There's Something Dead Inside:
Nothingness Overwhelmed McVeigh All the Way To His Death
More and more, I am becoming disillusioned with the human race as a whole. Wars are horrific, tragic beyond reason, with the tremendous toll on the world far out-distancing any pale victory.
Children are now killing one another, secretly building bombs in their parents' homes, eager to be the next Timothy McVeigh. In the case of the tragic Columbine shootings in Littleton, the two troubled boys who murdered thirteen people achieved just that dubious status on a smaller scale. As the closing of the millennium quickly approaches, faster than any of us expected it to, we are left with violence and bloodshed, world-wide wars and Nazi-like concentration camps and a pervasive feeling of evil in the atmosphere.
We should all be working together to remedy some of this misery, this grand-scale apocalyptic nightmare that threatens to destroy us all. But instead, supporters of the death penalty for those who kill, are simply preventing the cycle of human slaugher by the act of "You took away someone's life; now we are going to snuff yours out". Yes, that really makes a lot of sense. It's kind of like saying to someone who needs a heart transplant, "My father died of heart disease---therefore I am going to make sure that you never get to be the recipient of a donor's heart, no matter how much suffering is involved and how many years it may add to your life." Does that make any sense?
This site began as an ambitious form of protest, a protest to get rid of the death penalty in the United States, but has since evolved into a site concerning Timothy James McVeigh and the hollow and destructive odyssey that began when he was an imaginitive and solitary boy and which will, in ten short days, be put to death for his part in the devastating bombing attack on a federal building filled with innocent people, as well as babies and young children.
I will admit that I was furious and wanted whoever had inflicted this horror to be punished severely. My staunch stand against capital punishment prevented me from wishing he'd be sentenced to death, but all the same, McVeigh's crime seemed beyond reproach. Why would he have done this? He talked about the carnage of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas and how it whipped him into a frightening rage, but could that incident alone spur him to unleash a fiery hell on people he'd never met. It was an enigmatic situation, one that spurred the 27-year-old McVeigh to bomb the Murrah building to pieces.
So, I would imagine that, as people read and peruse this site-in-progress, they will, in all probability, feel tremendous animosity toward me for looking beyond Timothy's heinous crime to see the once-promising young man write his own obituary. He must have known that, if convicted, he'd face the death penalty and with his history of depression and obsessive compulsive tendencies, the future execution appeared to be cruel and unusual punishment, even for one who'd set out to wreak vengeance on a government he no longer trusted or felt proud about.
So, exactly what am I going to do with this site? I guess I've nominated myself as the voice of temerament, one of the very few who will mourn McVeigh when he's given the lethal injection very soon. Is he frightened at all, or are his suicidal tendencies bring him a warm feeling of relief that he'll be gone before long.
This site is not only for those of you out there who share my beliefs concerning the futility of clamouring for Timothy's blood. It is for others who oppose the death penalty as much as I do. We have to get together and figure out a reasonable way to deal with this extremely important issue. I live in Canada, which, fortunately, has banned the death penalty---for now. Those of you in the United States, who seem to be most prevalent on the Internet, need to read this. I know that many of your states support this atrocity, and I was saddened to see New York reinstate it recently. I live in constant fear that our country, wracked by pressure to reinstate this barbarism, will cave in. I would organize protests and take part in acts of civil disobedience to see that this never happens. Don't you Americans realize that as long as you support the death penalty you will never truly be free?
While watching an episode of "Law and Order" recently, I became enraged at District Attorney McCoy's attitude. He had welcomed the return of the lethal injection several times over the last few seasons, but at the end of the program, Adam Schiff, the Big Cheese of the courtroom who never leaves his office, was quoted as saying, "Enter at your own risk" as the subject of Canada having gotten rid of the death penalty came up. Well, listen, we have much, much stricter laws here with regard the purchase of firearms, and furthermore, there's no Charlton Heston-like jerk touting the virtues of the "Freedom to suspect he was a little of both.
The picture below is of a typical gurney used to give a prisoner his or her lethal injection. Timothy McVeigh will soon be straped onto the gurney and asked if he has anything to say. My bet is that he won't utter a word and just go to his death with the stony resolve he used in the courtroom in 1997. If anyone thinks that the lethal injection is just a painless method of falling into a deep sleep, think again: The psychological aspect of the execution is far more difficult to withstand than impending death.
