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174 ˜ A Work of Hospitality, 1982–2002
of years of his having been sentenced to die. Chris was seventeen at the time of
the crime that landed him on death row, and when I first met him he was a
skinny, frightened kid trying to figure out how to grow up. I saw him off and
on over the next thirteen or fourteen years, and, indeed, watched him grow up.
What I learned of Chris’s life was a horror story. Severe abuse, neglect, abandonment,
cruel and capricious punishment, and having been moved from place
to place, family member to family member, left him a shaken, confused, disoriented
child. Finally he joined the Army to try to find a direction. What he found
was more chaos, drugs, and an endless amount of trouble. He was taught more
of the ways of violence; he was trained to fight and kill his enemies. The downward
spiral of chaos and violence resulted in a tragic death at the bottom of a
muddy pond for a young man named Roger Honeycutt, and jail and a sentence
of death for young Chris. His life had never really started when the state of
Georgia declared it to be over.
Over the next fifteen years, it would be safe to say that the state of Georgia
spent some three million to five million dollars disposing of Chris Burger.
Through his early childhood of abuse and neglect, there were never any resources.
But when he finally stepped over the line, the most enormous resources
imaginable were marshaled to get rid of him.
It is an adequate metaphor, I’m afraid, for how we are dealing with our children.
We are bombarded on a regular basis with the dreary facts: America’s children
are in trouble, and in Georgia what we see is an exaggeration of a national
norm. Georgia’s children are the poorest and sickest in the nation. They go to
schools that are consistently rated at the bottom. They are more likely to die at
birth or in the first year of life than children in El Salvador. Those in Atlanta are
more likely to be exposed to or victimized by violence than children in any other
city in the country. And, to solve our problems, we lock up everybody—women,
men, and children—at one of the highest rates in the world.
We have heard and tolerated a language of hatred and alienation for so long
that we have begun to believe that we are powerless to call on the forces of goodness
and kindness. We are afraid of our children, and our minds, spirits, and
imaginations have been paralyzed by the fear.
Common sense might tell us that hungry children need to be fed, sick children
need to be cared for, homeless children need to be housed, and troubled
children need a helping hand. Instead, we participate in and tolerate public discourse
that says homeless people “choose a homeless lifestyle”; that there really
is no health care crisis; that thirteen-year-old children should be tried as adults
and put into adult prisons; and that troubled youths will be “scared straight” by
putting them into boot camps where adults will scream and humiliate them into
submission by barking orders morning, noon, and night. Finally, if the kids are
just too bad, we can electrocute, gas, lethally inject, shoot, or hang them. Since