Gut Reaction

The following paragraphs are excerpted from a front page story of the Washington Post’s Web page this afternoon:

The jerky cell phone videos that surfaced Friday showed Gaddafi, his face and shoulder drenched in blood, being pushed and shoved by revolutionaries.

“Get him out of the pipe!” yelled one, apparently referring to the drainage culvert where he was discovered Thursday. “God is greatest!” several revolutionaries yelled, firing their rifles.

Another video shows a dazed Gaddafi pulled roughly onto the hood of a truck and being punched and slapped. A third showed him begging revolutionaries, “Have pity, don’t hit me!” The videos were shown on the Arabic television channel al-Arabiya.

I hardly know where to start. But these are my visceral thoughts:

I’ve never felt firmer in my stance against an-eye-for-an-eye Old Testament justice. Which, however you want to dress it up, is the core of the death penalty in this country.

While I know intellectually that religion can be a force for good, once again I find myself thinking the key to world peace would be universal adoption of the Golden Rule and abandonment of all other faith-based nonsense.

I’ll readily cop to being a technophobe who’s in many ways the 21st-century equivalent of The Kinks’ 1960s Village Green Preservation Society, but, is it really progress that anybody, anywhere, now can and do take pictures of anything—including lynch mobs virtually whistling while they work?

Sure, you can argue that compassion comes easy to someone like me—a middle-class American who’s never known a Libyan, let alone one who was brutalized by Moammar Gaddafi, that country’s deposed and now quite dead dictator. But I have to say, I feel more than a little sympathy for that battered corpse.

I‘ll not belabor any of this, because I always feel more comfortable—inside and outside this blog—making light of myself, rather than suggesting I have anything profound to say, or that I’m an expert on anything.

Who am I to argue, for instance, that the death penalty is any less defensible than are its sad alternatives within our criminal “justice” system?

Where do I get off condemning religious faith, which propels people of all creeds toward good works, and not merely toward rivalries, hatreds and wars?

How can I credibly argue that the digital revolution is, in wide balance, perhaps less empowering than it is impoverishing?

Why waste sympathy on a sorry excuse for a human being who hardly lavished it upon his own people?

I don’t frankly know how to answer any of that.

All I know is that I've a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach—as once again, as routine as sun and rain, violent retribution is celebrated and shared.