Three weeks into Russia’s lethal invasion of Ukraine, two years into a pandemic — surrounded, that is, by death on all sides — South Carolina quietly reserved the right to execute people by firing squad.
The Palmetto State joins Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah in offering inmates the option of being shot to death, citing a shortage of lethal injection drugs. The South Carolina Department of Corrections spent $53,600 to renovate its capital punishment facilities to make way for this new method of killing people.
Have you read how people are killed by firing squad? It’s medieval. They’re strapped to a chair with a hood over their heads. Executioners put targets on their hearts and then a three-person firing squad opens fire. Sandbags surround the chair to absorb the blood.
I thought about that a lot this week as I saw person after person declare “violence is never the answer” in well-meaning social media posts, spurred to such a conclusion by Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars.
I thought about it, too, as I watched the prolonged hand-wringing over the slap. The calls for moral clarity and zero tolerance and unequivocal condemnation — by the Academy, by Hollywood, by all of us who witnessed the immortal moment.
This? This, I thought, is where we draw our line? A grown man’s righteous anger boiling over at another grown man’s cruel joke? This is the time when we’re checking our nation's moral compass?
I know there are gradations of morality and violence and outrage. I know they live on a spectrum, and I know we look to shared, singular moments to draw larger, lasting conclusions about where to place them. I actually love that about us. I may be in the minority on this, but I’m heartened, in a way, that the slap is still reverberating. That we’re still making sense of both the moment and the meaning.
It has raised all sorts of conversations we’ve needed to have, need to keep having — about denigrating Black women, about defending Black women, about violence, about love, about masculinity, about forgiveness.
But I don’t know how much any of it matters if it doesn’t move us toward a kinder version of ourselves. A version that’s quicker and freer with grace. A version that examines our own complicity or shortcomings or stinginess with our mercy. A version that acknowledges we have all said hurtful things to people who didn’t deserve them, and we have all responded to hurtful things in less-than-helpful ways.
Can this moment get us there? Maybe.
The better angels of our nature were also on display at this particular Oscars.
Lady Gaga’s tender “I got you” to Liza Minnelli, and Minnelli’s quiet “I know.” Best supporting actor Troy Kotsur’s gorgeous acceptance speech, delivered in sign language, in which he paid tribute to his father, who was paralyzed from the neck down in a car accident. Best supporting actress Ariana DeBose making history as the first openly queer woman of color to win for her acting. Stories that tell a fuller, truer, richer portrait of our lives, and awards that celebrated them.
That’s not nothing.
But it’s on us to turn it into something.
The slap struck a nerve. And depending where and how and why your particular nerves are already shot, it struck them accordingly.
After hour upon hour of watching Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson being maligned by Senate jackals, some viewed Smith’s slap with as much gratitude as they viewed Sen. Cory Booker’s joyful defense of Jackson. To others, the slap was a toxic conflation of loyalty and assault, love and violence. Chivalry run amok.
Where each of us stands, I think, is less important than where we go next.
And I think our moral outrage is almost always better directed at systems than individuals — at the factors that live just beneath the surface of the slap and our reactions to it. The historic inequities in Hollywood; the toxic disparaging of Black women; a culture that celebrates and monetizes and sanctions violence, and then recoils when it pops by uninvited.
In 2019, I interviewed Sister Helen Prejean, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir “Dead Man Walking,” about the year she spent as a spiritual adviser to a death row inmate. Prejean was in Chicago for the staging of her story at the Lyric Opera.
We talked about the country’s gradual change of heart about the death penalty. In 1993, the year her memoir was published, 80% of Americans supported the death penalty. By 2019, fewer than half of all Americans (49%) supported it, according to Pew Research Center data. It’s banned in 21 states.
She told me she’ll advocate against the death penalty for the rest of her life.
“I cannot not do it,” she said. “I’ve accompanied six human beings to execution. I owe it to them to tell their story. To bring them close.
“We all know what it is to be hurt or to have someone we love hurt,” she said. “And what road would we take? To try to get even? Or to find another road where we don’t lose the love inside of us, where it’s not overcome by the hate?”
I think about that quote a lot. That, to me, is moral clarity. A moment to check and set our moral compasses — toward reflection, toward kindness, toward good, toward grace.
