I read an AP article yesterday about Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of blowing up Pan Am flight 103 over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland in the late 80s. The so-called Lockerbie Bomber, who is terminally ill with prostate cancer, was released from a Scottish prison on Thursday so that he could return to Libya to die at home with his family. The U.K. government granted al-Megrahi a compassionate release, after he served eight years of his life sentence, as “an expression of the Scottish people’s humanity.”

What interested me most about the article was the way in which it illuminated different cultures’ attitudes about punishment and compassion.

Obama released a statement that Scotland’s decision to release al-Megrahi was a mistake. Secretary Clinton is outraged. The American families of the victims are speaking out, saying things like, “‘I don’t understand how the Scots can show compassion. It’s an utter insult and utterly disgusting,’ said Kara Weipz, of Mount Laurel, New Jersey, whose 20-year-old brother Richard Monetti was on board Flight 103. ‘It’s horrible. I don’t show compassion for someone who showed no remorse.’”

On the other hand, “Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill said although al-Megrahi had not shown compassion to his victims – many of whom were American college students flying home to New York for Christmas – MacAskill was motivated by Scottish values to show mercy.” Likewise, a British man whose daughter was killed aboard flight 103, “welcomed the Libyan’s release, saying many questions remained about what led to the bomb that exploded in the cargo hold. ‘I think he should be able to go straight home to his family and spend his last days there…I don’t believe for a moment this man was involved in the way he was found to be involved.’”

Mercy and compassion seem to be part of the cultural landscape in the U.K., values that its citizens continually aspire to possess. In America we have confused mercy with weakness. When I looked up mercy in the dictionary it said, “compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm.” In fact, mercy is a show of great power. It is a grace offered to those who are weaker than we are. The greater the act of mercy, the greater the show of strength.

I am not advocating that we let all the criminals go; I think there should be consequences for people who break the law; but I believe that most people who do bad things are in need of help. I believe that violence and crime are a result of desperation, a lack of resources, and the exposure (and subsequent inurement) to violence over the course of one’s life. People who promote violence deserve our pity not our hatred.

But the American families of al-Megrahi’s victims feel that by granting him a compassionate release, we are not punishing him enough, and are thus forsaking their loved ones. Al-Megrahi has spent the last eight years in prison suffering for his crime and will spend the next three months–the last three months of his life–getting intimately acquainted with death. To those who think he is getting off easy, I would say that over the next three months he will be going through a process far more frightening than anything we could impose on him in prison.

The argument can be made that al-Megrahi’s victims did not have the opportunity to die in a loving environment surrounded by their families, so he should not be given that luxury. I understand that reasoning completely, but I think it reveals a lot about our beliefs in justice, retribution, and punishment. The conventional wisdom is that if someone does something bad to us or to a loved one, it will help set things straight if the perpetrator is made to suffer as much as possible for his crime, that his suffering will act as balm for our suffering and for the suffering of our loved one.

Is there another way to think about it? Might the death of a loved one be less in vain if the person who killed them was given a different view of humanity, a chance to retreat from violence and revenge, to make something of their life, to serve their community instead of rotting in a cell, a victim of continued violence and hatred, further reinforcing the negative belief system that caused them to commit the atrocity in the first place? Might we have more to gain by modeling compassion for our prisoners, by exposing them to a way of being they have not yet experienced?

It is too late for al-Megrahi to turn his life around and to be of service, but his release has given us the chance to look at our views on justice and punishment, and to re-examine the principles upon which our penal system is based.

Comment away, my sweets.

For those of you dear folks who read The New Yorker, who like to make fun of other people’s grammar, who use the word “umami” in passing while cooking, and who refer to all movies as films, you may want to check out The Rumpus, an interesting new website made just for people like us.

And if you’re so inclined you can also check out the book review I wrote for them on Aaron Gwyn’s new novel, The World Beneath. As always, thanks for reading.

During one of his performances, Russell Brand—comedian, infamous lothario, admitted sex addict, three-time winner of the The Sun newspaper’s Shagger of the Year Award—notices a fan’s sign hanging over the balcony, which says “Kat ♥ U.” He stops the show to note that the heart should really be followed by an apostrophe S and then adds, “I don’t think I could have sex with someone who had such a slender grasp on grammar.”

Years ago, when we were engaged, Joshua and I went to a party together in the suburbs. At one point we were dancing and kissing and minding our own business. Seeing this, the host yelled loudly in our direction so that everyone else could hear, “Enjoy it while it lasts! You won’t be doing that once you’re married!” All the other Babbitts chortled and elbowed each other in the ribs as if to say Don’t we know it! Welcome to the club! Marriage is the death of romance! Kiss your genitals and your will to live goodbye! Just kidding, we love being married! Not really! Just kidding! (Not really!)

Joshua and I were astonished. We couldn’t believe that people actually felt that way. And that they were willing to say it out loud. In front of other people. We grabbed a few handfuls of food and got the hell out of there, lest their marital mediocrity leak onto us.

I hadn’t thought of that evening until today when I read an NPR article about a man who has been selling wedding rings for over 60 years. When he sees a couple kissing on the street, “he likes to tap the man on the shoulder and hand him his card. ‘You know why?’ he asks mischievously. ‘Because married couples don’t kiss on the street.’”

How has this happened? Who has given us marrieds such a wretched reputation?¹ When did it become a cultural norm to lose all desire for your spouse as soon as the I Dos are out of the way?

