Posted 12/12/2012
by Yasha Husain

I'm going to share with you a vision for a futuristic school system I think will help all character-types, including people who think primarily linearly, and primarily by association. It's a single, closed, holistic system, which interweaves the modern education system with holistic, closed systems of the world.

'Charting the Course'
is an education
proposal
that teaches
whole brain
thinking,
the reliance
on
interhemispheric
thinking,
which brings
together
dominant
left-
and
right-brained
thinkers, in a
closed, holistic
learning network.

The author of this
website has written
in her book, Holistic
Living: Tips for
Youth, how
people along the
autism spectrum are
naturally more
right-brained,
while "neurotypical"
people, tend to, from a young age, become dominant
left-brained
thinkers, with the exception that both
character-types
access interhemispheric, and graduated, thought.

With questions
or comments,
please email:
yashahusain@gmail.com.

The full education
proposal
can right now
be viewed
using the
following
link.

The book,
Holistic Living:
Tips for Youth,
will be
available soon.

Ending the Death Penalty, Universally
By Yasha Husain
January 8, 2013

When I think of such gruesome topics as the death penalty, I'm reminded of a personal memory, my attachment to Bob Dylan's song, “Hurricane,” that I listened to play over and over again on a favorite Dylan mix tape, as I drove through the San Gabriel Mountains of Los Angeles County. It wasn't only the thought of an innocent man going to jail like that, but Bob Dylan bringing the police to justice, that transfixed me. I thought implicitly, if Dylan can sing about law and truth like that, in a song so simple as to become justice itself, or the reincarnation of it, what can be made of it? At once, when you hear the song, you realize there's no place on this earth for a death penalty. The lyrics don't go that far, but the poetry contained between the lines certainly does, and did for me. But my mind didn't need changin'.

Something about those winding roads with views of the far afield horizon cut off by mountain ranges in every direction, with the hot sun beaming down in contrast, as if you are not contained but in the light, made the song come alive for me. Other of Dylan's songs did the same, on the journey I'd take to just get away from my small apartment and think for a while. In particular, I loved, “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.” The lines, “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed, son?, Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?,” struck a chord. I would be caught up in the innocence of childhood, not to mention how it's robbed sometimes, and then a man like Hurricane is taken away to prison.

Where do you go from there? You might find god in every one of us, the light and the truth, and the hope for better days. Better yet, I also found the will to enact our own innocence, which I knew from the lines, could bring about justice.

Another theme from pop culture, or the arts, or both, that rendered itself strongly to me, and as a reflection of why to disallow the death penalty, came from the imagery of “The Green Mile,” a Hollywood movie from 1999 based on the 1996 Stephen King novel by the same name.

The co-stars of that film were Tom Hanks and the recently deceased, Michael Clarke Duncan. What a beautiful pair of actors playing off of each other's strengths. But in the story you see innocence put to an early death, and you realize how upside down society can be.

Duncan, a larger-than-life actor, both in terms of his physicality and character, has special powers meant for healing the sick and by way of reading the truth in people, and the truth revealed to him in the course of the movie is the identity of the murderer of the victims he's accused of killing – a man who becomes his neighbor on death row.

Tired of all of the bad in the world, and wanting a rest, Duncan refuses Hanks' offer to walk free, now having found, and from being touched by the new inmate who grabbed his arm, that the prisonmate is the true rapist and murderer of two white girls, the crime the plain-spoken Duncan, with magical powers, is found guilty of.

The film leaves you spellbound, merely because such an innocent soul, a sufferer by way of his wisdom, finds it easier to die than live. Similar to Dylan's songs, the theme circles around innocence and the need for society to not only condone it, but own it. There should be no scapegoats, or blame games. True justice shouldn't afford such things because it can lead to the unthinkable, 'fear to bring a child into the world,' a line taken from yet another classic Dylan song, “Masters of War,” even when the innocence you find so hard to touch is your own...

It's contained within each and every one of us, it's in the murderers behind bars, though we still have a journey to take before we can access and rehabilitate it in the mind of a psychopath, as evidenced in yet another popular film that captured its audience's imagination, “The Silence of the Lambs,” starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins.

These artistic representations of truth and what necessitates nonviolence stand in lieu of a universally applied law that bars the death penalty, and the killing of the innocence. It's not that people who attain to psychopathy and are consequently put in jail for it are “innocent,” and yet they still hold within them the seed of innocence, life. And if we are not the Masters of War, we're not the masters of death either.

According to Canon Law, God didn't leave things like capital punishment for us to decide.

In my college text book on international law, Law Among Nations, by Gerhard von Glahn, it states, that from the doctrine of natural law came the general worldview of jurists, “until shortly before the end of the nineteenth century, ... that the states belonging to the community of nations enjoyed the possession of so-called fundamental rights, including the rights of equality, existence, external independence, self-defense, territorial supremacy (sovereignty), intercourse, and respect.” The origins of democratic, domestic law meanwhile continue to encourage the greater adoption of said international law norms, for instance it states in no uncertain terms in the Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

What this amounts to is that there is overwhelming evidence, when looking at all of the facts, and with a thorough understanding of the roots of natural law, to argue, and in alignment with the folk songs and “plays” of our time, that a set of universal ethics and laws strictly forbids the death penalty, an eye for an eye, or for blood to be shed. Natural law should on the one hand be able to be utilized in domestic courts to try individuals and it has strong precedence on the international level for the oversight of nation-states and their peoples.

What is yet to be applied in light of truth is the end of the death penalty, as a reconstituted and permanent fixture of domestic and international law, both steeped at their cores in universal law.