With every decision there is a price.
Years ago, while teaching at a small college in Texas, I used to ask my
students this question:
If you were back in old Germany and worked for Adolf Hitler, would you
follow his orders?
Of course, some of his orders had to do with exterminating the Jews. So in
essence I was asking if they would carry out an order to kill.
I was careful not to use the word
murder because in many of my
classes there were discharged veterans who had been sent to Iraq to kill the
enemy. In war, killing is not considered murder. So if you worked for Hitler in
a war against the Jews you might kill with the immunity of a soldier defending
his or her country.
Still, at some inevitable point in time, each person would have to come to
grips with the underlying moral question:
“Is what I’m doing or what I have
been ordered to do … right?”
In 1968, during the My Lai Massacre, US Army troops murdered five hundred
Vietnamese civilians at the villages of My Lai and My Khe. Many of the victims
were sexually assaulted, tortured, or mutilated. Villagers who tried to
surrender were shot or bayoneted. Several soldiers who refused to take part were
labeled traitors and cowards and reprimanded for disobeying orders. In the end
one man, Lt. William Calley, served four months in military prison.
During the “Freedom Summer” of 1964, only 2% of Blacks in Selma, Alabama could vote. The
Ku Klux Klan tortured and murdered protesters who came in to help eliminate the
Jim Crow injustice. And during the Democratic National Convention, white
Southern Democrats issued an ultimatum to President Johnson. If he allowed the
60,000 strong Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party made up of African-Americans
to participate in the Convention, white Democrats would leave the party,
perhaps, causing Johnson to lose the election. Thus, the African-American
delegates were never seated.
During the convention an old sharecropper named Fanny Lou Hamer told her
story.
After attending a civil rights workshop trying to learn how to vote, three
State Highway Patrolman kicked her in the stomach, threw her into a patrol car
and took her to jail. She was carried to a cell where two other male Negro
prisoners awaited her. The Highway Patrolmen ordered the first Negro prisoner to
lay her down on a bunk bed on her face. And then he began to beat her with a
large blackjack. After the first Negro prisoner beat her until he was exhausted,
the second Negro prisoner was ordered to take the blackjack and beat her more
persistently, until she stopped screaming; All of this because she wanted to
register to vote.
When we look into the raw face of injustice, we cringe. A dark fog envelops
our consciousness and the voice of morality cries out for righteousness to
somehow prevail. How could people be so heartless? Why won’t people do the right
thing?
And then we go and do exactly what they did. We trade in our righteousness
for the expedience of the moment and the fruits of being a member of the status
quo.
In January, 2013, a twenty-six year old Mexican immigrant named Maria Sanchez
died in Houston from the effects of an inoperable spinal tumor. This was four
days after U.S. officials refused to allow the parents to cross the border and
visit her on her death bed. U.S. Customs and Border Protection rejected a
humanitarian plea that would have allowed Sanchez’s parents to cross the border
from Mexico and see her. The agency said the plea had to be an extraordinary
measure granted only for a “very compelling emergency”.
Two years earlier, the University of Texas Medical Branch ejected her from
the hospital shortly before a scheduled surgery after discovering she was in the
country illegally. Her discharge papers suggested she seek surgery in Mexico.
Here’s my point. At every phase in this tragic scenario, someone had to
decide to follow orders.
Just as the two Negro prisoners had to decide to save their own skins by
beating, unmercifully, the old woman sharecropper, someone at Texas Medical
Branch had to decide to protect their job, follow orders, signed the papers and
eject Maria Sanchez from the hospital. The same decision-making process held
true for the person who signed the papers denying the parents the opportunity to
cross the border to see their dying daughter. Like the people who turn on the
gas in Hitler’s death camps, someone had to decide to follow orders.
Many Christians are like that. They go to work each day, see injustice
unfolding before their very eyes. And then they looked the other way. They
follow orders to trump up charges against innocent employees. They follow the
company’s rules to the letter, knowing they have the opportunity to intervene,
but are unwilling to take the chance because their position might be
jeopardized.
Here is the hard cold spiritual fact about these matters. Doing the right
thing will most often result in persecution and suffering, that is to say, God
is not going to step in to block the consequences of a righteous decision. Just
as cigarettes executive Jeffrey Wigand was fired, blackballed from the industry
and loss his family for exposing the truth about cigarettes killing people, and
just as John the Baptist got his head cut off for criticizing the King’s
unrighteous policies, you will have to endure your fair share of suffering. In
other words, you must be prepared to do right for the sake of right, fully aware
there will be a heavy price to pay.
This requires a profile in courage, character and spiritual maturity. Not
everyone is ready to take this leap of faith. But if ever you do, I can
guarantee this. You will see a new person in the mirror, a stronger more
resolute person, in sync with your purpose for living, and at peace with the
universe and with God.
Remember this before you make a Martin Luther King decision to go against the
status quo and do the right thing. The arc of the universe bends toward justice
only when someone is willing to pay the price. Are you that someone? Are you
willing to pay the price? Or do you limit your righteousness to the show on
Sunday morning?
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Bestselling author of
Exorcism At Midnight and
Black Church Blues.
