There are few subjects that get my hackles up like the death penalty and Indians getting screwed over by this government. So today, for your reading enjoyment, you get to see what happens when I write about Indians getting the death penalty. Chances are my head will explode as the natural side-effect of this kind of synergy.

The Pope, in his infinite wisdom, finally decided to get into the debate in 1998 when he said during his Christmas address to the masses that it is wrong to put people to death. I am paraphrasing, but the sentiment is accurate and also lends to the sense of “about time” I have. Two years from what is popularly referred to as the next millennium, and the Catholic Church just now decides to get in on this action? Hey, thanks guys, we’re dying out here.

I would have thought that one of the world’s biggest, most popular and unquestionably richest religious institutions would have felt comfortable stepping up, oh, maybe a few HUNDRED years ago.

I guess they couldn’t condemn it when they were getting so much mileage out of it. No one knew better than the Popes of old how the death penalty can be used to scare the holy crap out a populace. If religion isn’t enough to scare the bejeezus out of you, death by hot poker would be.

But this is one time when Pope J.P. Deuce and I are finally in agreement. I think if there is one time you should sit up and pay attention, it is when the Pope and I are on the same side of an issue.

Here is some background.

According to an article in the Daily Nebraskan, Randolph Reeves was born Randolph Blackbird of the Omaha tribe but on March 7, 1959, he was taken away from his family and adopted by a white family in a practice which is illegal now but which was common enough back then. Routine calls to the police for domestic disturbance or drunk and disorderly could get your kids stolen.

This brings me to a related point which I think is far too often glossed over by well-meaning white people looking for a reason to feel guilty and coming up with something they saw in “Dances with Wolves.”

Most Indians aren’t so much mad about all the massacres and land-stealing. People just get that idea because they make movies about that stuff. They don’t make movies about the 25 percent of all Indian children stolen from their parents and tribes and placed into white homes with bad results. It was done in the name of whitening them up. Stealing children is evil, even by Western standards; that is why people created rationalizations.

But which is this to be: a column on how the death penalty is an evil tool of oppression or a column on how Indians get brutally done over by the United States? Well, maybe a little of both.

One of the reasons why the Pope and I detest the death penalty so much is the fact that we aren’t talking about a penalty enacted fairly across cultural and racial lines.

That wouldn’t make it right, but the fact that it isn’t makes it that much worse.

According to the Omaha World Herald, 30 percent of the people on death row in Nebraska are “non-white,” which I think is a what Jung would have called a polite way to refer to the Other, that despised outsider who threatens our sense of security. This is genocide, plain and simple. What else is new?

The Pope is right to call for an end to the death penalty. I just wish he had done it sooner.

The United States, if for no other reason than sheer embarrassment, should want to get rid of this ancient and cruel tool of despotism.

Good Lord, none of the other civilized countries of the Western World use it. It’s like we’re living in the dark ages here.

I honestly don’t know whether to be more outraged or embarrassed when I see the kind of carnival freakshow atmospheres that spring up around an execution, but it is time to put an end to the death penalty. It does not make wrong a right; it only adds to the overall morass of human misery and indignity.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily. He hates the death penalty but loves Sean Penn movies.