Elizabeth Bruenig

“To look into the eyes of a vulnerable person is to see yourself as you might be. It’s a more harrowing experience than one might readily admit. There is a version of yourself made powerless, status diminished, reliant upon the goodwill of others. One response is empathy: to shore up your reserves of charity and trust, in hopes that others will do the same. Another is denial: If you refuse to believe you could ever be in such a position — perhaps by blaming the frail for their frailty or ascribing their vulnerability to moral failure — then you never have to face such an uncomfortable episode of imagination. You come away disgusted with the weak, but content in the certainty you aren’t among them.

Or they make you feel helpless, just by dint of how little you can do to stop what’s being done to them. The temptation in that case is to look away, let it all be someone else’s problem, or deny that there’s a problem in need of resolution in the first place.”
― Elizabeth Bruenig

“No penalty levied on Earth can answer the suffering of a parent wailing for her lost young. No punishment can fill the aching silence where the daily clamor of children used to be, or stir the brutal stillness they leave behind. Even if we were to set the price of one human life at another, capital punishment can’t deliver justice for multiple murder victims—nor for the wounded survivors. If a man can kill a single person and receive the exact same punishment as a murderer who massacred more than a dozen, in what sense does execution represent a proportional sentence?”
― Elizabeth Bruenig, On Human Slaughter: Evil, Justice, Mercy