Friday, April 16, 2010

Crime and Punishment

Some days you just can't win. I realize this is an old and hackneyed saw, but the truth of it is inescapable.

Last night, after a long day of what I thought was friendly togetherness, we had ourselves a fight. Not zombies or marauders for once, but a good old-fashioned fistfight. I think that most of us are adult enough to be able to get over a fight with relative ease, brush off the dust and get along. As it turns out, though, some folks just can't get over their hate and anger. 

In the aftermath, we found out what the fight was about. But at the time all we saw was fists flying and dust clouding about them. It took quite a lot of us to get them apart, both of them are pretty damn strong. 

Darlene held her own pretty well, considering that she got blindsided. Apparently one of the women that we rescued from the hotel has been harboring some pretty harsh feelings toward her. In most of the debates and discussions, Darlene has been siding with the moderates. She has tried very hard to move past the atrocities that happened to her and the other women, attempting to use her reason to decide, rather than her hate.

Darlene was rescued early on, from a smaller group of that had abducted her. This isn't something that she shared very openly before, telling few people, and I have respected her privacy. She feels that she made an error in confiding in others who had been imprisoned and abused, trying to provide a little empathy. Now she wants me to make the message clear: as a victim of rape and torture, if she can overcome, then so can anyone. She implores me to make a point clear: this is not to denigrate anyone, but rather a positive statement about the strength and willpower of the women she has come to know. Her mistake was not in sharing, as she  is having me do on her behalf now, but in not making clear her intention to make decisions with the better angels of her nature, rather than allowing hatred and anger, however reasonable, to rule. 

Some of the others seem to see this as a sort of betrayal. I see why they feel that way, but it's hard to feel pity for a person that has to solve her disagreement with violence. The fact that her attacker had been drinking only complicates the issue. I mean, all of us around here know that sometimes people disagree and get into fights. I guess you had to see it. It was vicious. She was aiming to injure or maim. So now we have exactly what I was hoping to avoid--a prisoner, someone in detention. I don't intend to imply that we are going to keep her there as a punishment, only that we have to do something with here until we make a decision about what to do. 

But we shouldn't have to wait, or figure out anything. We should have been more proactive about what our specific laws or rules would be, few as they are likely to be, so that we could administer punishment and move forward. Now, more talk, more debate. More dissent from many sides, more mired arguments going nowhere. 

Damn it. 

3 comments:

  1. All this talk of peace and understanding about the enemy is making me sick to my stomach. Are we supposed to debate with a loaded gun. These are the same leftist arguments that plagued our government and law enforcement agencies before the fall of civilization. I can't state enough that people have to have some personal responsibility, if you witness the atrocities that these sub-human marauders and do nothing or even at least attempt to leave them then you have made your choice. If we don't let them know the consequences of their action then who does. Now I'm not talking jaywalking here, I'm talking murder, and rape. Those people that we let go do we know how many women that they raped how man innocents that they have murdered since their release. That number my be zero, hell even their own people may have killed them for failing at their mission, but what if just 1 person fell to them. What if our leniency encouraged the others that there were no consequences. The world has moved on and no matter how much it hurts we need to as well.

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  2. Yeah, no part of this post has anything at all to do with our enemies. I am talking here strictly about those that choose to join us in peaceful coexistence. The people we let go hadn't killed anyone that we could prove, and while they were burning houses, no one was even injured. So killing them in cold blood seemed a bit too much. There are some things that people will do that deserve merciless killing, but this to me does not qualify. On a personal note, I want to point out how *thrilled* I am that some right-wing nuts seemed to have survived the outbreaks. Maybe Glenn Beck made it too, we could all use a laugh around here.

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  3. Due to everything that has happened, we obviously can't handle criminals in quite the same way that we did before. There are no courts, no judges, no juries, no prisons. But that doesn't mean we should just take up vengeance killings. We need to try to re-establish a sense of right and wrong, and social methods of dealing with criminals so that it's not just left in the hand of an angry mob.

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