by Pernell Sellers
The government is going to livestream an execution.
I want to sit with that for a moment before I say anything else. Not because it is shocking. Because it isn’t anymore. That is the point.A state killing a man on camera is no longer something that stops us. It is something we scroll past. It is content. It is a link someone sends with a caption like can you believe this, and then we go back to whatever we were doing. The killing does not land. It just passes through.That is what I want to write about. Not the execution itself. Not whether it is right or wrong. The fact that we can watch it at all.—What Violence Does to a Society That Never Stops WatchingThere is a difference between knowing violence exists and being fed it.For most of human history, violence was rare enough to be an event. A killing was something that happened in a village, and the village talked about it for a generation. It marked people. It changed the shape of things. A man who saw a killing carried it with him. It made a groove in him.Now we are fed violence the way we are fed everything else. Constantly. Endlessly. Without pause or context or consequence. A shooting in one city is footage by dinner. A war in another country is a livestream in your pocket. A man being executed is a notification.The human nervous system was not built for this. It was built for a small number of real things happening in front of us. When violence arrives at that volume, something has to give. And what gives is the ability to feel it.We call this desensitization. It sounds clinical. It sounds like a problem we can solve with a screen break. But it is not just about attention. It is about the erosion of the thing that makes us human — the capacity to be moved by another person’s suffering. When that erodes, the society that depends on it erodes with it.We are at a tipping point. Not a future one. This one. Right now. The point where violence stops being something we respond to and becomes something we consume. The point where a state can kill a man on camera and the response is a shrug.—The Paper Under the DoorI was nineteen years old when I found out I could be killed by the state.The notice came under my door. A piece of paper. It said I was facing the death penalty and that a hearing in the future would determine the outcome. That was how I learned. Not from a lawyer. Not from a judge. From a sheet of paper that slid across the floor of a cell.I had never been to prison before. I had never been in solitary confinement before. I was a teenager. And I was sitting alone in a box, holding a piece of paper that told me the government might take my life.I had not seen my lawyer. I had not talked to him about what was happening. I did not know what a death penalty provision meant in practice. I did not know what the hearing would look like, or who would be there, or what I was supposed to say. I knew nothing except what that paper told me, and what it told me was that my life was now something other people would decide.That is what the machine does. It does not come to you as a person and explain what is happening. It comes to you as a piece of paper. You are not a defendant with a future. You are a case with a docket number. The paper does not know your name. It only knows what you are charged with.I sat in that cell and I understood, for the first time, what it meant to be an object. To be something that happens to, not something that happens. To be the subject of a proceeding instead of a participant in it.I was nineteen. And I was already being taught what the system thinks of men like me.—What I Saw on the FloorI have seen what happens when a man stops being seen as a man.There was a man in here who had a seizure. He was on the floor. His body was doing what a body does when something goes wrong in the brain — jerking, stiffening, emptying itself. He was in distress. He was dying, or close to it.And men walked around him.Not past him. Around him. As if he were furniture. As if he were an obstacle to be navigated rather than a human being in crisis. Men who knew him. Men who interacted with him every day. Men who would have said hello to him that morning. They walked around him like he was not there.Nobody stopped. Nobody called for help. When help finally arrived, the response was not urgency. It was a joke. Something about how high he must have been. A laugh. A shrug. And then the man died.And nobody was outraged. Not the men who walked around him. Not the men who made the joke. Not the staff. Not anyone. It was just a thing that happened. A body on the floor that stopped being a body. A man who stopped being a man.That is what the environment does. It does not just make you numb to violence. It makes you numb to people. It teaches you that some lives are not worth stopping for. That some deaths are not worth mourning. That the man on the floor is not your problem, not your brother, not your responsibility.I watched that happen. And I understood that I was watching the same thing the outside world is now learning to do.—The Unnatural EnvironmentI live in an unnatural environment. Everything about it is unnatural. The sounds, the lights, the schedule, the way time moves, the way people relate to each other. A man is stripped of almost everything that makes a life human and then asked to remain human anyway.Violence in here is not like violence out there. It is not a news story. It is not a video. It is the man in the next cell. It is the sound of a fight down the hall. It is the thing you can feel in the air before it happens. It is close, and it is real, and it does not stop.That does something to a person. It makes you either more sensitive or less. Most men, in my experience, go one of two ways. Some become hyper-aware, always reading the room, always braced. Others go numb. They stop registering the small violences because they cannot afford to register them. They build a wall between themselves and what is happening around them just to stay functional.The man on the floor was not killed by the seizure. He was killed by the wall. By the environment that taught every man in that room to walk around him. By a system that had already decided, long before he hit the ground, that his life was not worth interrupting a routine for.That is what the outside world is now learning to do. The same wall. The same numbness. The same survival mechanism.The difference is that I did not choose it. The environment chose it for me. And when I look at society now, I see people choosing it for themselves. Turning away from violence not because they are cruel, but because the volume has made feeling impossible.That is the tipping point I am talking about. Not that we have become violent. That we have become unable to feel violence. And a society that cannot feel violence cannot stop it.—What It Would Mean to Be Held in Spectacle NowI have thought about what it would mean to be the man on that screen.If I had been sentenced to death. If the state had decided to kill me. If someone had decided that my death should be public, should be shown, should be delivered to the world as a message.What would it mean to be held in spectacle at this hour?It would mean that the worst thing I ever did became the only thing anyone would ever see. Not the thirty years of work. Not the husband I became. Not the grandfather. Not the son of Jeff and Cheryll Sellers. Just the last few seconds. The body. The performance.It would mean that my death was not for me. It was for them. For the audience. For the message. For the state’s need to demonstrate its power. I would not be a man being killed. I would be a thing being shown.And the worst part — the part I cannot stop thinking about — is that no one would feel it. Because we have reached the point where we cannot. The livestream would happen. The video would exist. And the next day, it would be gone. Just another thing that passed through.That is what spectacle means now. Not that the whole world is watching. That the whole world is watching and nothing happens.—The Step We Are TakingI am watching what direction this society is walking in. And what I see is not a society reforming. It is a society performing. Performing its power. Performing its indifference. Performing its right to kill a man and call it justice.The livestream is not the end of that road. It is a marker on it. It tells us where we are.We are at the point where a state can kill a man on camera and no one feels it. We are at the point where violence has become content and suffering has become scroll. We are at the point where the thing that makes us human — the ability to be moved by another person’s pain — is fading, and no one is stopping it.I am not a victim. I am not asking for pity. I am asking you to notice the step we are taking.Because if we take it, we may not take another one back.