Palate Cleanser #115

Neomarica caerulea braziliensis

© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Sunday Happy: Smile and the World Smiles with You

Stick with the slightly swaying camera. It's worth it for the sweet message that Bronson wants to share: you will be loved.

You can see more It Gets Better Project videos here.


© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Palate Cleanser #114

Rossacroonaloo Wood Near Kilgarvan County Kerry Ireland

Attribution Unknown

© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Justice?

"Such inconsistencies mock the idea that ours is a system grounded in equality before the law."

~ John Grisham

It's a bad thing when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is right about us, isn't it? 

It's been more than a week since the state of Virginia killed Teresa Lewis. I'm still trying to comprehend how this execution moved forward, given her low intellectual functioning and the fact that there appears to have been ample evidence that she may have been led into involvement in the murder of her husband and stepson. But I guess it's more than just that. I spend time looking through the posts at deathpenaltyinfo.org and I read eloquent op-ed pieces by John Grisham and Naseem Rakha. Much as I feel for the utter wrongness of Lewis's sentence and her execution, I'm struggling on the broader scale to understand a country in which we won't use stem cells for fear of killing a patch of living cells, won't allow assisted suicide in most states, even if a person is suffering horribly from intractable pain and without any hope of recovery or long-term survival, and yet we execute people who have done wrong. Even people who might qualify as mentally retarded. Like people whose measured IQ of 72 represents a margin of error that might dip significantly below 70 and therefore violate federal law. And that's leaving aside the fact that the two men who actually did the killing were not sentenced to death.

Grisham and Rakha point out, in their op-ed pieces, different facets of what is so very wrong with the death penalty. Rakha, in her piece in the Guardian, points out not just the obvious of Lewis's questionable level of intellectual functioning, but also the fact that as a punishment itself, the death penalty has questionable accuracy or what I would suggest as justness. Since 1973, 138 individuals have been exonerated while on Death Row. That's right, found innocent of any wrongdoing.


Lewis wasn't innocent of involvement in the death of her husband and stepson. She confessed to her involvement. But, as Grisham points out, the triggerman, Matthew Shallenberger, IQ 113, and his associate Rodney Fuller, did the actual killing and were both sentenced to life in prison. Shallenberger had even changed his plea to guilty during his trial. He got life because Fuller, whose case was heard before Lewis's, had received life in prison as his sentence.


As I have written previously, there was ample evidence both that Shallenberger did the planning and that Lewis was barely capable of functioning day to day, both because of her low intellectual functioning and because of an addiction to prescription painkillers. It mattered nought to the Governor of Virginia when it came to the plea to commute her sentence to the same as that of the men who actually killed Lewis's husband and stepson: life in prison.


Teresa Lewis reportedly went placidly to her death.

I can't stop thinking about her.

I cannot understand the mindset of a country that would preserve a clump of cells but kill a woman who couldn't balance her check book or plan groceries for a week. A woman who from all accounts, from her own mother-in-law's perspective, just wasn't right in the head.

The death penalty in this country is bad enough to begin with, but when we see it applied to people who are so clearly mentally incapable of even defending themselves?


Teresa Lewis was expendable political fodder. She was good for the tough on crime stance of Virginia's Governor. That's the only way that one can justify, and I use the word with full irony, her execution, which I prefer to just call killing.

How bad is it when Ahmadinejad says we're doing wrong and is right about it?


Bad enough so that I can't get it, or Terry Lewis, out of my mind.


What do we gain from the "eye for an eye" mindset? Well, I really can't think of anything.


Except... in this instance, shame.

© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Yemen's Shame

© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

Palate Cleanser #113

Autumn Leaves, Japan

Photograph by Michael Yamashita, National Geographic

This Month in Photo of the Day: Nature and Weather Photos

"The road gods beckoned." Thus the poet Matsuo Basho set off in 1689 into Japan’s backcountry. His journal, Narrow Road to a Far Province, described a path, still visible on Natagiri Pass, that devotees have followed ever since.

visual palate cleanser concept © Bright Nepenthe, 2010

What's Wrong With People?

Tyler Clementi

After reading a NY Times update last night that referred to Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei as 'children' ("I’m sure these children did not intend for this child to go out and commit suicide.”) and then slogging through reading a vicious little treatise on the blog Vox Populi about Tyler Clementi's suicide being just desserts for gay rights proponents telling people it's okay to be gay, I'm just reeling. Really? These 'children', who apparently are refugees from the world of the Lord of the Flies, didn't think about consequences? They were bright enough to get into Rutgers but so slow they didn't know wrong from right or harm from good? Wow. What does that tell us about our world and the promise of our future? I am so glum thinking about it. And speaking of our world, what does it say that a significant portion of the people commenting on Vox Populi (which certainly does not represent my voice...) evidently think that feeling ashamed of being homosexual is a fine and understandable reason to commit suicide. But let's start with Vox himself, shall we? It is simply astonishing to me that anyone could think: 

"So it was not a juvenile prank that killed the unfortunate Mr. Clementi even though it served as the proximate trigger for his lethal actions. If anyone other than Mr. Clementi should be blamed for his suicide, it is those who repeatedly encouraged him to behave in a way that would fill him with such guilt, remorse, and shame."

