As I write this from my kitchen in Perugia, Italy, a crowd is likely fighting off a cold wind in the center of town, about 10 minutes from me. Most of them are there to do their job, reporting, or supporting a news crew. I'm tempted to go join them, but my toddler isn't sleeping well due to a nasty cough. I have a few minutes to make up my mind, if I want to let my wife deal with him alone just for a while so I can be there, or if I'll wait for the online news clip, or just read about it in the papers tomorrow...
I'm not sure why I feel the need to be there. It doesn't seem to be because Amanda Knox is an American, as I am. I've never felt she was innocent. I just couldn't get past the fact that she implicated a completely innocent man while offering myriad changing stories in her early pleas of innocence... especially when that man happened to be an African, while another African male who was involved, and has since been convicted of the crime, was on the run in Germany, unknown to authorities at the time that the lies were being uttered by Ms. Knox. It just doesn't pass the "smell test" to me, that an innocent person would commit that "coincidental" lie at the peril of someone else's innocence.
But that's not why I'm spending my time trying to decide if I'll go attend the verdict announcement by writing this diary...
I'm writing to try to express something I have noticed that has been rather profound.
Throughout all of this trial, tabloid-made as it has been, the victim's British family, regular Italians, even the gossipy news rag writers and readers, everyone on this side of the pond as they say, has talked at some point about the victim, Meredith Kercher, or the defendants, or the whole sordid mess - and all the while, one thing has been missing: a concept of Justice that includes the vengeance of our death penalty. No eye for an eye, no friends or family or outraged citizen talking about how someone has to "pay" for their closure of sense of security going forward. And I don't think I could have imagined what a difference that could make. To me, and I am sure to many Americans, the death penalty is just a part of our way of life, even if one disagrees with it - it's there, and remains a part of the discussion and the reality. Sure, some States don't use it. But its existence and impact are not less because of it, or if they are, it's hard to imagine how.
Here, talk of any "justice" has been centered around the idea of getting a convincing reasonable verdict. To know, or feel, that the tragedy is no less a tragedy, but at least it doesn't linger like it would without having some idea of what happened. Knowing helps get to coping and rebuilding lives sooner I guess.
But no talk of needing to commit some act of violence in response to an act of violence. No talk of closure needing to come at the end of a lethal injection needle.
And like I said, it's been impressive.
It makes me think that for all our great American success, like a gifted child perhaps, there are certain ways in which we are not so well developed, because we're so busy being so great in all the ways we're great, that we're not being sufficiently challenged to improve and be self-critical so that we can improve in the ways where we still should. No one's perfect... but maybe some see it ok to be, if not perfect, then "exceptional"?.
I see a bit of a bump in the news lately of mentions of this thing called American Exceptionalism - how America is not like the rest of the world, that is, the exception - to most anything it seems. Any rule, any limits of behavior, anything. And ok, yeah, I agree with us being exceptional as a nation, but in a general sense, or in some or even many specific ways... and so does most of the rest of the world.
Problem is, I have also seen and heard many Americans who, when they say exceptional, they mean superior. They mean specifically that America is better than the rest of the world. And that's a problem. Self-proclaimed Superior Societies have led to some of the greatest tragedies in the history of the world.
And I'm going to wrap this up now, as it is time for the verdict, by disclaiming that yeah, America is superior in some ways. But you know what, so are other places, in other ways.
It's time for American Exceptionalism to end. And it's my suspicion that if we're to end this superiority complex before it really harms us even more, we could and should start by ending our role-play as God by thinking that we have the right to kill someone legally because we feel convinced that they killed someone else illegally. I mean, in any given situation like this, the tragedy is already complete without our making it more extreme than it has to be. It's just not the makings of a civilized society, let alone a superior one.
Note: as I was proofing this I saw the verdict come in. 26 years for Ms. Knox. Like I said, even with parole possible at about half that, the story is already the tragedy of 4 lives destroyed. I don't see how the American way of having a death penalty, which could make a case like this a story of 4 deaths, is the better option, let alone the option that shows the kind of leadership and character that we're going to need to resolve our world's problems going forward.