The Writing Desk of Jakebe Rabbit

Over the weekend Ryan and I watched Dead Man Walking, with Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. In case you don't know too much about it, here's a brief synopsis: a nun is sent a letter from a Death Row inmate (who murdered two teenagers, raping the girl before he killed her) requesting her help with his case. She accepts, of course, and strikes up a relationship with this man as well as the families of the victims. This is a situation completely outside of her experience, and she has to navigate not only her own feelings but the exceedingly raw and difficult emotions of everyone involved. The families of the victims are understandably angry, and want to see the inmate die. The inmate himself is difficult to like but desperate, and Sister Prejean's investment in him lends him a grace and dignity he's unwilling to take on himself. It's an incredible, moving film and if you haven't seen it I can highly recommend it.

The movie leaves you with an awful lot to think about. Besides the obvious hot-button topic of the death penalty, there's so many questions that are difficult to answer. Sister Prejean believes in the idea of a basic human dignity, that simply because a man exists he's entitled to a certain set of considerations. Does that really exist? Can someone do something that strips them of that? The families of the victims certainly seem to think so, and that clears away the biggest argument against putting this inmate to death -- that as a human being, there is something fundamentally wrong about a system that allows him to be effectively killed by the state. How do you reconcile the idea that people can become something...less than human with other religious ideas? How do you square the idea of the death penalty and all of the reasoning for it, with a Christian mindset?

OK, so that loops back to the death penalty, but removing that question entirely, you can't fault the victims' families for being so angry, so hurt. This is an act so devastating that the consequences have come to define who these people are. Because the actual victims are no longer alive to carry the mantle of victimhood, their parents take it up themselves. There's a finality to it that makes it so much more difficult to handle because it's so senseless and needless. How could someone else take a life so lightly? How could someone be so self-absorbed that they don't think about the suffering they're causing someone else? Normal people don't rape and murder a teenage girl. Normal people don't just kill people on a lark. Anyone who does that must be broken, immoral, soulless. That's the only reason people can make sense of something so random.

Once the certainty of his death sets in, the inmate must face the reality of his life. On one hand, you wonder if he would have arrived at that point if death weren't staring him in the face. On the other, you feel that Sister Prejean's assertion that there is a basic goodness in him has been affirmed. Despite the inmate's racist, sexist attitude through most of the movie, his love for his mother and family is undeniable. It's difficult to reconcile the Sister's experience of this man with the reality of what he did, and in fact she's the only one who even comes close to taking in who he is entirely. It's because she's the only one who wants to.

And this brings me back around to faith, its purpose, what it does for us when we truly understand it. The movie is set in the south, so just about everyone is touched by religion in one way or another. Yet it seems that Sister Prejean alone has any idea how to behave compassionately towards all parties. Even the prison's chaplain states that the inmate is simply a bad person out to manipulate her, to use her for his own ends. Was she able to coax goodness out of him simply because of her faith? Would she have been able to do this if she had been more directly involved. If, for example, someone were to do something similarly horrible to Ryan or my mother, would I be able to see past his actions to the basic goodness and decency I believe to be there? It would be incredibly difficult for me to look at someone who's hurt someone I love, see past what they've done to something I only believe is there and struggle to see their worth. Why would I? If they don't believe it's there themselves, why should I work so hard to lead them there?

One of the things I took away from the movie is how difficult it is to truly forgive someone who's wronged you in a severe way. I think we've all been hurt deeply by someone at some point, and it's really easy to put them in a class beneath you (or at least the people you admire) so that you have an excuse to hold on to your hatred, bitterness, anger. I do it myself -- there are grudges that I'm holding on to even now, fueled by the fallacy that someone is...less than. I think it's a completely natural impulse that helps us to preserve our self-image and our ideas about the world and our fellow man. But it also holds us back from holding the full measure of the human experience.

Any one of us is capable of doing something unspeakably awful. Any one of us, from the people we admire most to the lowest of the low. But we're also capable of great love, of wonderful things, of being generous and kind and astonishingly open. It's difficult to reconcile the two extremes of our potential, but I think we absolutely need to if we ever hope to look at other people with any sort of clarity.

We all have our people or groups to hate or mock. For most of my peers, it's going to be Christians for all kinds of understandable reasons. A lot of us grew up in strict Christian households that focused on avoiding God's wrath over embracing God's love. We live in a society where the public discourse seems to be dictated by people who insist on forcing people to recognize their own self-absorption, a trait that is as anti-Christian as they come. Most of us have been hurt tremendously or known someone who has been hurt by someone in the name of Christ. We see it so consistently that our idea of the typical Christian has been stereotyped, a sort of empty vessel that mirrors any delusion that makes them feel superior. And this may be a bit of an extreme equivalency, but it's the same process that these people use to justify the death penalty to themselves, or the cutting of our 'social safety net', or anything else we think of as harsh and isolating. They've been hurt and made to feel afraid too. This is their reaction, the same as ours.

It takes compassion, strength and resolve to see that, and to base your actions on that knowledge. A lot of us choose our delusions because the alternative is too difficult, including myself. Put simply, it's easier to hate the people who are unkind to us. It's so, so much more difficult to love them, to find them worthy of love. Most people can't do it. I can't do it. And that's what makes Sister Prejean's story so remarkable. In simply opening herself up, as honestly and completely as she knew how, she found a way. Sometimes it takes that kind of contradictory behavior -- to surrender yourself to a new experience, to cling tightly to the ideals that will guide you through it -- to do something that the rest of us see as impossible.

Anyone rejoicing over the death of Anna Nicole Smith should be reincarnated as a ditzy blonde obsessed with looks and opinion, and who can never go down that last dress size. Seriously, knock it off, people.

Yes, she was messed up. Yes, she was very messed up. Yes, she had a very high amount of media saturation. But no matter how much of insane personal life we didn't want to hear but couldn't escape from, she was still a person. Her life was really sad, and I'm sorry she couldn't get herself together before she died.

This is a huge problem with the objectification of celebrities: we forget they're just people, no more and (certainly) no less.