Roberto,
So
let me get this straight. To sum up: humans, unlike every other
species on the planet, are born inherently flawed and doomed
to live sinfully. We are born to murder and maim and steal and
lie but it’s not our fault. It’s human nature’s
fault. Fortunately for us we possess a biological imperative
to confess our sins, atone for them, and reprogram our faulty
psychic software. Religion, with it’s built-in confessional,
a kind of pressure relief valve, is humanity’s cure for
this human glitch. Am I right so far?
Secularism,
on the other hand, mucks up the bath water. To remedy this shortcoming,
secular society devises various ways and outlets for this much-
needed catharsis to take place. Such as bars, blogs, drugs and
psychoanalysis. And if I might digress for a moment and allude
to your theory elucidated in “The
Meaning of Dreams," the human faculty to
dream while asleep also assists by supplying the corrective
subconscious counsel to its bumbling conscious counterpart.
Being
human, O.J. Simpson has always subconsciously wanted to confess
and do penance for his wrongdoings. All his thoughts, speech
and actions subsequent to the killing of Nicole Brown Simpson
and Ronald Goldman have represented a camouflaged confession
and silent plea to be caught, punished and hopefully fixed.
You and Freud would say it’s just the beginning of the
long journey home for the damaged unit known affectionately
as O.J. Only time…or the man himself…will tell.
How am I doing?
Notably,
your essay “Half---Back
O.J. Simpson” does not touch upon the reparative
band-aids we prescribe for injustices visited upon our kith
and kin. This too, is where your “Prisons
of the World Unite” piece falls to pieces.
Both rest on the received wisdom that every crime and misdemeanour,
every breach of acceptable behaviour, no matter what the behaviour,
must be duly punished and paid for, despite the truths we hold
to be self-evident: that such measures have never stamped out
undesirable conduct, and abjectly fail to vitiate, reverse,
redress or diminish the damage done to the injured parties or
general public as a whole – which is what an elightened
law must map out if it is to foster healing and guide us back
to some semblance of harmony. We are experts sans pareil
at equipping our penitentiaries with state of the art technology
that keeps lawbreakers and lunatics locked up. We excel in designing
pseudo-rehabilitative programs to show them the error of their
ways. But when it comes to managing community damage and putting
into practice a policy of salutary salves that work for the
commonweal, we are all thumbs.
As
well, you provide no commentary whatsoever on the impotence
and absurdity of the millions of laws on the books – written
and re-written daily and flagrantly broken just as often by
everyone, including you, me and the very people responsible
for legislating and enforcing them. The United States has the
highest documented incarceration rate and total documented prison
population of any nation in the world. Untempted by heaven or
hell, 2.5 million of its citizenry – more than one in
every 100 of its adults – presently rot behind bars. Most
of them never confessed, much less expiated. This, despite the
fact that 90% of Americans adhere to one or another of the country’s
top twenty religious groups. That’s how much Americans
love their own and that’s how well religion works for
them. Another 5 million, also unconfessed, are on probation
or parole, their vast majority bound in all likelihood to re-offend.
By your reckoning, these 7.5 million souls – the respective
populations of Switzerland, Rwanda and the province of Québec
– are either misfortunate secularists or ‘the enlightened
ones, hiding among us despite their self-precipitated fall into
apparent ignominy.’ Astonishingly, these whopping numbers
come as no surprise to you, nor do they perturb, because, paraphrasing
Popeye, humans are what they are and that’s all that they
are…and it’s not their fault. It’s human nature’s
fault. The prevailing false perception is that since we can’t
change the nature of the beast, and the beast can’t change
its stripes, we may as well cage it or kill it.
Four
pillars support the need for prisons – ironically termed
correctional facilities, although they correct nothing: incapacitation,
rehabilitation, retribution, and deterrence. Only the first
of these carries its weight admirably. Bedrocked in the belief
that humankind cannot tolerate pernicious behaviour and must
be protected from it, those who break the rules are arrested,
tried and imprisoned. Simply put, it keeps the bad guys off
the streets. The last three pillars, riddled with holes and
piously propounded under the guise of morality and justice,
urge us to swallow the myth that malefactors will walk the straight
and narrow provided they confess and only if they are punished.
Subjected to re-indoctrination for the duration of their exile,
culprits are theoretically transformed into a ‘clockwork
orange’ and delivered of their sins before being returned
to the free world. If that doesn’t put them squarely on
the road to redemption then presumably nothing will. To point
out the obvious, any 8-year-old, or 68-year-old for that matter,
will assure you that this approach, far from reforming malefic
behaviour, only fuels a resentment and resolve to elude capture
the next time around. It’s rough justice American style
and a great denial system that slakes our thirst for vengeance
– but is it a successful strategy of deterrence?
American
prisons are bursting at the seams to accommodate the staggering
rise of aspiring alumni, and national crime rates, especially
for violent offenses, soar off the charts. You do the math.
As a one-size-fits-all cure, this retributive eye for an eye
policy only takes us so far, and as someone once noted, makes
the whole world blind. When you take a closer look, you notice
the problem is not going away. Nor will it go away.
Because, humans being human, disobedient behaviour can’t
go away. What’s the point of outlawing something you know
will inevitably happen? We can chisel laws in stone and imprison
individuals for breaking them until we’re blue in the
face but the odds of quashing misconduct in this way are about
as good as surviving a tsunami with a surfboard. I am not suggesting
we scrap the law or exchange it for anarchy and chaos. We can
no more exist without law than we can exist without air. But
a living Law of Life tolls and sooner or later we’ll have
to answer its ring. It is not a question of ‘if’
but ‘when.’ In fashioning a sensible way to deal
with misconduct, the Law of Life doesn’t criminalize and
avenge a misdeed we know will occur, but frames a remedial response
to it that offsets the damage done, knits the wound and eases
the path towards a better future for ourselves and our families.
Within
the framework of the American justice system – a de
facto penal system if truth be told – O.J.’s
options, which are not palatable options at all, are slim and
none. Let’s face it, even if you and Freud are correct
in your assessment, a life sentence in San Quentin isn’t
much of an option. And the gas chamber is no option at all.
Certainly a murderer as brilliant as O.J. – your words,
not mine – half---back though he may be, has figured that
much out for himself.
What
can I say that you don’t already know – the sine
qua non that will render my words worth the listen? Our
culture, voyaging in search of law and order and desperately
floundering on wind-ripped seas, is on a wayward odyssey. Our
cat’s cradle of crime and confession is obsolete, our
labyrinthine laws untenable, and our redoubtable reliance on
prisons and punishment hollow. Unless we find the will to step
beyond the grievous pull of this practice it will ultimately
cost us more and accomplish less than the wise embrace of the
unwritten Law of Life whose essence, eroded though it may be,
illusory though it may seem, has not yet vanished. What seems
to us a battle is not. There is a law, a living law that flickers
like a lighthouse lamp, that flows as easily as any river, that
is as alive as any Peruvian jungle or Adirondack forest. Let
that law be our polestar.
Wishing you the best from the west,
mark
Other
articles by Mark Goldfarb:
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HURTS
AND ALERTS
ON
AND OFF THE ROAD WITH MG
