Nothing Was Delivered

So if Twitter is to be believed, Troy Davis, a man who may well have been wrongly convicted of murder in the state of Georgia, was just put to death by lethal injection. I honestly don’t have much to say about the specifics of his case. Most of the stories I’ve read about him only gave the basic bullet points. Suffice it to say that there was doubt that this man committed this crime, even among those closest to the case.

This seems like a good time to talk about the Death Penalty in general. A state with the power to kill is a state that will abuse that power. Someone once said that the state does not have the right to take anything that it cannot return. Each of us are living every day by the graces of a government that hasn’t yet decided we need to be removed. Once we give the state the right to take a life, we change the relationship between the people and the bureaucracy. Citizens become dependent on the government  not to protect life, but to provide it. We are put in the position of asking the a bureaucracy to grant us not just our freedom, but our very right to exist.

And make no mistake. We all built this machine. We are all complicit in this death, and every subsequent execution.

This is where some of you are no doubt going to rev your Camero engines, put on your shades and say “not me, man. I don’t even vote”. Doesn’t matter.  You have an affirmative responsibility to make your voice heard. Vote. Call your representative, even if she’s not the one you voted for. You live in America. This is the price of admission.