Today, the friends and family of 18 year old Bobby Tillman are grieving over his senseless and tragic death. I too share in the grief and can't imagine what his mother must be enduring. The AJC reports that Bobby Tillman, who had just graduated from high school, coached youth basketball and planned a career in sports management. He reminds me a great deal of my brother and his photographs and physical similarities suggest we could have most certainly shared kinship. Fair skin, small frame, gray eyes. This young man was simply engaging in an activity common among those his age. He was not at a club, he went to a house party and there in the drive-way of the home, he lost his life to a bunch of hoodlums who don't deserve to share oxygen with the rest of us.
What possessed these punks to beat another human being? What justification is there for such brutality? Why did none of the nearly 60 onlookers intervene? What kind of parents must the other boys have for their children to be so disconnected from the value of life?
I am deeply troubled by this incident. I like to think that most people would act with integrity and stare evil in the eyes with courage and the vow to defeat it. Those boys are evil and yet it seems no one intervened. In PSYCH 310, we learned about a similar case, the case of Kitty Genovese which resulted in much research and reporting of The Bystander Effect. Of three dozen witnesses to her murder, no one intervened. In psychology, this occurs due to a transference of responsibility--the idea that someone else will intervene, someone else will act with courage and integrity. What if Malcolm, Frederick Douglas, Thomas Jefferson, and others waited or depended upon someone else to do what was necessary to defeat evil?
In the words of Edmund Burke, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." Sunday morning, evil triumphed and a mother is burying her son.
