<<I did my duty , but I don't feel as much pride as pity.
<<I pityed the victim , I pityed the guy I voted to kill.>>
Well, you wouldn't be human if you didn't pity both of them. Sometimes you just have to recognize this is a world of shit. And we're all a part of the problem. At bottom we just don't care enough about the other guy. We don't care when he's a baby, being neglected and abused, and we don't care when he's an adult criminal. We each have our own problems. I think that in our evolutionary path as human beings, we have a long way to go. We're evolved from animals, predatory animals. Our remote ancestors in the animal kingdom probably didn't even HAVE pity, that must have developed aeons later, and far into the future, when we've evolved even further from our evolutionary past, the level of pity that we would see then would probably dwarf anything we have now.
I was against the death penalty for years. At least for unfortunate, uneducated schmucks who kill from frustration, lack of opportunities, lifelong neglect, absence of any kind of affection in their early years, fetal alcohol syndrome, brain damage, you name it. These guys in effect are being punished for being the people that they can't help but be. Worse yet, for being the people that we as a society just weren't interested in spending the money to take the measures to ensure that they wouldn't be. In the end, it came down to self-preservation - - you could keep these guys locked up for the rest of their lives, but how could you guarantee that they wouldn't kill again inside the prison, or that they wouldn't escape and kill outslde the prison? And I'm ashamed to say, in the end, I concluded, "Fuck it, it's just too fucking expensive to pay the price of keeping them alive and safe all those years, letting them out early would be suicidally crazy, so the only answer is to just remove the problem at the source."
But how can you not at the same time pity "the problem at the source?" I don't know what the answer is. I feel the way we are living now, as a society, is just not right. Our justice system only appears to be highly developed, by looking back at where it came from. But we are very far from living in a just world, even in North America. And most of the time, we can keep these realizations out of our minds. But an encounter with the jury system opens a window, we can see what we block out. We actually get to see that world of shit. We see it, we absorb it, and then as soon as it's over, we wall it off all over again. We have our own problems, living in a world of shit is not one of them.