Guys, please! Do me this solid: Right now, grab your husband or your wife. Take them to a public place and make out with them mercilessly. Really manhandle the shit out of them. Then when your faces are all red and chafed from kissing, say to each other at the top of your voice, “I’m so glad I married you! Isn’t marriage hot?!”

Thank you.

I keep telling myself that the reason I haven’t posted anything to this blog in over a week is because I’ve been busy. But that’s not true. The real reason is that someone wrote an anonymous hateful (and very personal) comment on one of the posts and it completely deflated me.

I know that whenever you put yourself or your opinions out into the world there will always be people who have nasty things to say about it. I expected it when I started this blog. But I would be lying if I said that it didn’t still feel like a slap.

I started going through old posts, removing the most personal details about my life that I had written, thinking that if I shared less about myself I would be less vulnerable to personal attacks. I thought about changing the format of the blog, about giving it up entirely. I wondered if it wasn’t a completely self-indulgent project in the first place (surely my anonymous commenter would say it was).

Then I thought back to why I started this blog, which is because I believe in the power of personal storytelling. I believe that when we share pieces of ourselves, when we offer a window into our lives for other people to look through, it serves as a kind of communion. And at a time in history when we often feel cut off from one another because of technology, culture, and lifestyle, it seems important to grab little pieces of each other whenever and wherever we can.

The things that have affected me the most online, the things that have caused me to stop what I am doing and to examine my life, have not been news blurbs or special reports. They have all been personal stories written (or told on video) by other people. Not all the personal writing out there has had this effect on me, but when I sit down to think about what type of writing has most changed my life I keep coming back to personal narrative, creative nonfiction, memoir, and the first-person essay.

I have noticed a good deal of distain in modern Western culture for these types of writing; somehow we see them as having less value than straight-forward nonfiction, historical works, or journalistic accounts of important events. We think of their authors as narcissists, self-obsessed nobodies, or as thinking they have something important to say when, in fact, they do not. And in some cases, that is true. But I don’t believe it is any more true of the writers who attempt to uncover universal ideas from within than it is of news writers who attempt to uncover universal ideas from without.

I believe that personal writing should be evaluated in the context of something much larger. It is not just about the individual writer or the pieces that he or she is writing. It is about the lot of them. If we were to string together all the personal scraps—all the essays and the blogs and the love letters and the memoirs—written at one point, we would have a record of that time more faceted and nuanced and rich than anything we could ever hope to find in a history book. Subjectivity is not the enemy of objectivity. Writers who share parts of themselves and their experiences fill out all the holes in our objectively written history, they are the keepers of our collective memory—one day, one thought, one word, one comma at a time.

So to my anonymous commenter, and to anyone else who thinks that personal writing and blogging is a self-indulgent whine fest: I invite you to stop reading at any time.¹

And to everyone else: thank you from the bottom of my heart for your interest in my teeny tiny sliver of our shared history.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, gives a talk at the TED conference about the fickle nature of creativity and how it connects us with something greater, something over which we have absolutely no control.

This past year has been a hard one, perhaps the most difficult of my life: I lost two dear friends, moved across the country to a place I couldn’t stand,¹ turned around seven months later to move back home only to leave my husband three thousand miles away. We are hideously in debt from student loans, and the financial crash has left us without savings.

Things are bad.²

In the midst of all this, though, something wonderful has happened: I no longer care. Everything that I thought was important—my best friend, my financial security, the comfort of waking up every morning next to the person I love—has been taken away. And what I realize is: I am still alive. I am still breathing. My Fuck It Threshold, as Joshua calls it, has gone way down; I have gained the ability to let that which truly does not matter, slide.³

I have let go.

And I see the same thing happening to everyone around me. I see people losing their jobs, people restructuring their entire lives, people having to lean on others more than ever. I see a country, whose self worth was once based on prosperity and abundance, having to formulate a new identity for itself. And as terrifying as that is, I believe it is a positive thing. I believe we are molting, sloughing off the superfluous. We are coming to a collective reckoning about what is important, and it has nothing to do with how many Louis Vuitton bags we have per capita or who won the last round of American Idol. We are finally, at long last, learning what it means to be alive.

At the end of the day, those of us who are lucky are still breathing. We are scared, but we are breathing. We are reconnecting with each other, with simpler things. We are finding that it is possible to go forward by going backward a little. And we are, all of us, clean slates awaiting a vision for the future.

I just caught a rerun of Six Feet Under, a show which always inspires me. This particular episode ends with a conversation that gave me a lot to think about. It is a dialogue between David, one of the main characters who was just assaulted, and his dead father Nathaniel whom he continues to talk to. It was written by Nancy Oliver who also wrote one of my favorite screenplays of all time. Hope you enjoy it:

Nathaniel: You’re missing the point.

David: There is no point, that’s the point. Isn’t it?

Nathaniel: The point’s right in front of your face.

David: Well I’m sorry but I don’t see it.

Nathaniel: You’re not even grateful are you?

David: Grateful? For the worst fucking experience of my life?

Nathaniel: You hold onto your pain like it means something, like it’s worth something. Well let me tell you: let it go. [Looking skyward] Infinite possibilities and all he can do is whine.

David: Well what am I supposed to do?

Nathaniel: What do you think? You can do anything, you lucky bastard, you’re alive. What’s a little pain compared to that?

David: It can’t be so simple.

Nathaniel: What if it is?