TIME FOR CONCERN

The young lady I am telling you about was to be graduated from Texas Woman’s University this spring. She was an English major who was taking work in Education as well, preparing to be an English teacher. The time was Friday morning, April 17, the day Apollo 13 was due for its splash-down. Having driven to a university parking lot from a nearby town with another student, the future teacher decided to wait for her next class in the car so that she could keep tab on the returning astronauts.

Two hours later her body was found on a lonely county road. She had been brutally beaten and then run over again and again by the very automobile in which she had been peacefully waiting, which was found abandoned a few miles away.

Denton is yet small enough and quiet enough to be shocked over such an event. Campus and city police went to work on an around-the-clock schedule in an effort to come up with some leads in a case that seemed to have no clues. There did not seem to be any motive, for she was neither robbed or sexually abused.

The city was further shocked when the police arrested two boys, students in Denton High School, for the murder. They were taken into custody as they stepped from a school bus, books in hand!

Rumors had it that the brutal slaying of a lovely college girl must have been done by Negroes. Or hoodlums from Dallas’ eastside. Or some demented soul on the loose from an institution. But it turned out that they were clean-faced white boys from our own high school, products of Denton’s upper middle-class. They are in fact our neighbors, living just a few blocks from us.

Three sets of parents are immersed in grief. Two boys are in the city jail, held without bond, awaiting an early trial. The district attorney says he’ll ask for the death penalty. An innocent girl, full of life and hope, is now in her grave. And a peaceful college town is humbler than before. Now they are saying even of Denton: “Well, if one can’t sit in a car on a college parking lot in broad daylight …”

In 1968 President Johnson asked Milton Eisenhower to head a committee of 200 scholars and researchers to study violence and crime in this nation. The result of the committee’s findings is now in book form, entitled To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility.

Some of the information is staggering. In the past seven years our population has increased about ten percent, while crime has increased eighty-eight percent. The “brutal society” that now disturbs the core cities is making its way into the affluent suburbs. We are fast becoming “an armed camp of 200 million Americans living in fear.”

Other recent studies on crime suggest that if effective steps are not taken now that gang killings and presidential assassinations will become commonplace. One book, The Urban Guerrilla, predicts that a city-based revolt all across our nation is in the offering. They all seem to be saying that things will get worse in terms of crime and violence before they get better.

Each of us who professes to be a Christian must ask himself what he can do amidst this national emergency. The answer is certainly not easy, for the problem is so monstrous that it seems far beyond our limited capacity. But part of the answer is evident: it is time for concern. And if enough of us become sufficiently concerned, more of the answer will be forthcoming. An uneasy conscience will move us toward solutions, but most of us dislike being disturbed. James Reston, the columnist, recently commented that Americans are better about committing crime than in reading about it. Even Christians don’t want to be bothered. “Why read a study on crime? I can’t do anything about it, anyway,” we are tempted to say to ourselves.

Lincoln said something about our country being safe so long as the people have the facts. But facts can be painful, and we choose sometimes, for the sake of comfort, to remain in ignorance. This cannot be the Christian’s alternative. We are slow of heart to believe that when the nation is in trouble we are in trouble.

We are all impressed with what Art Linkletter is doing about the dope problem. It shows what a concerned man can do. He is arousing parents as they have never been aroused. If a tragedy in his own family could motivate him to such efforts, should not God’s community in the United States be aroused to action when the nation’s crime is increasing ten times the rate of its population? One statement that Linkletter makes in his speeches over the country points a finger at us all: it is not so much the dope pushers that are the problem, but it is the apathy of the American’ people that is the problem.

Our own congregations are as apathetic as any portion of our society. If one of our preachers gets off the beaten path of “first principles,” we get uneasy that he might be preaching a social gospel—as if the gospel of Jesus could be anything other than social! While we are content to obligate future generations with million dollar edifices in the suburbs, the inner-city that we have left behind are aflame with hate and resentment. Most of the Lord’s money we spend on ourselves, our own comforts and our own denominational promotions, while we look to the government to take care of the down and outs.

Concern, real heartfelt concern, is the first step toward a solution, for somehow the concerned person finds some way to express his concern. An example that comes to my mind is the story of one of my white colleagues at Bishop College in Dallas. For years he longed to go to Africa as a teaching missionary. When such a door did not open, he entered the door that did open. He became a teacher in a black college, which has proved to be his “Africa.” He is a teacher that expects his students to work for their grades, an academic virtue that is becoming increasingly rare these days. Black colleges are especially notorious for handing out grades without commensurate performance on the part of the students. The professor believes that he can help move Negroes along to the first class citizenship that they talk about by making demands of them in the classroom.

Sometime back he was approached after class by a young lady who had a low grade marked on her test paper. She wanted to know why. The professor explained that low grades usually follow low output of effort. “You white sonofabitch,” she said scathingly, “the only reason you teach here is because you can’t teach anywhere else.” She continued to curse and berate him.

As he related the story to me, I presumed that he would go on to tell me that he reported her attack to the dean and that she was summarily disciplined for her rudeness. “I just kept on loving her,” he explained. “Then one day she came to my office and we had a nice talk. She’s friendly now and is doing better work.”

That professor in his own way, in his own little corner, found a way to combat crime and violence in this country. And his source of power is the greatest force in the world: love. But we can’t just say to folk that they are to go out and love and thus heal the world’s wounds. Each must find, under God, his own way of implementing love. But it must begin by our being where the action is, and that happens only when we are concerned. Most of us are not going to be cursed by “the bad element” for the simple reason that we are not amongst them.

If we follow our Lord, he will lead us into the troubled spots. That is where he did his work. It is pertinent to ask ourselves if we really know the Jesus who kept company with society’s untouchables. Unless people dress right, smell right, and talk right we do not cotton to them. And so it is “proper folk” that make up our congregations. Would Jesus, the Galilean revolutionary, really be welcome among us? And in our vision of him do we not remake him into our image? It is hard for us to realize that, according to middle-class American standards, he was not a nice man.

But he was a concerned man, and it is concerned men that change the world.—the Editor