A dozen years ago, I had the opportunity to go to Calcutta, India on pilgrimage. We prayed, experienced a third world culture, and performed some corporal acts of mercy. My highlight was pulling a tooth on a woman in Mother Theresa’s House of the Dying. One evening as we were walking back to our ten-foot wall-enclosed, guard dog protected, dormitory, we passed through an intersection, where over a hundred locals were gathered. As we passed through, I heard several loud desperate shouts. The crowd began to encircle one area, and an eerie hum filled the air. We hesitated, and tried to see what the ruckus was about. A young man holding a small club, stood above another man who had fallen. Our guide pushed us away, the shouts weakened, and the crowd’s hum got louder, as they tightened-in on the event. Our guide told me that the man on the ground would be beat to death. Beat to death? None of the hundred stand-arounders would help? Any effective weapons for self-defense were prohibited?
This stuck with me, and I later asked, “Why we didn’t try to stop it?” “We were out of our culture”, but it bothers me to this day. I consoled myself with: this could not happen in our Christian world back home, someone would surely have a weapon, or Christian virtue to stop it, in a place like Frederick County, Maryland.
Last Friday, my nephew, Robbie was a patron at a bar on Rt. 15. He somehow became involved in a disturbance and was taken outside, where reportedly ten members of a motorcycle gang beat him to death. Reports of up to seventy-five witnesses gave statements.
Just two days later, a sixty-year old man, with no significant criminal record, was confronted at his front door by Anne Arundel County’s version of our police state. They demanded his gun. Gary Willis was mistaken; he thought he still lived in the constitutional United States of America. Somebody had dropped a dime, and our legislature’s latest tweaking with the law, loaded-up. He resisted. The state executed him.
I was wrong: the crowd witnessed executions do occur here. Robbie Swann and Gary Willis are dead, and I haven’t heard of any arrests. We have arrived. The hum, the silence, and the “yeas” in Annapolis, all have a similar tone. And it ain’t, “Namaste!”
