Georgia On My Mind

I wrote a letter. I signed petitions. I voiced my opinion wherever I could. I prayed. And I was not alone.

The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles did not hear. Did not listen. Did not want to listen. Could not accept even the simplest argument against putting Troy Davis to death: it is hypocritical. Hypocritical for a "Christian" nation to stand by the Biblical and moral admonition against the taking of another person's life, and yet have no trouble with allowing the State the power to do what we ourselves have stated we will not, as if the creation of the State imbues it with some form of shield against moral ambiguity, or worse, proclaims it to have some authority capable of overriding even the highest admonition in human society. Apparently, when handed to the State, a soul no longer has any meaning to anyone.

There is nothing of justice in this decision, only the need to quench a thirst for vengeance. One hesitates to pin ulterior motives on those who are left with the weighty responsibility of determining who shall live and who shall die, but even an iota of doubt should be sufficient for anyone to see it reasonable to choose life over death, for the system must always err to the side of conservation and justice. To beat a hasty path to the executioner's chamber in the face of reasonable doubts is the mark of those who would see their power unchallenged and their prejudices confirmed.

One would hope the merest hint of this execution would stick in the craw of a decent person, but if it were to do so only after the fact of a man's death, this would not say much for those who claim aegis over clemency or those who claim to revere life. Execution is a tool of emotion, a hearkening back to the Middle Ages, to the triumph of fear and prejudice over reason and humanity. It is a tool that is best relegated to the shed, abandoned like so many other ancestral barbarisms: stoning, crucifixion, inquisition, etc. A modern society such as ours should not hold on to the egregious behaviors of our past.

One can only hope that there is yet a bolt from the blue, that some reasonable, sensible member of the State moves to terminate this reprehensible act before its culmination. If not, the death of Troy Davis will be another stain upon our American society, heaped upon the many others we have yet to fully wipe away.

Ignorance Is Bliss

It must be nice to live in a world where suppressing knowledge and inventing facts are rules, rather than exceptions. How much better it is to go through life ignorant of those things which might upset you or lead you astray. How grand and satisfying it is, conjuring up fallacious tidbits to reinforce your delusional world view. Why surrender to reality, when you can live a life of happiness and joy, ensconced in your cocoon of prevarications and obfuscations?

For some odd reason, a great number of people have either come up bereft of logic and reason, or decided that facts should not get in the way of a good story. In either case, we are seeing, through the media, a wave of tripe that that threatens to engulf our country in a miasma of ignorance. And the media are complicit in allowing it to spread, by eliminating self-censorship for the reward of cheap and easy ratings.

How else can we explain the "birthers" cabal, or the anti-health-care-reform ranters, or the "tea party" crowd, for example? Here we have movements that either a) have incoherent and poorly parsed messages or b) have clear messages based on fabrications, innuendo, and outright lies. In either case, the record is easily set straight, the fabrications are easily debunked, and the messages invalidated by their unreasonableness and illogical frameworks. And yet they persist -- why?

We have methods of communication that span the globe at the speed of light, and ways of conveying this information that allow for individuals to dial in to ideas and data that match their view of the world. Satellite communication, 24-hours news, the Internet -- the scions of the digital revolution -- have made it possible for any idea, no matter how realistic, no matter how logical, no matter how factual, to be disseminated to everywhere on Earth, to be discovered, absorbed, and regurgitated by those who covet such knowledge. It only takes one person to put out a scrap of information, that within hours could be considered gospel.

There is no filter on information, anymore. No peer review. No editor. No oversight. Where those things exist, they are easily bypassed. All one needs is an Internet connection, and a place to deposit the information -- personal web site, social networking site, comment section of any news/entertainment site, etc. -- and through the auspices of "information" providers, web spiders, and re-writers, a "fact" is borne to every machine that can hold it, passed on to every computer that requests it, and lodged on data storage devices everywhere. Even if removed from it source, the information can never truly be erased.

Can it be any wonder, then, that so much unsubstantiated, illogical, and specious knowledge continues to plague us? Were it tucked away in a musty book, on a dusty shelf, in some dingy hall, it might never see the light of day. If the purveyors of such nonsense were still forced to go through others to have their ideas see the light of day, then many of these things would have remained in relative obscurity. They would be nothing more than fables, stories to scare children with, the intellectual equivalent of things that "go bump in the night."

Those of us aligned with the forces of reason, sanity, and logic will continue to rail against the descent into ignorance, but it becomes harder and harder to be heard over the din created by the maunderers and sycophants. The only bright spot in the current maelstrom is that the tools that allow such rubbish to exist and thrive, may ultimately be turned against it. Given time, patience, and the will, we may yet dispel the gray clouds of ignorance, and pull Mankind into brighter light and clearer air.