In his court statement called “We Could Not Not Do This,” Daniel Berrigan says he would rather be talking about anything else: “It's terrible for me to live in a time where I have nothing to say to human beings except, 'Stop killing.' There are other beautiful things that I would love to say to people. There are other projects I could be very helpful at. And I can't do them. I cannot. Because everything is endangered. Everything is up for grabs. Ours is a kind of primitive situation, even though we would call ourselves sophisticated. Our plight is very primitive from a Christian point of view. We are back where we started. Thou shalt not kill. We are not allowed to kill.” He was defending his choice to go to the General Electric Nuclear Missile Re-entry Division in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, where he and seven other people vandalized nuclear warheads, an act that sparked the Plowshares movement around the world to end nuclear armament.

I, too, want to talk about something other than my topic this summer—our broken criminal justice system and its most primitive component of capital punishment. I am traveling from one camp to another this summer, from Texas to Alabama to Iowa to California to Missouri to Florida to Washington, as a “Peace Intern.” I am a camp counselor with the glorious mission of teaching kids about injustice. Kids go to camp to have fun, to hike, to swim, to make s'mores and to laugh. I would rather talk about something more beautiful, but I can't. Our nation's ability to imagine an alternative to the current, mind-boggling social norms is endangered. But, the premise of peace—the belief that there are other ways to respond to evil and to violence than the ways our nation has constructed and supported since its inception—is worth these hard discussions. Maybe an end to capital punishment is the dumbest idea they'll hear all summer, but I cannot not do this.

There are a lot of creepy things about American culture, but one particularly pervasive quirk is the national fascination with death as entertainment. Brent Cunningham's article “Last Meals” refers to the last meal that death row inmates are given right before their execution date. He mentions a Pizza Hut ad that once ran briefly in South Carolina in which a death row inmate loves Pizza Hut so much that he requests it as his last meal. Cunningham notices the juicy, “irresistible blend” of food, death, and crime that grips the public, so much that web sites like “Dead Man Eating” used to catalog every single last meal request of death row inmates.

Our nation has executed over one thousand people since the death penalty was re-instated in 1976, and for each of those “irredeemable monsters” and “morally culpable public [enemies],” prison officials can sleep easier knowing that the criminals have accepted their crime. They have been reconciled to their fate, and all because the state so kindly offered them dignity despite the fact that the criminal extended none to his or her victim(s). There's the pretty little bow, the cherry on the pie, the cryptic offering. One inmate poignantly said “It's like putting gas in a car that don't have no motor.” Cunningham notes the paradox: “Why mark the end of a life with the stuff that fuels it?”

When a person dies on death row, no one has to claim direct responsibility. The machines of death, whether the electric chair or lethal injection or shooting squads, all act on their own. Someone presses a button, fills the tube, or pulls the trigger, but their physical body never has to interact with that of the soon-to-be-dead human being in front of them. Most death row inmates cannot listen to music as they eat their last meal or face death, for fear it would induce emotion. They all get to share their final words, but again, most prisons restrict that sharing to paper and pen. Why let them speak it out loud? That could also induce emotion. Why make this act feel real?

We are what we eat, it's said. Then I'm memories, warmth, family, happiness, because my most special meal is my mom's homemade tomato soup with her gourmet grilled cheese. She's an amazing chef who can cook almost anything and yet, on my birthday each year, I request this simple meal. All other tomato soup is ruined for me, and no one else's grilled cheeses can compare. You could take this meal from me, but you couldn't take what it represents. You couldn't deny the humanity behind something so simple, and you couldn't erase the love or thoughtfulness that goes into it.

Here's what anti-death-penalty advocates see: Our criminal justice system is a microcosm of all of our society's ills. What happens when we punish violence with a violent punishment? Nothing, and everything. The bad guy is dead, and the cycle continues. We kill to stop killing. Bryan Stevenson asks, "What if we abused to stop abuse? What if we raped to stop rape? What if we tortured to stop torture? We wouldn't do that, because we can't do that, because it's wrong. We know it would make us into monsters, too. Why is the death penalty any different? How is it even possible that we have kidded ourselves for this long?"

Take my favorite meal from me. Take my life. You won't get much.