WRITE DIRECTION: Red-flagging a sick society

FOR 25 years I have conducted business with clients in the USA, so I thought that I understood how they thought and acted.

I really loved the people that I interacted with. I’ve had many trips on the Colorado River, living on a huge houseboat  in Utah. I have travelled to Minneapolis St Paul, driven to the top of Canada, and fished areas up to the Arctic Circle with four American citizens. I’ve even fished in Mexico with friends.

I thought that I understood the wide range of Americans I dealt with.

No red flags were seen until the Trump Presidency arrived and attitudes changed rapidly and USA moved on from being the economic and defense leader of the world to a business fiefdom led by a man that forgot his famous slogan of “Build the Wall & Drain the Swamp” once he was elected.

Somehow, history accepted the regular community shootings without any interest in doing something about gun control.

This is where the red flags should have become obvious in relation to attitudes towards human life.

This has been followed up by a series of botched state-sanctioned execution attempts (eight in one state, apparently) culminating in two failed attempts on the life of the only female prisoner in the last 50 years sanctioned for execution by the injection of Pentobarbital.

Christa Pike, a convicted murderer, has been held on death row in a Nashville prison in Tennessee and was twice injected with the life-ending drug, which failed to kill her due to an issue said to be the difficulty of finding her veins.

Given the “assisted dying ability” said now to be available to Australians under specific circumstances, the failure to secure some deaths in the USA might raise concerns about its effective use for those who select this end.

The final straw for my absolute abhorrence of the death penalty for any crime was confirmed when USA authorities announced that on 3 December the firing squad execution of 13-times murderer Nidal Hasan would be carried out live on television.

It would be a disgraceful act by any human being to want to watch society dispose of Hasan, the Fort Hood murderer who, in 2009, killed 13 and injured 32 while working as a US Army Psychiatrist.

I rest my case and view with regards to the way this society has developed in recent years to such a sickening degree.

Surely the human race should be better than this?

By John BLACKBOURN