The Bus Ride

What are we doing? Where is our reasoning?

Whenever the death penalty is discussed, the arguments are brought forward that an innocent person might be killed by mistake. Names like Stephen Truscott and Donald Marshall are mentioned. I share this concern, too.

If that is the only reason these people oppose the death penalty, then what do they say about what happened today?

An innocent bystander was stabbed repeatedly on a Greyhound bus in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. There is no mistake who did it. The murderer hacked off the head and taunted the police with it.

I am not trying to argue the death penalty in this article. What I am trying to do is point out how we use hollow arguments to justify anything. Don’t tell me you don’t want the death penalty merely because a mistake might be made. What about the cases, like this one, where there can be no mistake?

Although the reason all of this happened is not known yet, people are saying that we should be spending more money on mental illness. Few seem to suggest the violence that we see in our media might be the cause of some of the ills of our society.

The film, Silence of the Lambs, about a sick person killing and eating people won several Academy Awards. I could create a list of several pages of violence that has been portrayed by “artists”. We even argue about everybody’s rights to produce this stuff, yet we scratch our heads in bewilderment that these things might actually be harmful to our society.

We are allowing our children to play video games that are far too violent. While filling in for a kindergarten teacher, the grade 8s paired up with them for computer buddies. As soon as I saw the 5-year-old shooting at a helicopter full of people, the monitor went off. The grade 8 student couldn’t grasp that this was not a healthy activity for the child. Guess what? Neither could his parents, because he said he played it all the time at home.

On one hand, we have people preaching that people must be responsible for their actions. On the other, pundits make their living explaining why somebody doing something is not entirely his fault. There are social/economic reasons. Maybe there was bad parenting. All of this may be true, but how does the situation get corrected?

In the meantime, there are parents somewhere trying to understand why their son was so brutally murdered by a stranger in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. No amount of making excuses for the murder can bring this young man back to life.