Here’s how I found out about Steve’s suicide.
It was Ruth who called with the news. She asked if my wife was home.
Yes, I told her and offered to get Toni to the phone. (Both women are leaders in our church.)
“No, I’m calling to talk to you.”
“Are you sitting down?”
Ruth sounded distressed. Then she told me.
“Steve killed himself.”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
That would have been Tuesday. That day I was in a committee meeting downtown at the Associated Churches offices. The group has been meeting to develop a plan to support family members and friends when a loved one had committed suicide. It’s a spin-off of the Allen County Suicide Prevention Council, which I helped launch when I was writing editorials for The Journal Gazette.
Just before the mid-afternoon meeting was about to start, somebody’s cell phone jingled. It belonged to Mike, our deputy coroner, sitting a chair away, to my right.
“Another suicide,” he said, as he shook his head.
I didn’t know about my friend’s death that day, although the person who was the subject of that call to the deputy coroner in fact probably was Steve.
On the phone the next day, I had little to say to Ruth, other than to offer
whatever support I could give to her for whom Steve was such a special person.
Not a tall man, in his 60s, he had been a minister, author of a couple dozen books, publisher and an expert on how to grow a church. He also advised people on how to manage personal finances.
Steve and I had been meeting nearly a decade over lunch to chat about writing, family and sometimes politics. He published my first book, after I retired in 2000. During that time, he acted as a coach, editor and champion for a memoir of my advocacy through the paper’s editorial pages. His publishing and consulting business found him traveling regularly around the country. He was an advocate of gay and lesbian young people and had been working on study materials on the subject for churches across the denominations. He simply was such a good, natural speaker, spoke without notes, so warm and personal.
But financial problems had fallen hard on him. He was accused of losing thousands of dollars of investors’ money, as well as a small fortune social agencies gave him to invest. Months ago, the story made the front page. That article also mentioned he had once spent prison time for embezzlement.
In the recent story, he accepted full responsibility. He offered no details of his defense. He did promise he would
get in touch with me to explain it all. He never did. I never got a chance to help him. Still, he thanked me for my support and friendship. I was sure the publicity devastated him. He had to be depressed. It crossed my mind that he might attempt suicide. When he actually did, that was quite another matter, shocking, sad beyond words. Newspaper articles on Steve’s death followed days later. They recapped the earlier account of Steve’s legal problems. None of it described the man I knew.
Steve’s legal problems no doubt represented a loss of esteem, although his church friends stood by him after his financial problems had become public. Was it some gambling-like addiction that got him into so much trouble? I guess I’ll never know. I know that he must have hurt deeply. With the investigations ongoing, he might well have faced another prison term after being a free man for so many years.
Even in that worst case scenario, I can imagine Steve finding a new calling, of suicide prevention. But that’s my wishful thinking. I guess Steve’s hurt must have been too great for him to find an alternative.
I won’t forget him. I won’t forget what a champion he was for good causes. I won’t forget how much he helped me as I stepped from daily journalism into the unknown world of book writing. I won’t forget how much he encouraged others to tell their story, helping them get their books published.
I picture him now, across the table at the Italian restaurant where we met for lunch every few months. He’s ordered the lunch special and a coke. I asked for a salad without dressing and a cup of decaf. I wanted his advice about taking on a new writing project. But he pauses and then offers some crystal clear idea, something I hadn’t thought of. Now I’m sure Steve would want me to continue to find ways to help the community reduce suicide and heal those still alive, who have lost so much. I can do no less.

Larry Pelok, blonde hair, brown eyes, was my catcher for Schatz Motors, our Little League sponsor. That would have been in 1948, and we would have been 10 years old then. My wool baseball suit, which assured that summer evenings at Kinsbury Park, were even hotter, was Number 7. That was the same number as Mickey Mantle, although I was a Tiger not a Yankee fan. Let it be noted that I wasn’t credited with more than a few wins that season. I was as apt to throw my fastball over the backstop as over the plate for a strike. I don’t recall that Larry complained. He’d just fire the ball back wherever he retrieved it from, his mitt or the stands where Dad sat, faithfully cheering his future big leaguer for every game.

Larry and I attended different public elementary schools, he went to Brickle and I went to Slocum in Defiance, in northwest Ohio. In high school, though, we were together again, this time in Miss Maria Slegel’s freshman Latin class. Larry’s was the first seat in the row next to the window. I sat in the middle, in front of my best friend, John Mitchell, who brought a piece of dry ice to stick against the metal on his desk, making a squeal to district Miss Slegal. Larry Pelok minded his own business and did nothing to harass the teacher.

