Notes from an execution
by Bruce Campbell

The gurney was wheeled into the small, concrete room. A sheet was used to cover everything, nearly up to the neck. A patch of skin was prepped for the needle, which was then methodically inserted, empty but ready to deliver the poison. Following procedure step by step, at a command the assistant turned the small lever that sent fluid through the tubing and into the veins.

Knowing it was hopeless by this point, I still found myself resisting, resisting, but my pounding heart started slowing down. I yawned once and closed my eyes. When I awoke, feeling half-asleep, I could hardly breathe for the packing in my nose, and my eyes felt scaly and dry. I asked the nurse for water.

Two months ago. My 3-year old son got a little quieter as we entered the hospital lobby, then went completely quiet as the doctor examined his nose, his eyes, felt his small pulse. Going into the operating room, he clung to my neck ferociously and it was hard for me to peel him off to lower him to the table. Inches from his face, I still couldn’t convince him everything was safe and going to be all right, and with some force I held his arms splayed down as the anesthesiologist struggled to keep the mask to his face. Not knowing what was happening to him, he resisted with muscular terror.

This week. The shortest route from the commuter train to my office in New York takes me through Rockefeller Center, and on most mornings I stroll past the plaza outside the Today Show and the myriad of people, mostly tourists, who gather there for a glimpse of the show and a glimpse of themselves on the monitors scattered about. Barricades hold everyone peaceably at the periphery of a large square of street which serves as the outdoor set. The mood is usually excited but quiet, until Al or Katie or Matt comes outside, when it erupts into squeals and flashes and frantic waving.

This time, a different scene. I round the corner of the building at 48th Street, and there is the customary square of spectators, but today they are lifeless, subdued. Live from Terre Haute, Ind., a procession of press people are filing past a podium and delivering their descriptions of the execution of Timothy McVeigh, which has occurred just moments before.

I move closer to a monitor myself. Around me, people stand holding poster boards with photographs of their babies or bearing the words "HELLO, MOUNT VERNON!!" or they stand in a loose knot of a dozen or so sporting college mascot baseball caps, or their T-shirts holler out party phrases or website addresses, but the people are very still, some slumped across the steel barricades in torpor, some standing and frowning with their arms folded, some looking at their watches, some trying to hold conversations about something, anything, else.

There are no protesters among the crowd nor death-penalty advocates, not one amid all of the posters and homemade banners and hats, no chants, no catcalls. When people speak to one another, they draw close and whisper or cup their hands conspiratorially. The entire mood is that of a party at which both band and bartender have flipped out the lights early in the proceedings and unceremoniously departed, leaving the guests adorned and mid-delight, but with nothing left to do.

I can only find one person trying something else. I hear a voice behind me, not loud but conversational, say, "It’s just wrong. The whole thing is wrong, it’s just the wrong thing to do, there’s nothing right about it." I turn to see two working men leaning half-heartedly across a barricade, staring off, and speaking to them is one of the Rockefeller Center guards, dressed in a brown security suit with tan piping and a mock-policeman’s cap, metal name badge, and drum-major sleeve cuffs. He is standing officiously, tall, in corporate authority, casually but deliberately scanning the crowd as he speaks softly and surely, "I’m sorry, it’s just wrong." Black, his unlistening audience of two is white.

Standing together at an American epicenter of news and media activity, the people here are by now restless at the repetition of details from the press, the forced march through a numbing yet fatal government procedure. The show’s almost over. We are dressed up and without a role to play any longer in what is happening.

But we are all resisting. We are resisting death, in all of its versions and preludes, every current that tries to drag us to shore, to shallows, no matter how we are reassured it is all for the good, that it is just. We are resisting in different ways, but we resist. We are helpless but to be taken in the flow of life. All discussions of what is moral must begin with the evidence of our resistance.

Resistance, itself, is our life.

Bruce Campbell, a media critic/editor for The Witness, has been a producer and film reviewer for National Public Radio affiliates and conducts community workshops on media literacy. He lives in Tarrytown, N.Y.