The Ides Of March

There is superstition go the lyrics from a very good Stevie Wonder song and truer observations are hard to come by as there is indeed superstition all around us in our lives and our customs.

Take last Friday for example, the thirteenth, and think about all the karma or lack of it associated with such a date. For that matter, think about karma itself, for what is karma if not fate?

Traditional customs, superstitions, obeah, doens, La Diablesse, all are part of the folklore of our region and the analogy exists in every known society. Today being March fifteenth, I am reminded of the soothsayer in Julius Caesar who uttered the memorable line "beware the ides of March". Perhaps a little superstition of my own?

Not really.

Superstition and religion are closely linked. Some say that religion is superstition. Some who I respect and admire hold such a view, so I am left to ponder the choice between embracing the idea of a supreme being that I cannot detect with my senses as reality, as opposed to my firm non belief in ghosts and spirits and omens and signs and obeah and such rubbish.

Come on man, show me a ghost and I'll believe; show me the witch flying on the broomstick and I will do what she says for fear that she will burn down my house. Just how much of a fool must I be to believe in such rubbish which folklore has handed down to us?

The truth is a lot simpler: we are each and every one a product of our lives and how we handle them. Sometimes fate intervenes, but we each have our fate and fate is karma and karma is out of our control, so when bad things happen we deal with them and hopefully live to smile and laugh another day, and forget about superstition and omens and somewhere along the line keep on believing there is a God.

Talk about paradoxes.

Anyone ready to come to my next Friday thirteenth party?

Death As Punishment

The moral melee over the death penalty is well justified as the issue remains controversial well into 2008.

Many want it implemented while others consider it an aberration and want to have it abandoned.

The "death penalty as a deterrent" advocates posit that the threat of death as a consequence of the deed will reduce the incidence of murder by changing perpetrator's minds: kill and you will die. Simple. No problem. 

The revenge-driven feel that if one has the temerity to kill somebody who they care about or outright love, the now hateful person must die for that act. Revenge, plain and simple, and believe it or not, from what I have read and heard, it actually makes them feel good. They get "closure", whatever that means. As if they could forget the horrible or otherwise facts of the deed by eliminating the perpetrator. Kill him (or her) and it's gone.

The abolitionists, with their more civilized approach view the death penalty as rooted in more primitive times, tribe times, when there was little alternative but to kill those who killed.

"An eye for an eye" is quoted in the Bible as law in the Old Testament, and that surely translates into a life for a life. In the Muslim faith, the thief has his hand chopped off as a guarantee that he will not become a repeat offender, and in the more extreme interpretations the death sentence is liberally applied. Ask Salman Rushdie.

It seems that the death penalty is rooted more in religion than in law. Yet the revised Christian philosophy advocates forgiveness and reconciliation in the New Testament, while Islamic extremists today increasingly push death as a penalty for wrongs perceived or otherwise. They quote the Qur'an as justification.

Who, if anyone, is right?

The US, that great disbeliever in the extremist Muslim philosophy, executes people, and thus has common ground with it's enemy. It is a country that is increasingly in the minority of those who do. Just next door in Mexico, , there is no death penalty. 137 countries have abolished it, yet there are 24 countries which enforce it, quite a few of those in the Caribbean, including Trinidad & Tobago.

Albert Schweitzer was reputed to have proposed the philosophy of the sanctity of all life.

Tolkein, a veteran of the most brutal war man has ever witnessed had this to say on the subject through his mouthpiece Gandalf: "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement".

Man with his modern technology can create and destroy many things; yet he cannot create life, and so should not destroy it.