For years now, we’ve heard people say the public schools aren’t doing the job anymore. They say we need to turn the job of education over to private interests to run charter schools or fund vouchers that students can use at private or parochial schools. At the paper, I often researched and wrote about this complaints and about the new testing plans to improve the public schools. And as I’ve reflected on the proposals and the debates, I’ve found myself remembering my friends from my early years, friends like Larry Pelok and John Mitchell.

I won’t say every teacher we had inspired us and pushed us to learn all that was humanly possible. But we were blessed with a number of fine teachers. And many of my fellow students grew up and not only managed to be responsible citizens. Some, such as Larry Pelok and John Mitchell, became physicians.

A few classmates spent their working years as professors at major universities. Larry Willey played basketball with the famous Oscar Robertson at the University of Cincinnati, studied architecture and then went into real estate. Public school proved to be no handicap for these people. And for most all my other friends. One, an appeals court judge, was even considered for a Supreme Court appointment. Another ran a magazine a variety store.

In the 1940s and 1950s, We didn’t have any standardized tests that I recall. Maybe an IQ test, which might have explained why teachers kept telling my I wasn’t living up to my potential. We had quizzes and homework, which I often failed to turn in. It seemed that everybody graduated, judging from the size of the class reunions of the three high schools I attended. Do drop-outs go to class reunions?

I can’t imagine what charters or private and parochial schools can boast of that you won’t find in a good public school. Granted, I have a different perspective than most folk. I taught high school English for seven years. Then I taught various writing courses as an adjunct professor at the regional campus of Indiana and Purdue universities in Fort Wayne. Meantime, when I wrote editorials and columns for the morning Fort Wayne paper, I visited a lot of schools in the city and the area and interviewed teachers in all kinds of settings.

For part of that time, I served on the board of the national Education Writers Association, two years as board president. One big event at the annual EWA conferences was a day-long visit to a local school. So I observed classes in such varied cities as Miami, San Diego, Minneapolis, the South Bronx, Washington D.C., Philadelphia and New Orleans. I visited the country’s first charter school. That was in St. Paul, Minnesota.

During a few school visits, I was embarrassed for the teachers. At some schools, I saw the students only doing busy work. But I also witnessed inspired teaching, such as the first grade teacher engaging her students in a fun session on Spanish vocabulary and counting.

Even at good charter or parochial schools, I didn’t observe any kind of teaching I saw regularly at public schools. As a rule, however, the smaller the classes, the more engaged the students. Which was exactly what I saw as a teacher. That’s also why I’ve always been in favor of small classes.

Of course, as a journalist at each national conference, I had a chance to interview leading education experts, superintendents, public officials, researchers and reformers. Conservatives, liberals, radicals – we spotlighted I led some sessions and moderated a few debates. And no matter what the proposal or what the criticism of the schools, I always came back to the same question: Who has a better idea to improve education than the public school?

I do believe some reforms can make it harder for teachers to do a great job. Here, I’d include high-stakes testing, which drives teachers to focus on a narrow set of skills. It’s a real loss when students aren’t challenged to think for themselves or when the arts are neglected. I don’t believe that performance pay motivates teachers to do better and the bonuses likely will be awarded in an arbitrary fashion.

On the charter school movement, I’m a skeptic. I distrust this movement because too often we have people running these schools who aren’t proven educators. Even when the leaders have the background, I distrust the movement because so many charters are launched to make a profit for investors, putting up little of their own money. As a rule, the states provide little or no oversight. Or they allow these schools to avoid the high standards of treating teachers fairly, as required by a strong union. Often, I hear charter advocates bad mouth teacher unions. Ostensibly, the charters welcome all students. But they tend to attract students from the same social, racial and economic groups in a community. So you easily end up re-segregating otherwise racially balanced districts. Moreover, charters typically fail to produce test scores as good as, much less better than the public schools they’re drawing their students from.

Judging from my own visits, public schools are doing a better job than the public schools of my day. Teachers are better trained. Where they’re encouraged, and don’t feel constricted by state reforms, they’re more creative, resourceful. I’ve visited magnet schools, still organized and led by the public school educators, where the classes were so exciting I wanted to sign up for the class myself.

No, I wouldn’t choose to return to Miss Schlegel’s 9th grade Latin class. I have no idea whether either Larry Pelok or John Mitchell ever think of that otherwise routine year of their lives. But most all of us got a good early start in our education in those public schools.

