1/19/08 – NCADP Lifetime Achievement Award, San Jose, CA
Thank you. First I want to thank my beautiful wife, Shelley, for being willing to put aside the fact that today is her birthday and be here to support me. Thank you, sweetheart.
Now, I must confess that this honor, this thought, and your generous reaction thrill me deeply. But I am in equal part embarrassed to be singled out in this way when we all know that so many – all of you here and so many others out there with whom we work, so many who are down in the trenches putting their hearts and their guts on the line every day – should be up here receiving this and every other honor we can bestow. So, if I may, let me accept this honor on behalf of all of you and all of those whose efforts make real Albert Camus’ belief that “when there is no hope it is incumbent upon us to invent it.”
Invent it. I think it’s up to us not only to have it, believe in it and live it, but to embody hope for those who have lost it. Not only for those who live every day in a place designed to promote hopelessness - cold, dank, dreary, spiritless cells, places of misery and inhumanity and violence and shame - but also for those who become volunteers, men and women so defeated, so immiserated by their circumstances that they give up their appeals and ask for death, rather than continue to slip down the road to misery, despair and invisibility.
We have to have hope. I believe in hope because I believe in the human spirit, this ineffable something, this force beyond our understanding that empowers whatever is good in the world to stand against what is not. As Vaclav Havel told us: "Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good."
That is what we do, you and I. And let me say that in this work I have the incredibly good fortune, in working closely with those on the board and those in support of Death Penalty Focus, to be in the company of some of the finest, most caring and most decent people it’s ever been my privilege to know. And I find that fact to be mirrored wherever I go in this country – or in the world, for that matter – to join with others in pursuit of an end to state killing. Oh, like any social movement we have our crazies, of course, but by and large we are in damned fine company.
So, by “working for good,” we stand against that other force, we expose it to the light and watch it, however slowly, coagulate and shrivel away in embarrassment, in shame, just as we saw happen last month in New Jersey because of the hope and love and ferocious dedication of Senator Ray Lesniak and Celeste Fitzgerald and her courageous colleagues at New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (NJADP).
I’m not a hater. I’m a pretty easy-going and optimistic guy, but through my years of experience with it I have come to hate the death system in this country. I hate what it is, I hate what it does and I hate the corrupting influence it has on everyone it touches. As I tell people every time I get a chance, there’s no better example of the moral corrosion our society has suffered from this damnable process of dehumanizing those we deem expendable than what is being done today by otherwise normal, patriotic young Americans who are torturing human beings in Iraq, Guantanamo and elsewhere. It’s the poisonous legacy of mindless authoritarians, cowards who slink out of their caves long enough to try to bludgeon others into joining them in their self-imposed agony of fear, loneliness and dystopia.
I’m not a great believer in evil – at least not in the existence of evil people. But I do believe there are evil acts, evil practices, and I believe our tolerance of them does us harm. As Einstein said, "The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of people who are evil but because of people who don't do anything about it."
And I’m not blind to the fact that there are bent and broken people out there who do terrible things, evil things. With Bishop Tutu, I believe that those who do monstrous things are not monsters, but people – damaged, hurt people. And I agree that we have to have a system that keeps society safe from them, but not only by incarcerating and warehousing them, by treating their wounds, educating them, habilitating them so that they may some day return to society able to be productive citizens. And yes, reluctantly, I will agree with the doomsayers that there are some who may not be healed, some whose life experience has been so utterly vile that they may be beyond our poor power to repair; they are the dangerous ones who do harm to others without apparent thought, the vicious ones, whose contempt for life endangers others - think Dick Cheney, for example - who should be kept apart from society.
But if we concede that there are evil acts, we must also face our responsibility as a society to understand how even the worst of them can happen. To understand is not to justify. To understand is to find a way to move us forward.
No evildoer ever believes he or she is doing evil. In the beginning of Mein Kampf, Hitler says, “In dealing with the Jewish question, I’m doing the Lord’s work.”
Simone Weil, in “Gravity and Grace,” tells us that “Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.”
Phillip Zimbardo, the Professor of Psychology at Stanford whose prison study exposed the damage to both prisoners and guards done by the distorted power relationship such circumstances impose, says, “For me, evil is the highest level of inhumanity. It could be one-on-one, like the torturer and his victim, but more often than not at that level it’s the individual as an agent of a system.”
It’s that system, the death system – and the willingness of some to submit to it out of fear while others use it to serve their own political ends – that we must expose to the light.
Expose political ambition and, yes, willful ignorance. I cringe at them all, but the killing of Stanley Tookie Williams still makes my blood boil. The cowardice of Gov. Schwarzenegger – a man whom the late Red Buttons perfectly described by saying he didn’t know if harass was one word or two – is staggering. He wrote me a few years ago claiming “California’s administration of the death penalty is free from the kind of systemic defects that have called its accuracy into question” in other states. And today, in the face of a $14 billion dollar budget shortfall, he cuts services for children and the elderly while setting aside $136 million for a new death row.
We have work to do here. And we will do it because it is good work, necessary work, some would say heart work, some would say holy work. It is all those things.
On our board we have clergy and non-believers and everything in between. I’ll never forget Lance, my esteemed friend and our extraordinary Executive Director, a self-proclaimed atheist, who one day at a meeting was extolling the wonders of our small and dedicated staff, he was singing their praises and raised his eyes and just caught himself as he said, “I thank the…” ceiling.” Whether thanking God, the ceiling or something else, atheists, agnostics, rabbis, priests, clergy and laymen and women all work with a shared vision, a shared sense of mission, a shared love of life and a shared awareness that there are mysteries the solution to which are not available to us in our current state of understanding, but which can best be approached through a mutual sense of love and respect. As Einstein said, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."
I’m not a religious man, though I believe there is something smarter, higher, nobler and more sublime out there. I see it in you, in your eyes, in your work, and I sense it here, in this place where the betterment of humankind is the common goal.
I lost a friend two weeks ago, a magical human being with a poetic soul who died suddenly, inexplicably, at far too young an age, and took from the world an eye and an ear for beauty the loss of which leaves me breathless. When John spoke, with his lovely Irish brogue, he had a way of reaching inside the words to find a deeper meaning. When he reminded us that we are people of privilege and said that ‘the duty of privilege is absolute integrity,’ he helped me to understand our charge here in this life. His death wounded me and, as those events tend to do, it reminded me that we all must die at some point. But it also reaffirmed for me that by God that point should not be determined by some political hack or some heartless, inhumane, arrogant ‘system’ that holds itself more valuable, more meaningful, than some lost, wounded invisible soul who never got the chance to see past the boots of those holding him down.
So in thinking of John, who was himself a former priest, I want to offer to you a bit of a prayer that recently came my way. It was written by an unknown prisoner in Ravensbrück, a Nazi concentration camp, and left by the body of a dead child. It seems to me to speak to much of what we do – and for whom we do it.
“O Lord, remember not only the men and women of good will, but also those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted on us; remember the fruits we have bought, thanks to this suffering -- our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all of this, and when they come to
judgment let all the fruits which we have borne be their forgiveness.”
Thank you for this honor and thank you for what you do.
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