Bleeding Heart

Loving people, and nurturing others. If I had to pick my ultimate goals in life, it would be those. I know it sounds cliche, and some folks might think it’s more of a broken record, over and over again, but I say it because it’s true. I don’t get to go places, because of the situation I’m in, but I take every opportunity I can to love people, to nurture them, to let them know their lives have value, and that even if they were hated by every other person on this earth, they would still find my heart open to their needs.
I don’t know if it’s just how I am, or who I am, but I cannot push people away. Even when I’m angry, even if I am broken-hearted, I can’t push people away. I can be mad, I can be hurt easily enough, but if someone came to me for help, I’d give it, because that’s just the way I feel, the way I think. When I look at people, my heart weeps for them, it breaks.
My brain sits both inside the box and outside the box. I see how people are, and how they could be. Seeing how people are, and what they want to be, it’s amazing how much we actually love one another, but it’s all covered by pain, fear, and doubt. So many people want to be good, but they’re not sure how to achieve it because there are so many sources claiming to be authoritative on the subject. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then there is no road to heaven, because if not even good intentions are enough to put one on the right path, what hopes does anyone have to ever achieve anything at all other than failure?
Darn right I’m a bleeding heart, because every heart bleeds.
Part of why this entry exists today is because last night I was reading up on the United States and its support of the death penalty. For many, the death penalty seemed to be a fitting punishment for the worst of the worst crimes: murder. Yet at the same time, I saw quite a few arguing in favor of it for sexual assault, fraud, even theft. Several people were advocating for the return of lynching.
I find that kind of thing disturbing on many levels. I am staunchly anti-death penalty, considering life imprisonment for the taking of another life to be equitable. I cannot and could not ever be an eye for an eye kind of person, because the foolishness of it is so clear to me, as to be avoided at all costs.
It’s bad enough the United States has the largest prison population in the world. It’s bad enough we have crime laws that can be nothing short of Orwellian, and it’s awful that we have a populace where being “tough on crime” is seen as a positive trait and not a more openly interpreted one. In the U.S., we have prosecuting attorneys who hide evidence, or cut it from whole cloth, when they’re trying to convict someone, and we have a system where defense attorneys are assigned to the poor, but those attorneys are already swamped with so many cases they only get a handful of minutes to learn about each case before they have to represent each person in front of a judge.
Pair that with our love and support of the death penalty, mandatory minimum sentencing, and a desire to expand on those laws, and it’s nothing short of terrifying. My heart breaks for each person who must stand in front of a judge wondering whether or not they will be found guilty, regardless of their actual innocence, because the system is so broken.
Are there people who commit terrible crimes and are remorseless? Certainly. I believe such people should receive treatment for mental illness. Death? No. No one deserves death. No one. Regardless of what others think, as far as I’m concerned it’s pre-meditated murder, sanctioned by the state, and approved by the people. Murder approved by the people is still murder, it’s just that there are now more hands for the blood to splash upon.
You don’t have to like someone who murdered another human being, and they should pay for that crime. Taking a life isn’t a reversible act, there is no true recompense for it. So taking two lives isn’t any more of a solution. I’ve been against the death penalty ever since I first I truly learned of its existence when I was in high school, and a super fundamentalist Christian. I had devout Christian friends at the time who were very much pro-death penalty, and that position eluded any sense of logic to me. It still does, as it strikes me of an unholy bloodthirstiness that shouldn’t be present in a faith that speaks of forgiveness and love as its core principles.
So, yes, I’m a bleeding heart. My heart bleeds for every human being. I don’t want people to die. I want people who did wrong to change for the better, and to make amends for what they’ve done, and I want the society around them to give them that chance. That isn’t too much to ask. It isn’t! We do it all the time, but only for either the people we like, or the people who can benefit us if we forgive them, and that’s just too limited. It’s too little for a population that says it loves so many things. Of course, what our society says it loves, and what it actually loves is the subject of a wholly different topic, one I hope to cover extensively in the future, but for now, I’ll let it go with this:
I love you regardless of who you are. I love you regardless of what you have done. You do not deserve to die. Every life is precious, and has value. Your life has value. You are not a monster, you’re a human being. There are no such things as monsters.
You are loved.