Such schools form the foundation of our society, of our country. They’re not run for the benefit of an elite group or to promote religious beliefs or to enrich investors. Overseen by elected board members, funded almost solely by all taxpayers, leading the way for every innovation in education over the past century, when it comes down to it, public schools simply educate the kids. In fact, the public schools – despite self-serving efforts to destroy them – educate most all the kids. Including a lot of doctors, and editorial writers.

My wife Toni said I could donate old clothes I no longer wear to the church garage sale or to the Carriage House.
I suppose that since I’m on the Carriage House board, and that any of my old clothes wouldn’t bring the church much profit, I think I’ll give the latter the clothes. But that’s the easy decision. The hard one is to stir myself to go sort the stuff, drawer by drawer and shelf by shelf to see what I still have use for and what can go.
I think about this nearly every time I enter my clothes closet. My pondering has taken on the ritual of my morning and evening tooth brushing. “I should sort this stuff,” I tell myself daily.
Now I don’t think of myself as a person who clings to possessions. I wouldn’t expect to find a description of my behavior in the DSM-IV, the psychiatric bible of mental illnesses.
Neither Toni nor anyone in my family has ever hinted that I may be some kind of psychopathic hoarder. I confess, though, I do seem to have a great number of shelves stuffed with books throughout the house. But I’d guess the problem has more to do with the difficulty I have finishing a book I’ve started and my habit of buying books I don’t get around to reading at all.
Much like the book shelves, the clothes in my closet do define me, my tastes, my daily need for clean socks and underwear, my preference for a certain order and logic to the placement of shirts, pants, sweaters and shorts.
But there’s a larger issue here. My clothes closet serves as a kind of history of my life in recent years. Start with the pin stripped navy suit, a blazer and a couple of sport coats. You can find those on the left side of the rack. They don’t see a lot of action since I retired from the paper after a quarter century. All those button-down Oxford cloth shirts? Don’t wear those often, either. To be sure, the other day I slipped a white one with a much frayed color on to wear under a navy cotton sweater.
The other day, in search of clean khakis on a hanger, I laid my hand on a rack full of ties, mostly of the rep variety, all silk. Who knows when I bought them, though surely it was long ago? That type of striped tie was part of my dress up outfit in college and graduate school. On choir or quartet trips or during my stint as a student minister. The rep tie also was in order at the paper, too, especially if I had an interview or meeting outside the newspaper building.
Any time I’m in New York, I make a stop at Brooks Brothers on Madison Avenue, just to browse in this store with four or five stories, a business my editor referred to as “the temple.” My taste has evolved, naturally.
At home, I’ll spent half an hour looking at a new catalog that’s come in the mail. It’s mostly more casual men’s clothes. That can be LL. Bean, The Territory Ahead or Orvis. Yet rarely do I order anything. As a rule, the clothes in the catalogs look so much like the stuff in my dresser and on the shelves in my closet. I do enjoy thumbing through the catalogs, a relaxing way to window shop.
I don’t believe that “clothes make the man.” But I’ve never given up the habit of sizing up people according to what they’re wearing. I’ve even made judgments about the person on the basis of he or she is dressed.
Collar looks too stiff. Shoulders are too wide. Tie clashes with the handkerchief. Pens don’t belong in the lapel pocket. Where did I get such picky phrases? My Dad.
He was what they called a “natty dresser.” Which may seem odd thing to say because of his job. Home from the tool and die shop, he’d be wearing a loose polo shirt, wash pants and steel-toed shoes that tracked steel shavings through the house. But in the clubhouse picking up his scorecard before a round of 18, he’d be wearing dress slacks, a sporty polo shirt without a wrinkle or spot, yes, dressed like a pro at the British Open. Style mattered to him. And when I brought friends home from college, he didn’t fail to mention how important it was to keep your shoes shined. All the guys wouldn’t glance down at their usually dull-looking shoes. Dad had high standards, for everything including how you and your friends dressed.
Today, he’d sure wonder whether I ever paid attention to his tutoring to dressing for success if he could see me in my usual outfit – sweatpants, sweatshirt, moccasins, maybe a ball cap with a Polo insignia. Such staples I’ll keep. As for the rest of it, well, there’s so much personal history there, a lot of memories. And what’s the rush?

They set the bar high for grandparenting, these eighth-grade educated parents of my dad, whom I knew not as Grandma and Grandpa but as, simply, Mom and Tom.

Their home all the years I spent summers with them was Latty, Ohio, although I have one photograph of my toddler self on the porch of a farmhouse where they must have lived for a while.

