This was the first Thanksgiving in many, many years that my family did not follow our traditions exactly. We always have it with the same family members from my father’s side, eat at our cabin in upstate New York, bake a pie-per-person, and go around the large dining table giving personal reasons that we are thankful. This year, everything changed! Hectic schedules and my cousin’s abroad experience resulted in a totally new plan.
I was initially thrown by this change. We ate with different family members, at my house in Connecticut, had desserts of every kind, and were lucky enough to have three international students at the table. My mother, endlessly believing that she is everyone else’s mother also, invited these boys to our Thanksgiving when she visited my older brother at St. Lawrence University and found out that they were planning on staying at school over break since they couldn’t reasonably travel home for such a short time.
However, these friends of my brother actually made for a really interesting Thanksgiving, particularly because it is not a holiday that any of them had celebrated before. They provoked interesting conversation and brought a new perspective to the table, giving my usually traditional family a glimpse of their own, much different, lives. Igor, who is from Macedonia, decided to pose a question to us all, explaining that he believed a person’s answer was very telling about them.
If you could have any two people from throughout time sitting to your left and to your right for this dinner, who would they be?
The table immediately livened up as we imagined dining with everyone from Winston Churchill to Jack Kerouac. We imagined having famous enemies to each side, having it out one last time. We imagined celebrities coming back from the dead, politicians explaining themselves, and having the chance to ask our favorite authors more about some of our most cherished stories. This was a new spin on Thanksgiving, yes, but we all jovially laughed and attempted to one-up each other in our dinner guest choices.
Things really got interesting when my dad joked, “So, we know what deceased people we’d all like to have dinner with. Now it’s time to go around the table and say who we want dead!” The table erupted in laughter until Igor said flatly, “Kim Jong-il”. For a moment, our boisterous amusement turned into nervous and awkward giggles. Isn’t it politically incorrect to say you want someone dead? Overall, I’d err on the “peace keeper” side of things and try not to sustain that kind of hatred in my body. However, he’d broken the seal, and it was now an open topic of discussion.
The discussion turned to one of my (creepily) favorite topics: the death penalty. My own opinions about capital punishment waver case-to-case, especially as I learn more about inequities (i.e. racially) and bureaucratic atrocities that have, in the past, resulted in an innocent person being executed. My mother, who I inherited my peaceful disposition from, surprised me when she said that she had someone in mind.
Several years ago, a horrific and brutal murder occurred in Cheshire, CT, where my brother attended boarding school. The story was huge when it happened, especially because of the location; nothing that gruesome had occurred nationally since perhaps the Charles Manson murders, and especially not in a small suburban town. Honestly, the media coverage also stemmed from the fact that the Petits were a white, upper-class family and the three casualties were the promising women of the family, the daughters both relatively young.
The case has been in the news again recently, as a jury in the trial sentenced of one of the now-convicted perpetrators to death. For anyone as interested in crime psychology as I am, the story is worth looking up. My mother, a very diplomatic and empathetic person, said that she would sentence the Petit murderers to death if she were on that jury. The story had hit a nerve in her, and she could barely speak about what she thought Dr. William A. Petit Jr., the women’s father and husband and lone survivor of the attack, might have felt in the aftermath.
My aunt, having admittedly indulged in the copious wines on the table, said that she didn’t believe in the death penalty, nervously adding that people’s polarized views on the matter might earn her some impassioned criticism and maybe cost her a few dinner guests the following night. Of course, this was not true… we’re family! I’m not one to pass judgment and I was really interested to hear the perspectives of the fifteen people whose life experiences and ages varied from my youngest brother Jack, who is 12, and my maternal grandmother, who is 80.
As I said, my view on capital punishment changes constantly and I have never really explicitly stated whether I am for or against it and its use in modern society. Something about the justice system in general makes me feel that punishment outcomes, including prison, are both necessary and barbaric at the same time. In some ways, I believe that the application of the “eye for an eye” rule (broad in both encompassment and application) is unnecessary and immoral. On these anti-death penalty days, the whole idea seems outrageous to me and I can’t fathom concluding that a person must die versus serving a life-sentence in prison, which to me, in some ways, seems worse than execution. Human life, even that of the most evil of people, is not expendable and shouldn’t be treated as such.
At the same time, I find myself coming back to the idea that these people, these criminals, themselves treated human life as though it is not valuable. Any number of things can push a person to commit a crime and I am sure that in some instances, the defendant was driven to a violent action as an act of self-defense or perceived danger. However, the generally malicious and gruesome crimes that warrant the application of the death penalty in the legal system, such as the Petit family murders, make me think that my own empathy for the victim’s loved ones (who must live with these tragedies) could lead me to support the application of capital punishment as a juror who is familiar with the excruciating details of a particular case.
I think that overall I am predominantly against the death penalty, but I do understand why it is sought in some situations. I was initially stunned when Igor, a newcomer to the Powell family Thanksgiving and a nuanced challenger of tradition, so quickly named someone he would subject to the death penalty. However, I came to really value the heated discussion that followed and the tactful consideration of morality and humanity. Thanksgiving traditions are something I hold close to my heart, and I’d be lying if I said that a part of me didn’t miss the way we’ve done things for the past two decades. Still, one of my greatest interests as both a writer and a person is the perspective of others, whose life experiences make us extremely different and yet have brought us to the same table. This narrative reflection of my 2010 Thanksgiving dinner went much longer than I’d anticipated, but in this need to include so much I see the challenge to my perspective and re-evaluation of what I believe that I value so much.
How have your conceptions of what is “right”, “true”, or “moral” been challenged in the past? Do you, like myself, appreciate this challenge and perceive it as constructive? Do you have a strong belief system that prevents you from being influenced by such conversations? And, more specifically, how do you feel about the continued use of capital punishment?
December 2, 2010 Update: For anyone interested in the Petit case or the application of capital punishment, one of the men was officially sentenced to death today by New Haven Superior Court Judge Jon Blue. Click through for the New York Times coverage.
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