Post-Election Blues
November 9th, 2016
There’s no way to sugarcoat what happened yesterday, and we won’t try. Indeed, in our capital punishment world the news was even worse than might appear already obvious – the attempt to repeal the death penalty failed in California, and the plan to speed it up passed; the attempt to reinstate it passed in Nebraska; and in Oklahoma a ballot initiative passed insuring that the state can carry out an execution some other way if it can’t find the drugs necessary to do it by poisoning. (But note that the news wasn’t entirely awful. Pro-moratorium Governors in civilized Oregon and Washington won.)
ACCR staff was working at a polling place all day. Many conversations were had, some of them predictably depressing. In one it was pointed out that Trump’s claim about skyrocketing crime rates was factually wrong, that according to the FBI and the DOJ violent crime rates were near all-time lows. “Those are your facts, not mine,” the Trump supporter responded. This conversation is particularly consistent with the recent Trump claim that the Central Park Five were guilty, irrespective of their exonerations through DNA. The appointment of Rudy Giuliani to a position at the head of the Department of Justice makes the thought of justice seem distant.
A post-factual and post-scientific world is not an easy place for a rational person to live in. But as John Adams said: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” Facts will prevail – we have had fewer death sentences and executions than at any time in recent memory, and no baseball hats with stupid slogans will change that fact. A friend of ACCR just texted that “we have bottomed out.” But if you’ve read your college share of Sartre, Camus, and Beckett, you’ll know that this is good news – we now have only one direction to go.
And speaking of Samuel Beckett, you might even recall the last lines of The Unnamable: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”