I know they weren’t trying to practice some child development specialist’s ideas of how to be terrific grandparents. Mom Hayes, her jet black hair in a bun, would shake her head at you, put her black-rimmed reading glasses back on and return to her rug hooking. “I never heard such foolishness,” Tom would say in his husky base voice that could make a kid want to crawl under the table.

I suppose I’d have similar fond memories of my mother’s parents had I spent big chunks of my childhood with them, in nearby Van Wert, Ohio. In truth, Mom’s parents were a lot funnier than Dad’s.

But it was in the tidy Cape Cod house where my formal education was so richly supplemented. As a rule everybody gathered there for Thanksgiving. Dad and other men in the family would go pheasant and rabbit hunting early. Mom Hayes would pluck and skin the game. Somehow, as if by magic, the dinner would be on the table by mid-day. Lacking a successful hunt, Mom Hayes and maybe Dad’s sister, my Aunt Norie, would serve up an old German dish of roast pork and potato pancakes, seasoned with caraway seeds.

It was during such holiday dinners – the same routine repeated Christmas Day – that I found out that if you had anything to say, you had better speak up whether or not anybody else was speaking. This advice made sense because in Dad’s family, everybody tended to speak at once. Stereophonic family you could call it. Everybody on that side of my family also had strong political opinions, mostly of the Republican variety and mostly opposed to anything the Roosevelts every did or thought.

Yet, during my summer holidays with Mom and Tom, we all read the editorial page of the daily newspaper of the area, The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, which I would work for many years later. And while faithfully studying the editorial page, my grandfather and sometimes grandmother would comment about some editorial or column.

“Well, now that makes sense, even it’s in this Democrat newspaper!”

Even in summer, Mom and Tom, in the 60s by the time I’m remembering here, spent afternoons in their bedroom on the first floor. Propped up on several pillows, they would listen as their brown plastic Crosley radio blared out the play-by-play baseball games of the Detroit Tigers, announced by one of the great sports announcers of that era Harry Heilman over WGR.

In the 1950s, when somebody bought them a TV, Mom wouldn’t watch a ball game. “I don’t think I could follow it,” she’d say.

“From the radio, I’ve got the game worked out in my head.” For that reason, I suppose, she wouldn’t attend my cousin Bill’s ball games when he played for a semi-pro team in the area.

Sundays were a different story. I have to explain that Tom’s own father, John Hayes, was a preacher as well as a farmer who helped start churches in northwest Ohio and Indiana.

“He wasn’t much of a farmer,” Mom Hayes would say when the subject of her father-in-law could come up. Anyway, sometime before Mom and Tom lived in another small town, Tom was a Sunday school superintendent. They also regularly attended church in Paulding, the county seat during the years Dad was in high school. So given this history, you’d assume that living in Latty, they’d spend the Sabbath mornings in church.

That would be wrong. In Latty, they didn’t attend services. They listened to radio preachers. In fact, they’d listen about all day and all evening to Billy Graham’s “Hour of Decision,” “The Old-fashioned Revival Hour,” and “The World Tomorrow” with Garner Ted Armstrong. There were others.

Now it so happens there was a Methodist Church just down the street and around the corner from their house. They sent me to the Vacation Bible School there. But for them, there was only one church, the Church of Christ. If you weren’t in that church, you weren’t in church. No Church of Christ in town, no services for them!

Nevertheless, Mom Hayes taught me hymns and choruses. She had me memorize the books of the Bible and long passages, too. She read Bible stories to me. Both of them frequently told stories of their favorite ministers and evangelists, holding them up as examples of great preachers and important persons as role models, although I doubt that they consciously were trying to implant in my head the dream of being a minister. Years later, when I studied in theological schools and even served as a student minister to small churches, I often wondered how much my summers in Latty with Mom and Tom was the beginnings of my dream of becoming a minister. I suppose all that talk of great preachers and listening to all those radio preachers helped keep the ambition alive. If there were alive today, they sure wouldn’t understand how I left the ministry for teaching, then for a job at the same newspaper they scoffed at daily.

They sure would have trouble accepting my change in churches from Brethren and then to the Unitarian-Universalists.

But looking back, I give them credit for how they accepted and did not judge those in the family who chose a church other than the tradition they remained so attached to all their lives. Nor did they judge family members who divorced, although Dad and Mom did get back together and the three of us, when I was in high school, moved from Defiance to a big house across from the general store in Latty of all places.

