The Daily Wire's Michael Knowles calls for bringing back public executions
Knowles: “It would be good because people just don't see death period anymore”
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From the March 17, 2023, edition of The Daily Wire's The Michael Knowles Show
MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST): Certainly, yeah, I think that that would do a lot to bring back the deterrent effect of capital punishment, certainly. But furthermore, it would be good because people just don't see death, period, anymore. We used to see death more -- I'm not saying we want more people to die, but we need to recognize that death does happen. We try to run away from death. We try to hide death. We hide aging. We pack ourselves full of cosmetics. We pack ourselves full of all sorts of surgeries to pretend that we're not aging. And then when people look like they're about to die, we shove them off into special little centers - hospice and old age homes, and we try to just separate them. When they do die, we don't really do open casket wakes anymore. We don't do proper funerals anymore. We do these brief little celebrations of life. We burn up the body as quickly as possible, we ignore the fact that death has happened, then sometime later, maybe you will have a celebration of life ceremony where you basically just gather with your friends and have dinner to try to process death. But it's a death that you won't look in the face.
And so, we live our lives trying to put it out of our head. But death is very important. It's one of the four final things - death, judgment, heaven and hell. You're living your life as a preparation to die, and you need to be prepared for your death. In -- in the -- in the olden times, people would pray for a good death, by which they meant death that they saw coming, that they could prepare for, that wasn't sudden. Today, people pray for a good death, meaning they don't want to know what's happening, they basically want a piano to fall on their head so that they're just walking along one day with their frappuccino, having a lovely time thinking about, I don't know, whatever they just saw on Instagram. And then it's all over and they think they go to oblivion. They don't think that the soul persists after natural death. And so, our view of death is just so perverse now and we're so separated from it that, yeah, public executions would -- would also help us to have a little memento mori, of course.