Ray didn't die right away.....
he was in agony & moaned "why" all the way up before he died.
Knny, your avatars are absolutely hilarious!!!
You know, I think an analogy can be drawn between a jury (or anyone) trying to pass judgment on what Sally and Francine did, being the victims of spousal abuse, and what soldiers who commit “war crimes” do in a combat zone.
IMO, you can only judge people who have experienced severe emotional trauma FAIRLY and ACCURATELY provided you have personally experienced the same emotional trauma. What’s that old saying (words to that effect)…”not until you’ve walked a mile in my moccasins”.
Ideally, Sally should have been judged by a panel of jurors who were all the victims of spousal abuse. As I said, I would probably have killed my father, while he slept, because of my eventual fear and hatred of him when he got drunk and beat me and my mother over many years. I truly thought at the time because of ignorance, or whatever, that this was the ONLY solution to the problem. Fortunately, he died of natural causes before I could act on my aberrated thinking.
The analogy of Sally’s homicide to soldiers in a combat zone committing war crimes is that both situations are ones of extreme mental/physical/emotional/psychological trauma where things build, and build up, and, at times, you just SNAP!
As mentioned somewhere else, my father served in WWII in the Pacific Theater in the battles for Guam and Iwo Jima. My mother said that prior to his service he never drank, or smoked, and was always kind and gentle to both of us. When he returned from the war, he was a changed man, drank and smoked heavily, and had developed a real short fuse of explosive anger. He later related to us his intense hatred for the Japanese and the fact that he and his fellow soldiers killed several Japanese prisoners-of-war in cold blood simply because they didn’t want to be bothered with them, or because they simply hated their guts.
I thought these acts on my father’s part “were monstrous” and that he was a true “war criminal” until I, in turn, was drafted and shipped-off to Vietnam, in the mid-sixties…and it was like being dropped off of a “space ship” into another world!!!
When you see your buddies/fellow-soldiers brutally murdered and their bodies DEFILED; for example, a VC U.S. soldier POW who was murdered and deliberately “left behind” for your advancing company to find; decapitated and the severed head set on the torso’s chest with the body’s testicles and penis stuck into the decapitated head’s mouth; you develop such an INTENSE HATRED for your enemy that you totally “dehumanize them”, and there becomes no such thing as taking (or keeping) prisoners-of-war!
Only by God’s grace in that INSANE environment did I personally not commit a “war crime”. But I often “looked the other way” when they were committed…and they were committed around me all the time!
All I am saying is that there is NO WAY ANYONE can FAIRLY judge individuals committing war crimes in a combat zone, OR women committing spousal homicide like Sally and Francine did, until they themselves have PERSONALLY experienced the SAME THING(S) in a SIMILAR ENVIRONMENT!!!
Otherwise, you are TRULY off in an ivory tower out-of-touch with reality!!