there was my music, my stories, my drawings, my health, and dance. Maybe a strong mind would do better than a weak mind in such a confinement, or maybe over time all minds get weak and bend to a reality that is loud and consistent. In some ways, I’ve experienced that bend and nothing causes that more than loss and the subsequent trauma and sadness that follows.
When compared, the Death Penalty as a punishment isn’t so profound and has lost its impact. The room removes the person from the world and human beings due to the evil they have done to other human beings just as death would, only in that room you’re conscious of your removal and must live with it. One is more impactful than the other.
I heard this song, strange eerie song, in the morning when driving back home in 2022. These men sung, ‘staring at four walls…in my room.’ It sounded like they had found Hell, or Hell had found them. Now years after hearing this, I know this to be true, it isn’t the emptiness or the four walls that make it Hell; it eventually becomes your mind.