I credit them,too, with not judging the black folk in town. George Goings delivered the paper faithfully each day. Behind their house stood a corn field, property of another black gentleman by the name of Sad Day. There must have been quite a story behind that name. It never occurred to me to inquire. No matter who it was, Mom and Tom treated everyone with respect. I never heard a comment of racial prejudice from either one, though Tom liked to tease Mom Hayes about her German heritage. (Her mother, I was told, never learned to speak English.)

It’s hard not to miss them. I miss the warm summer evenings as we sat on lawn chairs near the apple tree and watched the starlings converge on the maple trees that lined the front of the house and the occasional car pass by, often with a gentle tap from the horn to say hello. I miss the smell of the lye soap Mom stored on the back porch and the crackle of the floured cube steaks in the frying pan. I miss listening to the chatter as they played Pinocle and Euchre in summer evenings with Floyd and Emma Baxter who had a farm west of town. What a calm, predictable life for my summer vacations, removed from the hustle of Mom and Dad’s working and social lives, not to mention their frequent shouting matches.

I learned so much during those days, things that stayed with me all my life. That surely must include how I discovered that reading could be terrific fun. In the living room, only used during the Christmas holiday, there was a cabinet with a treasure trove of old comic books, no doubt stored there by my older cousins. These truly were books no bigger than three inches by two inches with hard back covers. Through these little books, I would enter the another world, the world of Donald Duck and his nephews and Mickey Mouse, nurturing my always lively imagination.

When I was older, in junior high and still spending summers with Mom and Tom, I got hooked on their magazines of true detective stories, which took me into another world. My grandparents never moved to censure my reading, despite the lurid photographs.

We all ask sometime in our adult lives what and who influenced us to become the persons we are. I don’t think you can escape identifying first of all your parents, an influence that happens long before you remember. I look back on the good things in my life that I can attribute to my parents, from respect for elders, proper behavior and etiquette in restaurants to some aptitude for sports and love of music. Mom and Dad never failed to applaud my successes and champion my goals.
Dad died when my own children were little more than toddlers. But Mom couldn’t have been a more entertaining and challenging grandmother. She always enjoyed the status of favorite aunt for her nieces and nephews.

For this grandson, my debt indeed is also great to Mom and Tom. They shared their time, what little money they had, their knowledge in the practical matters of life and their values. They taught me to be engaged in the life of our society and with neighbors. Neither forgot their own origins and shared stories of those origins, building for this grandson a pride of those ancestors who struggled, raised decent children and contributed to their communities and, despite hardships, prevailed. My challenge is to do no less.

We’ve often heard people say how lucky our granddaughters are to have two such wonderful grandparents.

It’s true that the two girls, Tanya and Cynthia, since they were babies, have spent a lot of time with us. Their only parent in the U.S. is a single mom. My wife Toni and I have gladly picked up the slack. Fortunately, we could afford to do things for them their mother couldn’t.

We’ve taken the girls on vacations to Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California. They joined us for a trip to Washington, D.C. And for weeks at a time over the years, we took them to the Chautauqua Institution in western New York where they got to see Bill Cosby and other famous performers in person.

I hope we helped enriched their lives and broaden their education with visits to museums, water parks and theaters. And I can’t begin to count the hours we spent reading to them before they were old enough for school. Yes, I suppose you can say they’ve been lucky.

Yet I feel that Toni and I have been the greater beneficiaries. We’ve so much enjoyed having them with us, “just visiting,” as Tanya used to say when she was in elementary school, sitting with us on the back porch in a cool summer evening. They’ve taught us about listening to others. They’ve taught us about being patient with a child’s, ah, interesting preferences in food and about what matters.

If the girls have introduced us to a new meaning of puzzlement, they’ve also enlightened us, especially as they grew into adults, about the true meaning of humility. Between us, my wife and I hold six college degrees. We’re supposed to know stuff. Right? But since they were little, the girls’ questions never failed to stump me and, indeed, often surprised me.

“Grandpa, I’ve got a question,” Tanya used to say. And often, I wanted to say, “I haven’t a clue.”

The girls’ grasp of technology has always seemed intuitive and beyond my mortal comprehension. And we’ve learned to appreciate how two kids who’ve grown up in the same household can be such close friends and such different people. In personalities. In talents. In interests. So you don’t talk to them the same way.

Before they went to school, they had memorized the words in the stories we read to them. I recall, before she was in kindergarten, Cynthia reading from a paper or book just lying around.

“Well, so much for the importance of phonics,” Grandma said. At the time, Grandma was a school principal.

