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Listen, y'all, this is not the way. When I woke up

this morning, and I saw that the Supreme Court had re-instituted

the death penalty, in the case of one of the Boston Marathon

bomber... people, I was horrified. I was horrified.

Either we are for a more humane society, or we are not. Either

we are for justice reform, or we are not. I can't say I was

surprised, given who's on the Supreme Court. But I was

horrified. Believing in people is never easy.

Whether you do it as an act of faith, or a practice of

religion, or a matter of principle, or because it's the

only thing you can do. It's still hard. Believing in people

when people are mean, when people are cruel, when people

are destructive, when people are committing what most of us find

unthinkable acts of violence toward huge swathes of the

population... believing in people becomes an act of

defiance. But that doesn't get us off the hook for doing it, we

still need to do it, we still need to believe in people, we

still need to believe in people because the only way we can

believe in ourselves is by believing in everyone. And that

doesn't mean that we let people do destructive things. It

doesn't mean that we expect that everyone's ethics or everyone's

values or everyone's morals are equal to everyone else's.

Sometimes people lack of conscience. Sometimes people use

that lack of a conscience and their power to wreak havoc.

Sometimes that havoc is cruel, as well as just bad. But if

we're going to believe in people, if we're going to

believe in ourselves, we're not different. That's the important

is that we are not different. I am not

different from you. But I am also not different from all of

those people who are doing those abhorrent things. We are made up

of the same cells, the same flesh, the same blood, we are

the same as our oppressors, we are the same as those we

oppress. We are the same, we are made up of the same stuff. We

are the same species. And the only thing that makes my

behavior different is my commitment to behaving

differently. And that commitment comes from different places for

different people. For some people, that commitment comes

from duty, for some people, that commitment comes from faith. For

some people, that commitment comes out of habit or out of a

kind of begrudging obligation. It doesn't matter. I mean, it

probably matters on the inside. But it doesn't matter on the

outside because on the outside the result is the same, which is

that the people are doing the thing. So that we can believe in

each other and we can believe in ourselves collectively. And

what's been happening in the United States over the last

bunch of years- and that bunch may be a very big bunch or maybe

a little shorter, depending on your level of awareness- what's

been happening in the United States over the last bunch of

years is that people have been floundering, looking for ways to

believe that we're better than that. Pro-tip: we're not better

than that. We're not. We have never been. We have lost sight

of our own potential, of our own honor, of our own capacity for

heroism and selflessness and nobility. And reimplementing the

death penalty in any one case or in any broad set of cases, this

is not the way to bring that back. Yes, we need clear senses

of right and wrong. And yes, that gets more complicated. The

more factors you include, the more people you include in "we",

the harder it gets to know what "we" should do to uplift all of

us. "We" and "us" become very complicated ideas. When we have

different cultural expectations, different cultural values,

different ways of being in the world, it's much easier to feel

united, when you start out mostly united. When you start

out mostly the same. When you start out mostly different-

except, you're not mostly different are you? You're not

mostly different at all, you're the same handful of elements, a

bunch of water. Probably some moderate need for sunlight,

probably need to eat. There are levels of same and levels of

difference. But when we say that it's not okay to kill people, we

can't then go around killing people. To me, this should be

obvious.

We lose not only our own humanity, but we lose our moral

high ground if we ever had it in the first place. Because it's

hypocritical. It's hypocritical to say that it's wrong to kill

someone here, but not wrong to kill someone there. It gets

complicated. Like everything, it gets complicated. If one person

is going to die to save the lives of hundreds or hundreds of

thousands, is that a worthwhile trade off? It's a hell of a

trade off. It's terrible. Nobody should ever ever have to be that

sacrifice. Nobody should ever have to look that sacrifice in

the eye and make a decision. Nobody, and certainly not all of

the frontline workers who have had to make decisions like that,

since the pandemic started, but we can't rely on those

exceptional situations to get us out of having to behave

ourselves the rest of the time. And by behave ourselves, I don't

mean constrict ourselves. I mean, blossom, I mean, put roots

down, and leaves up. I mean, become so much more than the

acorn. The acorn has value in and of itself. It's food, it's a

seed, it's an entire tree in a tiny little cup with a hat on

it.

And when the roots go down, and the leaves and branches go up,

that one tree, that one seed, that one little cup with a hat

on it becomes hundreds of cups with hats on it, becomes food

for entire families of animals, including humans. It becomes

shade, it becomes compost, it becomes soil again. It becomes a

nourishing, nurturing part of a forest community. We need to

become. We need to keep becoming, because it is our

nature. It is how we are. If we are going to move toward

something that is actually just in a justice system. We have

absolutely 100% got to put down the idea that it's ever okay to

kill someone in the name of the State. It may happen

occasionally. But as a last resort and never, never under

circumstances where other people's lives are not

threatened.

I'm not a pacifist. I know I sound like one. I wish I

believed in people well enough to be a pacifist. But I am very

close. Not because I believe that people are always good, or

always kind, are always wise, but because I believe that it's