Of Rats and Tim

By TAD BARTIMUS

A rat has been wreaking havoc around my house lately. "Gotta do something," I mumble to myself, catching sight of two pointed ears in my peripheral vision as I climb the porch stairs. "Gotta get that guy!"

My cats are old and feeble, barely able to lift an arthritic paw as the rat skitters by. They've always done this dirty work; now it's up to me. But what to do? None of the options is particularly palatable.

My friend the organic farmer rids herself of varmints by catching them in a cage and then dumping it in a 55-gallon barrel of water. "I slam down that lid and forget about them," she says firmly. "I can't afford to have a rat destroying my livelihood. A sentimental farmer is a broke farmer. If I catch 'em, I kill 'em."

There's also poison - effective, but a danger to other creatures. Messy glue strips trap sharp toenails and little feet; so do old-fashioned traps baited with cheese. But once you've caught the outlaw what do you do with it?
The solution arrived in a catalog advertising a "clean, easy, more humane way." For about $50 I can buy a plastic box that's open at one end, closed at the other, and has a metal plate on the inside that electrocutes rats when they step on it.

"No need to touch" the rat, the advertisement promises, "you hardly even have to see it."

Which brings me to Timothy McVeigh.

A lot of people wanted to watch that rat die. They wanted to put the lid on Tim McVeigh forever, and with good reason. When he blew up the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995 he not only killed 168 people, he also damaged countless other lives.

Throughout his $1 million trial and incarceration, not once did the 32-year-old McVeigh express sorrow or remorse. He wanted a publicly televised execution so he could become a martyr to a twisted cause. His description of the 19 children he killed as "collateral damage" prompted many Americans generally opposed to the death penalty to make an exception in his case.

The Timothy McVeigh the world saw had no redeeming qualities as civilized society defines them.

Of the 3,000 names of survivors and victims' families the FBI had compiled, about 300 asked to watch McVeigh die by lethal injection. Since only 10 seats were available to them at the Terre Haute, Ind., execution site, Attorney General John Ashcroft agreed to a live broadcast via closed circuit television to a prison in Oklahoma City, where the rest of the witnesses were to gather. No video cameras, tape recorders or cell phones were allowed because it's against the law to videotape or make an audio recording of a federal execution.

Maybe watching Tim McVeigh die will ease the survivors' suffering. Maybe they'll be comforted by observing his passage to a higher judgment. Maybe seeing a corpse will remove the object of their hatred and help them start to heal. No one who witnesses death -- whether it's in a hospital bed, on a battlefield, in the streets of Oklahoma City or on closed-circuit TV -- is ever the same. Not even, despite his stoicism, Timothy McVeigh.

The hope is that, having seen light in the eyes one second and then watching it go out in the next, there is a greater reverence for life. If witnessing Tim McVeigh die gives the bereaved a renewed will to live, then the rat did some good on this earth after all. 

© 2001 The Women Syndicate

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