They loved sledding in our backyard which is mostly a steep hill. They have always helped Grandma Toni cook in the kitchen. They had learned early on the power of persistence.

Some years back, after her bath one evening, I was reading a story to Cynthia. “I want another bath,” she informed me midway through the story.

“Nah,” I said, “You’re clean enough now.”

“Por favor,” she said repeatedly in Spanish. (Her dad is Hispanic and her mother, my daughter, teaches high school Spanish.) I ran the bath water again.

It’s hard to imagine how much I would have missed without those girls in my life. I loved hugging them and kissing them when they were little. I loved giving comfort and wiping their tears. I loved laughing out loud at their impromptu dramas. I burst with pride watching them perform in high school choirs and plays.

My hope is that they remember the good times spent with us as fondly as I remember the many days and hours I spent with my grandparents. Such relationships never fail to bring me good feelings. And I just have to smile.

Okay.  It wasn’t the entire cast, Hawkeye, Radar, Hot Lips, Major Burns and Col. Potter.   But B.J. Hunnicut showed up.  For me, it was enough to have the actor/activist Mike Farrell make an appearance, ably representing the entire cast of the 4077.  It was my favorite TV show.

I met Mike and heard him speak on the death penalty at Beacon Heights Church of the Brethren, a member of one of the three historic peace churches.

When he arrived, he was still wearing in navy topcoat, his wavy hair turned mostly white since his earlier days in the popular TV series.  Yet he’s as handsome as that young, war-weary captain, with a friendly, disarming manner.   He seemed eager on this bitter cold morning to get on with the session.

The church gradually filled, with many faces I recognized from my visits over the years and of other friends I came to know during my time writing editorials, dozens against the death penalty.

Ellen Eggers, a California death penalty attorney originally from Fort Wayne, led the speakers.  She told a sad, even tragic story.  Lots of people don’t know that over two thirds of the countries have abolished the death penalty.   But that fits with how we treat all offenders, from the small-time drug dealers to murderers.  In face, we now lock up more people than any country in the world, even China which has four times the U.S. population.

Such punishment hasn’t made us safer, when we’re compared to other democracies.   In fact, as Eggers pointed out, the death penalty is an illusion.  It doesn’t deter murder.  There’s plenty of research on that.  And it doesn’t bring healing to the victims’ survivors.  That’s been my own observation.

Because of the lengthy appeals, and the cost of housing a capital offender, the death penalty costs the taxpayer far more than giving the person a life sentence.   Death row is not bargain:  A regular cell can run as high as $50,000 a year.  The solitary cell on death row  can cost more than $90,000.  Even conservative Indiana’s attorney general, Greg Zoeller, has challenged lawmakers here to weigh the value of executions in light of the cost.  Nationwide, we have 3,000 people in those cells today.   About half, it’s estimated, are mentally ill.   Which was true of every case I wrote about.

Rachel Gross followed Eggers.  A long-time friend from North Manchester, Rachel told stories of her network of people who write letters and send cards to death row inmates.    Some of these letter-writers have visited with the offenders, offering friendship and human contact with a person not part of the criminal justice machine.

Mike Farrell knows his message backwards and forwards, no need for notes or a script.  I thought it was noteworthy that he encouraged death penalty abolitionists not to become self-righteous.  I’ve probably been guilty of that myself.  But to the substance of the issue, citing Justice John Paul Stevens’ recent article, Mike argued that an execution can’t be done constitutionally.

It’s the poor, the minority defendant who is the most likely to receive a death sentence.  As one study of Georgia cases showed, a black defendant is 11 times more likely than a white defendant to get the death penalty. And it’s used disproportionately throughout the country. Several states don’t even have the death penalty on the books.  Most states that do have a higher capital crime rate.

When it’s invoked, the sentence is carried out freakishly, like being struck by lightening.  I imagine Mike, given his role in M*A*S*H*, must often have thought that such punishment is  about as senseless and arbitrary as the battle deaths in Korea.

But he suggested a constructive approach for abolitionists to defenders of the death penalty.  Rather than argue that killing somebody already locked up in a cage is immoral, show how there’s no way that death penalty can be administered fairly.  Impossible, which is exactly where Justice Stevens finished his long tenure on the high court.

Moreover, Mike concluded, such an extreme, inhumane punishment corrodes our system of justice and corrupts those who join in this legalized murder.  And as we’ve dehumanized the offender, we dehumanize the rest of us.  It’s real simple he said:

“Everybody counts or nobody counts.”