Pray for mercy

See this guy? He's turning 76 years old next week. He's blind and in a wheelchair. Last fall he had a near-fatal heart attack and would have died had he not been forcibly resuscitated three times. Next Tuesday, at one minute after midnight, the state of California is going to take him out of his wheelchair, carry him to a gurney, strap him down (as if he might get up and try to run away!), and murder him.

With stuff like this going on, is it any wonder sometimes I just sit in my room sobbing uncontrollably? When this happens to me, I often end up scolding myself. "What's wrong with you?" I ask myself. "Nothing bad has happened to you! You have no reason to be feeling this way!" This week, I more or less assigned the blame to hormones – I've been ferociously PMSing all week, not to mention, it might be coming up on time for perimenopause ... I don't know. Gotta check in with my mom about her experience. But aside from that, the brutality and self-righteousness of the society we're living in regularly makes me feel angry and afraid of the people around me, and sad on almost a daily basis. Just really, really sad.

The details of this particular situation are so sick and perverse that it's hard to believe they're actually going to go through with the execution. But it appears they will. Please take a minute to go find out a little bit about this man, Clarence Ray Allen.

Yeah, I know he killed people. I'm not saying that's okay. Actually, that's the whole point – it's not okay to kill people. Ever. No matter what the person is guilty of. It is a constant source of shock and heartbreak to me that so many religious people are so eager to line up on the side of vengeance, clenching their jaws and flexing their muscles, their hands full of stones ... Although I did note that the Catholic church (among others) is stepping up its opposition to the death penalty these days. That's encouraging.

I've lived in the Bay Area for eleven years and in that time there have been several executions at San Quentin, which is only about a half-hour drive from my house. Until now, for a variety of reasons, I've never gone to any of the vigils at the gate – I've always just stayed at home and meditated or prayed alone. This time I'm feeling like I want to do more. It's a relatively small number of people who are killed this way, and I know my little candle-in-a-cup won't change that. But to me this issue symbolizes so much of what I think is wrong with our culture that it seems like a good place to make a symbolic statement of my own. I want this violence to stop.