It's incredible that I haven't written a new post in almost 5 months, but it's indicative of a new awareness and a new focus - namely I need to start living my life and not torturing myself all the time trying to analyze and figure everything out. It's not gonna happen.
2015 has been wonderful and I'm thankful for the new friends and new experiences. So far I've sung by myself in front of a BUNCH of people, gotten involved in the first activity that reminds me of the kind of community I'm familiar with and comfortable in (idea based - not religion, ethnicity, locality or nationality-based), it's FINALLY hit me that I'm no longer employed (as it should - finally - it's been almost 3 years) and I'm beginning to do some things that I always wished I had time to do back in the old days when I was killing myself working 8-plus hours a day (and that was a LONG time ago, too). Now I'm doing some painting, making jewelry, and trying to sew a bit.
In addition to the personal things I've been working on this year, I've also continued to have opportunities to help graduate students with papers and articles. I'm grateful for that as it keeps me abreast of current issues and also teaches me more about things with which I've had little to no experience. I'm thankful for that.
The best thing that has happened this year is that I got to go to the US and visit my family. It was the first time in over four years. Oddly enough, it felt as if I had just left yesterday, but I had a good bit of readjusting to do once I got back here.
Try as I might, there are always things that weigh heavily on my mind. Lately it's been the stark injustices and responses we're witnessing in the US (again), the concept of peace and how it's directly related to values - cultural and personal - and today it's the death penalty.
Maybe as with many people who have a strong sense of right and wrong and an idea of justice, I was, at one time, comfortable with the death penalty. As I grew in faith and as I learned that concepts of justice differ among different groups of people, the support I once held for the death penalty began to fade. That being said, I still tried to have faith in the justice system. Even though I learned long ago that in the US, a poor man of color had a greater chance of being sentenced to death than anyone else, I falsely believed that things were changing and that our justice system is, more or less, faultless. However, it's not and it never has been.
Remember To Kill a Mockingbird?
Human systems - all human systems - are imperfect. We are imperfect. Like it or not, our justice system - and all justice systems around the world - are influenced by the culture in which they develop. The US has a history - well-documented and irrefutable - of systematic oppression of people of color, namely Americans of African descent. We're trying to change the laws and make things right, but what has been cooking for hundreds of years doesn't just stop when the stove's turned off. Social change takes longer. We cannot keep our biases and prejudices separate from our actions - we can only hide them.
And we can only hide them for so long and only so well.
I was moving in this direction long before I arrived in Indonesia, but sometimes being out of context can make things crystallize. Indonesia was colonized for almost 400 years...regularly I see something, read something, or watch something that reflects that history. Yes, Indonesia has been independent since 1945, but their first two presidents served terms that, together, covered almost 50 years. The second president stepped down in 1998, but vestiges of his administration crop up regularly, too.
The point is, we can't erase our history, or as William Faulkner pointed out in Requiem for a Nun, "the past is never dead. It's not even past".
It's folly, at best, and horrendous, at worst, to think that we can operate completely objectively. Even if we can do an OK job with it temporarily, who's to say that another person - administrator, clerk, guard, teacher, spouse, anybody - has done the same? The thing is, we can't.
I would like to say that it's because I'm Christian, but the fact is, I'm not perfect, either. I like a good smack down as much as the next person, but I just can't abide with an institution tainted with social and cultural history having the final say on the necessity or worth of a person's life.
For those reasons, I can not support the death penalty.
There is just too much water under the bridge and the death penalty is a bridge that all thinking people need to burn.
When I was preparing for a class a few years ago, I came across this video from the TED talks website. Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, gave one of the most impressive talks I've ever heard. When he talks about the death penalty in the US to a group of scholars in Germany, their response gave me chills. And it made me understand why I can never, ever support the death penalty anywhere.
http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injustice#
I'm not going to scapegoat my country. I love America, but just with everywhere in the world, we have the same things that other countries have: people. And people are not perfect. THAT'S my Christian response. We are not perfect and cannot achieve perfection. To think otherwise is not only arrogant, but dangerous, as well.
