WHEN WILL WE MAKE AN END?

On the 1^st February 1865, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It is a very short amendment:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The Thirteenth Amendment's archival copy bears an apparent Presidential signature, under the usual ones of the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate, after the words "Approved February 1, 1865". Lincoln was assassinated 73 days later on the 15^th April 1865.

It is noteworthy that the act does not prohibit the imposition of slavery or involuntary servitude for those convicted of a crime. Any crime will do.

Ninety five years later, to the day, on the 1^st February 1960 four students from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina sat down at the lunch counter inside the Woolworth's store at 132 South Elm Street in Greensboro, North Carolina. The men, later known as the Greensboro Four, ordered coffee. Following store policy, the lunch counter staff refused to serve the African American men at the "whites only" counter and the store's manager asked them to leave. The four university freshmen – Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr. (later known as Jibreel Khazan), and David Richmond – stayed until the store closed. This was not an easy thing to do, given the nature of white America at the time.

And on the 1^st February 1968, in Vietnam, National Police Chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan is videotaped and photographed by photojournalist Eddie Adams, in the act of ‘executing’ an alleged Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem. It is one of the most brutal episodes of that war and the picture still provokes outrage and disgust. The impact of the photograph, its performance, was almost immediate and contributed to  a hastening of growing support in opposition to the Vietnam War.
Since that picture, Adams has had second thoughts about its effect. On Nguyen Ngoc Loan and his famous photograph, Adams wrote in Time:

The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. ... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?

I believe he may have a point about the performance of still photographs; however, in my submission, this is a rather sad statement. Summary, brutal and public execution is NEVER acceptable. This attitude of good guys and bad guys still infects society like an incurable virus. It may be OK for kids to play at cowboys, but it should be left behind with childhood. Perhaps the only way to get rid of it is not to play it anymore. This attitude is what permits men to feel they are entitled to operate outside the rule of law, with the excuse that it’s OK to take revenge on the bad guy. This ignorance still permeates our culture. It is an attitude reflected over one hundred years ago in the 13^th Amendment – if you commit a crime, you can be made a slave.  How can one in the same breath exhort that slavery is evil on the one hand, but acquiesce in its inflictment as a punishment on the other. What sort of reasoning is that? It is the sort of reasoning that leads to summary, brutal public executions. For a while the public is appalled, but when will we make an end?