Insight of an Execution

For the first time I realized something, call it insight. It happened so long ago, most have forgotten, but I remember still . . . It was one of those nights that I couldn’t sleep and turned on the zoo we call the media. You know them, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, it was all the same.

Every news channel was showing the same pictures of a panel of witnesses to a man’s execution. They were being interviewed one at a time. Looking back it sounds funny, not funny ha, ha, but funny in a ridiculous manner. Here we are in 2000’s and still executions excite, still they make the front page. Somehow we still feel a morbid curiosity with redemption and sentencing. We want to know that a killer pleaded for his life, that he felt the pain of his victim in the end . . .

And everyone seemed to say the same thing, what they saw, what they thought he said to guards, what he mouthed to his witnesses. Many described the room as if that made some worthy connection of a higher order.

Then one man said it. “I was thinking,” he said. “I felt sick.” He explained it as if it was the stale air or the close proximity? And he was the only one that never mentioned values, his or any others, but . . .

That’s not my point. What I saw, was one out of ten reporters tell us what he truthfully knew, what he felt. Everyone else described things they saw, as if they were and author writing in 3rd person omniscient, we call it all knowing.

And that made me sick . . . They reported he made a fist, stared at the media and then looked back at his supporters. And then came the words, such as; Belligerent.

We know what belligerent means, but is that truly what he was feeling or maybe it was hopelessness? Maybe the fist was his way of communicating love or maybe it was his plead for forgiveness.

I don’t know the answer to the problems of the world, but I know too many times misrepresentation has started wars. This has to stop and it starts with each of us.

Dan Hanosh
Dreams Are Yours To Share