CrankyBuddhist   the learning never ends …

Last night as I clicked through all the channels offered on basic cable I kept flipping by CNN and its reportage of the upcoming execution of Saddam Hussein. For the last few days it had been hinted that his execution would take place sooner rather than later, then in the next few days, then within a day, the next few hours, then it was over.

I could never be a reporter. Anderson Cooper sat at his desk delivering the news in that boyish quizzical way that he always does. Should they show photographs? Should they not? I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I find it hard to distance myself from the planned death of another person.

And it makes me ill.

I watched as people in Dearborn cheered the news. How were their prayers in the mosque, a holy place, a spritiual place, for Hussein’s death justified? Is there something I’m missing here? Besides not knowing enough about the teachings of Mohammed? I wondered how their cheering of a person’s death was different from Hussein’s smug cheering on of the deaths that he had caused. When politics are stripped away from the issue, there is no difference. How is one better than the other, when they are both the same?

Some would argue my case against the death penalty. Some would try to explain it away as being the person’s karma. Or ask me to remember the too oft mis-used phrase in the Bible, an eye for an eye. But it is not up to us, as individuals or collectively, to decide when someone’s karma is fulfilled. It is ugly, no matter how ugly the deeds that have been done to warrant such a judicial action.

For me, punishing a crime with another crime – which is what killing for vindication is – would mean that we are still at the point of demanding an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. — Cardinal Renato Martino, Head of the Vatican’s Council for Justice and Peace

The EU opposes capital punishment in all cases and under all circumstances and it should not be carried out in this case either. — The Finnish Presidency of the European Union