War, Abortion, Capital Punishment: Recognizing our "Killing Debts"
I admire the way some non-western societies use the concept of “killing debts.” It is an acknowledgement that sometime or another, we all commit murder, whether we call ourselves Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, animists, atheists, pro choice advocates, anti-abortionists, advocates for or against capital punishment, vegetarians or pork butchers. Why? It is because we are human.
At the very least, our survival on this earth demands the consumption of other living organisms, whether animal or plant. And our all too human egos cause us at times to do lethal harm to whatever factors stand in the way of our ambitions and goals, whether they be political, material or even religious.
In American society, we all too often recognize the killing debts of others but suppress our own. Pacifists condemn the military for killing “the enemy” in times of war. And yet many pacifists are also pro-choice. Anti-abortionists often find themselves behaving as hawks on military questions and supporting capital punishment, while vehemently condemning “the killing of unborn children.”
I had an abortion in my early twenties, despite a deep reverence for the life force in all things, which I had inherited from my African ancestors. At the time, I was unmarried, unemployed and unprepared to assume the responsibilities of parenthood. But these circumstances, though real at the time, were merely excuses. The real reasons for my actions emanated quite simply from the fact that I had made a mistake, for which I lacked the courage to accept its life long consequences. I was, therefore, a coward. I was narcissistic. I had committed murder, even though I did so with a deep sigh of relief that I would not be tried and prosecuted for an act which by then had been decriminalized on account of the Supreme Court’s “Roe versus Wade” decision of 1973. But alas, I owed a killing debt.
Even as a young woman, I recognized that the anti-abortion/pro-choice debate about where life begins was little more than an intellectual sophistry to sugar-coat the emotional pain of certain actions (killing debts) for which I did not then have an appropriate name. A democratic society, as opposed to a theocratic state, allows its citizens to decide which of their collective killing debts will be prosecuted, and which sanctioned or at least tolerated. And that is as it should be. But in the end, it is our hearts and not our heads nor Congress nor the legal system that tell us when we have transgressed the divine law of the cosmos and owe a killing debt. Regardless of whether our legal system demands restitution or not, it is repaid through the sometimes torturous process of first learning to acknowledge that we owe this killing debt. We can then employ such methods, which lead us to self-knowledge in order to learn self-forgiveness and a genuine compassion, which begins with acceptance of our own flawed humanity.
And yet, something truly frightening and sinister happens when we fail both to recognize and to forgive our own personal killing debts. This will especially be so if our murderous actions entailed the strangling of an integral part of our own spiritual being. We will in such a case all too often project the emotional pain of our unfinished business onto scapegoats, whom we attempt to suck into our own private hell of self-hatred and unprocessed remorse. In so doing we invariably deceive ourselves into believing that we are the veritable white knights battling the murderous and “dark” forces of externalized evil.
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