Why I watch people die

In America, we love to kill people. Sometimes it is legal, more often it is not. But, legal or not, the killing is steady. Sometimes it is in self-defense, sometimes it is in a frenzy of rage or fear, and sometimes it is premeditated, planned for hours and days and months in advance.

At night in this desert metropolis, I sit with a glass of wine, looking out at the hot darkness, watching the moths swarm around the porch lights, and when I hear the gunshots I think about the people who pull the triggers. I wonder what they will eat for breakfast in the morning, who they’ll wake up with, who they’ll never think of shooting.

It goes like this: the darkness is shattered by the gunshots, and then the police helicopter—the ghetto bird—hangs noisily above. If the cops come, it is said, it usually means someone was hit. The cops deny this, but it is said that there are so many shots fired that they can’t afford to respond to them all.

And sometimes it goes like this: a man is locked in a room and he is told that he is going to be killed on a certain day. And when the day comes, he is taken to another room, tied down, and killed while a group of people watch. Some of those who watch will be people who love him. Others will be people who hate him. And still others will be people like me.

On nights like tonight, as I play with my cats and listen to the song of the ghetto bird, my mind rolls back to the last killing I watched. Scribbled words that lie dead in old notebooks come back to life, and all at once, it is no longer night and it is no longer now. Instead, for at least the hundredth time in my mind, it is the furious daylight of June 1999.

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This article has been written by Dogo Barry Graham, "a Zen Buddhist monk trying to live life with kindness and without causing harm - a daily vow and a daily failure, a social activist and a writer, the Abbot of The Sitting Frog Zen Sangha and a priest in The Engaged Zen Foundation." Visit his blog: The Urban Monk