Twenty years ago, I went to Egypt with a friend. First stop was Cairo for a week, then Sharm el Sheikh for a few nights. It was hot, at times exceeding 45 degrees Celsius. My friend is a red head with freckles and he suffered. I love the heat, especially dry heat. But once it heads north of 40 degrees, it becomes troublesome. I loved Egypt. It was my dream destination. I want to return to do a Nile cruise. One day I shall, the sooner the better.
I can always put a date to my Egyptian holiday. We stayed at a very nice 5* hotel in Cairo which had a wonderful terrace and swimming pool overlooking the Nile. We were relaxing by the pool on Monday afternoon, having returned from a morning excursion. There were TV screens dotted about and a news story caught my eye. Timothy McVeigh had been executed. June 11th, 2001, twenty years ago today. It remained the most momentous date of the year for precisely three months.
I miss travel, hugely. But normality will return. I keep rolling the dice, hoping for the best. We’ve booked flights for Malta, again. Third time lucky? Our previous bookings in March 2020 and October 2020 failed to happen. September 2021 feels lucky though. I have my fingers crossed.
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Timothy McVeigh came up in my political group’s conversation this past Tuesday. All present were of the opinion that he went to his death with information that would have been better said, that a few decades rotting in an iron cage might have helped him to decide to divulge. We did him a big favor, taking his temptation away. I suspect there was a score of people who were very glad to see that loose end cut off.
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The death penalty has no place in a modern justice system, for a whole host of reasons. One good reason is the reason you’ve given. It exists as a means of retribution. Nothing more than that. And we should be better than that.
Not that I’d shed any tears for McVeigh, but there we are.
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Hope your travel plans come to fruition the third time around! My English cousin and his wife are dealing with the same frustration. They have resigned themselves to taking some short trips within the UK this summer.
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We have been forced to endure a short U.K. based trip, which begins tomorrow. But I look forward to getting further afield later in the year. But even then that’s likely to be limited to Europe, perhaps the US. It’s going to be quite a while yet before much of the rest of the world gets a handle on Covid.
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The main thing I hate about capital punishment is that I look like millions of other men and some of those millions are killers. Some soul would swear on the bible that I did it and the real killer would be free to kill again. Here in the states, there is not a month goes by where some person is let out of jail because the real miscreant has been found.
We had a case here in my home township, two men spent a decade in jail for killing a fellow drinker from a local bar. DNA, as it got better, sprung the two men . Our local prosecutor fought their release the whole way-needless to say, I vote for anyone running against our local prosecutor.
The grand jury system is broken here in Ohio. One of my lawyer friends says: ” Any prosecutor can get an indictment of a ham sandwich in Ohio”. I’d hate to be that sandwich in a murder case.
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Timothy McVeigh?
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He of Ohio federal building bombing infamy…
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