Lethal Killing is Legal

Nothing bends the will of the living more than a government-injected death, and with the recent Supreme Court ruling that lethal injection was not cruel and unusual punishment — the killings will continue.

What we cannot miss in the “kinder killing” of lethal injection instead of, say, the electric chair, is the hard fact that the nation and many states prefer to kill their incorrigible citizenry rather than reform them into better members of society. 

The fact that the death penalty is more often executed against minorities seems lost in the analgesic shuffle to be the first to kill the most people. 

States like New Jersey have taken a stand against killing inmates and, for that, we rejoice because we learn through imitation and example.

If we don’t want people killing each other, than we need to stop using the death penalty as a punishment because it glamorizes death and celebrates the horror of dying.

When the implements of killing become common enough touchstones in society that lead to exploitation in Art — we should know we’ve gone too far in the extreme for putting out one eye for another and to swap one interminable suffering for the whimpering remnants of our tattered souls.