Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

The Boston bombings brought out great emotions among my acquaintances, and understandably so. They brought out great emotions in me, as well. One thing I try to avoid, though, is letting my emotions cloud my judgment.

Occasionally, in regard to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, I hear people say, “We didn’t learn anything from him,” and “Great; now we have to pay for his room and board for the next 50 years,” and “We should have killed him on the spot.” Their rhetoric feeds their frenzy, bolstering their own anger. My calm and reasoned responses to these views are refuted by ad hominem attacks, calling me a hand-wringing bleeding-heart Liberal (and other, crispier descriptions, that I’m sure you can imagine).

Naturally, this frustrates me, but it is a symptom of our nation’s ideological divide. We no longer accept reasoned debate. We argue only by polemic, where everything is divided into right and wrong, true and false, and there is no room for the understanding that society is a collection of spectra. The Left is as bad as the Right on this point, and the middle ground is like the no-man’s land of trench warfare: desolated, charred, perilous.

We, as a society, as moral people, cannot indulge our baser natures and emerge unscathed. We cannot deny human and civil rights to some and expect them for ourselves. We cannot tear down the law today and expect it to be standing tomorrow.

In “A Man for All Seasons,” Sir Thomas More and his son-in-law, William Roper, have an argument. William wants More to arrest a dangerous political foe. Sir Thomas refuses, saying the man has done nothing wrong. William is aghast; will Sir Thomas not protect himself from this bad man with bad intentions? No, Sir Thomas tells him, for he has done nothing wrong.

William: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

k