Thou Shall Not Kill
When the film American Me premiered in Los Angeles in 1992, director Edward James Olmos walked up to the stage to introduce his directorial debut. What stood out was the question he asked those of us in attendance: What do you think is the most addictive, powerful high one can experience?
His answer was news to me. The addiction he was referring to wasn't heroin, it was murder. Olmos wanted his audience to understand this. The act of killing another person was a thrill beyond any other. It would haunt any murderer for the rest of their life, damaging their soul and leaving them with a craving for the unquenchable power that only comes by ending another's life. Think serial killers.
Nobody questioned Olmo's assertion. As the film's director, he had learned much about gang culture by embedding himself in their world to create the most realistic portrayal for the story he hoped to tell.
His words always stuck with me, and it made me wonder if murder became one of the Ten Commandments precisely because it damages our soul.
Now, Republicans, the only political machine that's hellbent on taking us way back in time, the one party that outlaws abortion as murder, but not regime change where entire populations are eradicated, have decided it's a good idea to bring back firing squads. The idea is to cut costs and give volunteers the thrill of a lifetime by legally killing a "bad" human being.
We're all well-aware of trigger-happy ICE agents who freely use their weapons to kill these days, and we know that war veterans who have killed others never truly rest easy. My own father who served in Vietnam, was mentally tortured in his last years of Parkinson's by daily "sightings" of Vietnamese soldiers doing military exercises in his home's backyard here in the U.S.
So why would Republicans want to corrupt the souls of these new volunteer firing squads? What does this achieve? Wasn't this barbaric practice abandoned long ago because it was considered inhumane and uncivilized?
Are Republicans now saying, let's be barbarians? Let's give our boys some red meat? And who gets to mop up the mess? Is sanitizing the kill floor part of the volunteer package? Do we even care if this damages the volunteers' souls or permeates their brains with a disturbing new high they can't get enough of?
Last question: how on earth will it make America great again?