we just make a little money and we buy a little mercy

October 5, 2015 12:23 PM

"I think there are different kinds of mercy: big Mercy and little mercy. Big Mercy is so big because it is made out of suffering and ultimatums, out of saviors and omnipotence, and out of stories that have only one way of ending, which are brutal and where almost nobody wins... But maybe there's another kind of mercy—mercy so little that it costs almost nothing. So little most of us never notice it."

FPP title via.

posted by divined by radio (14 comments total)

First Portia!
posted by comealongpole at 1:19 PM on October 5, 2015

Wow, campaigning against the death penalty and running childrens classes in a pediatric oncology ward. She has a big heart.
posted by ianso at 1:22 PM on October 5, 2015

So many allergens in that piece.
posted by mogget at 1:38 PM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

Good ol' Doomtree \\|//
posted by GameDesignerBen at 1:39 PM on October 5, 2015

This child is not my child
Yeah, coming home to one's own children after that kind of work strikes me as such a difficult thing. Wow.
posted by comealongpole at 1:43 PM on October 5, 2015

I didn't even know this was a job. I think I would like to have this job.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:43 PM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

She's a very effective writer.

The subjects she's writing about here are so viscerally affecting that it feels a little overwhelming in a not-entirely-good way, to me, personally. Dying children writing poetry, dying children thanking their parents for their love. Innocent men being executed for the misfortune of having been born Black in America, men writhing on gurneys in mute agony while being incompetently executed.

This is all real, of course; the author is not inventing or manipulating facts. She writes on two subjects that are well-documented. It's extremely rhetorically effective to have two such emotionally captivating narratives in a single article, but it seems almost excessive somehow.
posted by clockzero at 1:49 PM on October 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

Me too, Blast Hardcheese. Me too.

The idea that the writing of the poems and stories comforts the children... the idea that reading the poems & stories comforts the adults... I can't think of anything more worthwhile for a writing teacher to do.

And this idea of big mercy and little mercy-- I need to sit with that awhile. It's hard. But I'm glad I read it.
posted by tuesdayschild at 2:15 PM on October 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

cannot even read
posted by gottabefunky at 2:16 PM on October 5, 2015

As long as defense lawyers are paid by the accused, justice will be unevenly served. This is true whether or not the death penalty is available, although of course it is definitely one of the best arguments for abolishing the death penalty in the context of such an unequal system. If all defense lawyers were state employees (at least for capital cases), appointed just as are judges and then assigned to trials by a similar system, wouldn't that at least make things less unfair? The death penalty would still be arguably unjust, since now your chances were more of a dice roll--juries still being less than omniscient. In fact even more people could suddenly find themselves arguing against capital punishment as people of their caste faced execution despite claiming innocence.
posted by TreeRooster at 2:37 PM on October 5, 2015 [2 favorites]

This is very good. A song I've been listening to lately is also about a child dying of cancer: I See Everything by La Dispute. After I finished the article, I put that on and cried some more.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 6:16 PM on October 5, 2015

Thank you for posting this. An amazing and moving essay.
posted by Athanassiel at 1:00 AM on October 6, 2015

I like the concept of Big Mercy and little mercy, but I'm struggling with it. I think the difference, in the author's framework, is that there is pain that is supposedly Just and therefore relieving that pain is Big Mercy. An apparent cruelty, however, props up that Mercy, because it requires the presumption that you deserve pain. Little mercy is relieving pain when that pain is unjust -- I mean, who could say little children and their families deserve the pain of terminal cancer? In this framework, Big Mercy ends up seeming cruel in itself, because it makes others less human than we are -- we can be selective or even capricious in applying Mercy because they don't deserve it. By contrast, everyone deserves little mercy because no one deserve the pain it relieves. The way the author sets up her framework, little mercy is better, kinder, and more humane than Big Mercy.

But, of course, the pain we inflict as Just pain often is not just. We botch it, we misapply it, and it is covered in our society's (and our own) racism and bigotry. Is clemency and mercy in the context of an unjust death penalty and criminal justice system really this big, othering, Mercy? Or is it simply cruelty marked with intermittent kindness?

This is why I am frustrated. If punishment were truly fair or just, then it isn't necessarily cruel and othering to inflict it, and Mercy relieving that pain would be at least as kind and compassionate as relieving undeserved pain. Of course, our system isn't fair, so the little mercy seems better than the "redemptive fires" of big Mercy. But her criticism is not really about the mercy, it's about justice of choosing to inflict certain types of pain in the first place.
posted by alligatorpear at 8:02 AM on October 6, 2015

. Very moving article. Seems to me that there is no such thing as big Mercy nor just deaths. As fallible as man is, we should focus on providing little mercies where we can, but what do I know. Difficult to type while cutting all these onions.
posted by What'sAPedantWalter? at 12:48 AM on October 7, 2015