It’s reasons like this that make me wonder exactly how people think that life and the legal system are fair, nowadays. I’m assuming you’ll all at least read the article… at any rate, it ran in the Sunday Times in the UK last month, and came to my attention when the Weekend Australian reprinted it this week.

Just another example of the insanity of some of our Caucasian cousins - really, reading through the article brings to mind the saying, ‘Only in America’. Indeed so, only in America would such things happen; at least in the western world.

I am, personally, opposed to the death penaltly in general but am somewhat in favour in very specific cases. There’s an element of revenge in all people, there most likely always will be. As such, all of us sometimes think ‘the bastard deserves it’ - which can of course be applied to, say, a mass murderer who is being executed. But when said penalty is applied in cases such as that mentioned above - it makes me step back and wonder.

Prejudice, my friends, it’s all about prejudice and hatred. And many prejudices and hatreds are still present in our world today - social prejudices, religious prejudices, racial prejudices. Everyone has some of them, embedded within themselves somewhere, through social conditioning. It’s perhaps unrealistic to simply sing ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon and hope it will all get better, someday, somehow. Realistically, the society imagined in Imagine probably won’t ever happen - or if it does, it will be after at least another World War - and, to paraphrase and extrapolate from Albert Einstein, there won’t be much of a world left to live in afterwards… for although we can’t know how World War Three will be fought, World War Four (if it occurs) will be fought with sticks and stones.

But that is the Human Condition. To blindly continue onwards, destroying and ravaging as we go, like a steamroller over the bracken and heath of the world around us. And if some of the people who make up the Human Collective happen to fall off and get run down along with the rest of the insignificant things… oh well. Morality and ethics, my friends. It makes me wonder, sometimes, why I even consider myself a human being.

Oh wait. It’s for the legal protections afforded to humans opposed to animals, of course.

Silly me.

rnAlcata’riel.

-Andiyar