Necessar[il]y Evil
A few days ago, I backed out of my driveway on the way to work, and the thumb on my left hand reached over and rubbed the inside of my left ring finger, and I thought, “Oh, I forgot my ring.” I am divorced and have not worn my wedding ring in almost 11 years. I don’t know where that impulse or thought came from except that once upon a time, I was married and wore a ring on my left finger, and the impulse to feel for it – and my expectation that it will be there – is still stored in my brain and in my body. Repetitive movements become a reflex.
This reminds me of the death penalty. That’s not a joke about marriage.
Several years ago, I read an article at NPR about civil servants involved in capital punishment. After years of carrying out their professional responsibilities – not just the ones who flipped switches and checked for pulses, but also the ones who filed paperwork, cleaned facilities, ministered to the sentenced, and participated in execution “rehearsals” – they reversed their support for the death penalty. Their reasons did not describe moral dilemmas. Their reasons were for the toll it took on those involved in the process. Their jobs ruined their mental health and their lives. They describes chronic insomnia and an inability to be present with their children. Some turned to addiction. Many struggled to maintain relationships.
Jeanne Woodford, a warden at San Quentin who oversaw four executions is quoted as saying it doesn’t matter how heinous the crime was: “...the truth is, killing a human being is hard. It should be hard.”
A while back, I saw a very devout evangelical acquaintance on social media say something along the lines of: “Politics don’t matter. We just need to pray and spread the gospel to drive out evil.” I think I’d just watched a video clip of ICE agents zip-tying brown children’s wrists in court (where they didn’t have representation because their parents had already been deported and our system is broken). And I thought: Well, what do we do when we elect politicians who mandate evil acts? What then? When do politics matter? Might it be possible to both pray AND intervene? Or at the very least, to pray AND stop voting for terrible, greedy, power-hungry human beings?
This scene, and countless others like it – people tackled on the street and thrown into vans, children sobbing, families separated, people deported to countries they’ve never visited, immigrants being shipped off to for-profit prisons known for abuse, detainees disappearing completely from records, their families clueless about where they have been taken and what will happen next – have been funded in part by Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. $170B earmarked for deportation efforts.
ICE recruitment ads offer new agents $50,000 sign-on bonuses, $60,000 student loan repayment, overtime pay, “enhanced retirement benefits”, and require no particular education. I see the brutality of so many ICE arrests and in addition to worrying over the wellbeing of those being detained, I also wonder what is to become of the soul of the aggressor. You cannot zip-tie the wrist of a crying child and remain well. Like something as simple as feeling for a ring you haven’t worn in a decade, repetitive movement becomes a reflex. It becomes muscle memory – a part of you.
What if the reflex is cruelty? When do you become immune to it? What else do you become immune to? What do you carry home with you? What sits around the dinner table with your child or rides in the backseat on a road trip? When empathy dies so you can carry out your duty, what happens next?
Some will argue that we need impactful punishments to deter crime and we need secure borders to keep out the riffraff. They will call capital punishment and mass deportations necessary evils.
Necessary evil: What an interesting phrase. What if we changed it to “necessarily evil?” What if instead of referring to the act as a noun - a disembodied object we could alphabetize and put into a cabinet - we referred to it as what we are asking people to do, how we are asking them to move through the world?
I think it matters.
Because you can’t on one hand pray for the eradication of evil while you vote to keep it in circulation with the other.