They are seeing too that the justice system so often is horrifically un just to people who are not white. Courts can be racist because they are composed of human beings, and racism is one of the results of the human desire, so ordinary and so terrible, for contempt. Then, there is the death penalty, the large popularity of which is growing less in America. My purpose now is not to present an argument against it though I see it as completely barbaric and think it should be done away with immediately. My purpose is to say something about why the punishing of human beings by execution has been popular.
People generally feel they are in a world they dislike, that is uncaring and confusing.
There is a big desire to deal with such a world by annulling, wiping out what we see as against us. This wiping out has thousands of forms, but they are all contempt. They are all in opposition to that respect for the world, in its sweetness and bitterness, which is the desire to know, the desire to have thought that is exact and continuous. There are other forms. It stands for that complete lessening which is our revenge on an uncaring world.