Web Logs
6/11/2001 - McVeigh No More
And so Timothy McVeigh is dead. The baby faced killer who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma, has been executed. I won't discuss my opposition of the death penalty ( which is based mostly on fiscal, not ethical, considerations ), nor will I go into the obviously indefensible nature of his crimes
But I will express respect for his ethical stoicism. Throughout it all he never waved from his principles. He never recanted or expressed any doubt that he had done a necessary and needed thing. He believed entirely in his actions, from drawing board to prison gurney.
Such convictions are a powerful, and yet dangerous thing.
Before dying he handed out this poem:
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud,
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
-- William Ernest Henley
