Tag: existentialism

Originally published in Free Inquiry

Every society has the criminals it deserves.

-Albert Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine”

My sister must have been terrified the night that her junkie boyfriend beat her to death in that filthy motel room. Terrified and disoriented, she would have been struggling to understand what was happening to her. Beating a human being to death is apparently not an easy thing to do. According to the coroner’s testimony, it took about five minutes for her to die. What was she thinking, in those five minutes? At what point in that five-minute period did she suspect she might die in that squalid room? At what point did she know she would die there and then?

I would lay awake at night, for months after her death, unable to turn off the endless broken loop playing in my brain that kept repeating these questions. More than answers, I wanted revenge: hard, bloody-fisted revenge, bitter and uncompromising Old Testament revenge. More, I wanted to stand before those in power, point my finger at all the world’s death rows, and scream at the top of my lungs, “Kill them all, and let God sort them out!” I was slowly going mad with my ache for revenge.

But-but-revenge is not justice.