This is number 80 in my ongoing diary series, which runs on my Instagram page. My hope is to compile these, along with essays and poems that reflect our moment, into a book.
#FrontLines, a #pandemicdiary 80. Nine dead. Murdered. Pentobarbital. In six months. Five more planned by Jan. 20. A killing spree of massive proportions. After 17 years of silence. // Brandon Bernard. The latest victim. Bernard, 40, killed tonight in Terre Haute. Convicted of murdering Todd and Stacie Bagley in Texas. He was 19 at the time. Just a kid. Didn’t pull the trigger. But he was there. “I’m sorry,” he said before he died. // Todd’s mother thanked the president, the attorney general, “for bringing the family some closure,” said after the execution, “I can very much say: I forgive them.” // The Bagleys are dead. Brandon Bernard is dead. Christopher Vialva, who pulled the trigger, is dead. // “A death sentence offers the illusion of closure and vindication,” says the Catholic Church. Appearance. Semblance. Imitation. Mirage. “No act, even an execution, can bring back a loved one or heal terrible wounds. The pain and loss of one death cannot be wiped away by another death.” // This is Donald Trump’s legacy. Adding dead to the dead. Almost 300,000 killed by his neglect. Fourteen more seem a pittance. But these killings are premeditated. Active. Thought through. // “We owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.” // But Batman does not kill the Joker. Because Batman would become the Joker. Justice would disintegrate before our eyes. // “When the state, in our names and with our taxes, ends a human life despite having non-lethal alternatives, it suggests that society can overcome violence with violence,” says the Catholic Church. Violence is normalized. Murder becomes a tool. “The use of the death penalty ought to be abandoned not only for what it does to those who are executed, but for what it does to all of society.” //