~ Vox Day of Vox Populi

Yes, I'm definitely feeling so guilty that I thought it was okay that Tyler was gay. Wow, what was I thinking? My bad. Surprisingly, I even think that it's horrible that he felt so bad about himself and his future that he committed suicide.

I guess I wouldn't be so troubled by the Vox Populi post if it wasn't for so very, very many commenters who appear to agree with him. After all, Vox Day is just one blogger, an ex-pat, theist, racist, elitist, if not supremacist, writer. But the number of people commenting in agreement with him- the number of people who seem to think that Tyler Clementi felt the weight of his immorality (their summary words, certainly not mine, nor my thinking) and that drove him to suicide- is just appalling to me.

Vox Day writes grandly and grandiosely. Oh, and pompously. But I am genuinely taken aback at the simplistic take that shame over his immorality drove Tyler Clementi to suicide. Vox's take, as if it was a sort of aquatic harakiri and atonement for Clementi's grave sins, is laughable. While I'm sure that Vox Day is quite intelligent, if rather reptilian in his repellant assessments, surely shame is not the only factor here. There are plenty of people who do genuinely immoral things, far more immoral than exploring their sexuality in the privacy of their own bedroom, such as murder and rape and animal cruelty. Many of them don't feel at all motivated by the weight of their actions to commit suicide. (Oh wait a minute, they're so bad off they may not even feel shame... they are, gasp... worse than gay people???) As for the supposition that immoral gay sex and its proponents were to blame, perhaps Vox Day believes that nudity is immoral, too? That would explain why 18 year old Jessica Logan committed suicide in 2008 after a nude photo that she had texted to a then boyfriend was sent by that same young man, after they had broken up, to hundreds of high school peers. What happened there? She immorally sent photos of herself and we were inadvertently advocating for rights for teenage girls to send racy text messages? 

Jessica Logan

Day's post doesn't even begin to capture the plethora of reasons that would lead a young person who had been embarrassed and betrayed to commit suicide. Clearly, after reporting the incident to several people in his residence hall, Clementi became more agitated and despondent. I can't even begin to imagine the thoughts that lead him to jump from that bridge. But I'm surmising that they had less to do with shame about his being gay than they did about his fragile view of the world around him, the lack of privacy, the breach of trust and feeling despondent about having to deal with all the people around him and wondering if they had seen it. In short, I'm thinking that he was in not too different a place from Jessica Logan. Their exploration of their sexuality had gone horribly, horribly wrong. Yes, I'm thinking about the fact that sometimes, finding out that you trust people and they're heinous and vile and abusive of that trust, that they cross all kinds of boundaries and make you believe that boundaries are really a sham, might be enough to make teens, who notoriously live in the moment, despair.

It's easy to be dismissive of Vox Day as being a flake, an ultra-conservative religiously driven hate-monger. We're all just bloggers and I'm sure he can be just as scathing about my beliefs as I am about his. But his followers do give me chills. Some of them are like Ann Coulter on speed. And I have to ask myself, is this really the world we live in? A world filled with so much hate, so much intolerance, so much judgement as to be dismissive of a young person taking his life because he was a nascently gay person?

I really don't know what Vox Day's religious beliefs are (I didn't take the time to read that deep into his website as the FAQ page alone was disturbing enough) but I'm very curious about a religion that advocates such venomous views as chalking up a body count to believing that people have rights, of any bent whatsoever. Frankly, it seems less than charitable. Of course, religion is all about interpretation. Ask any Taliban and they'll explain it, I'm sure.

Vox, you aren't popular with me. And I'm really hoping with every fiber of my being that you aren't speaking for the public at large...

Rutgers Students Protesting Tyler Clementi's Death

New York Daily News staff photo

In light of the deaths Tyler Clementi and Phoebe Prince, the NY Times has an interesting discussion about cyberbullying. It's food for thought. I'm just hoping our legislators put it together to tread that line between freedom of expression and destruction of lives. 

© Bright Nepenthe, 2010

It Gets Better: You Are Beautiful by Lex

What it's like to be gay/queer in middle and high school or even college? It appears awful enough so that this past week 13 year old Asher Brown and 18 year old Tyler Clementi committed suicide because of bullying, invasion of privacy or, just in general, despair that they would ever be accepted for who they are.  Though I'm not exactly a Dan Savage fan, his It Gets Better project seeks to help young people adjust to their sexuality and have hope that the future holds more for them than taunting, fear and loneliness. It's a marvelous thing that makes you hope that young people everywhere, struggling with their sexuality, or more than that, people's reactions to that one one small part of who they are watch these videos. 

One of the most eloquent videos I've seen in the project is that of Lex...

I'll feature videos every few days. please share them...


© Bright Nepenthe, 2010