Lessons Learned From Boo Radley

"Sir?"

"- until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

That simple trick Atticus is talking about is empathy, the plain ability to imagine oneself in the place of another. The trouble with empathy is it's not a plain thing. In fact, it seems a lost art.

These days the comforts afforded by western rationalism have veiled reality to the extent that we are no longer able to look at ourselves, but at mere likenesses of what we would be with our machines.

Our history, like others, is a progress dotted with wars, oppression and enslavement. It is a document of the incapacity of one fellow to recognize the basic humanity of another and, on a larger scale, of a culture's inability to relate in any reasonable manner with other cultures, with other life.

The remnants of enslavement and oppression persist in our society. They've not gone underground or become more sophisticated. They stand before us, in the open - if we lift our eyes to see them.

According to American Civil Liberties Union statistics, some 19,000 men and women have been officially executed in America over the course of four centuries. 3,859 of those executions were carried out between 1930 and 1967. After a decadelong hold predicated mainly on public concern over the fairness of sentencing, executions resumed in 1977. Since then an additional 680 men and women have been put to death, with another 25 pending before April 4, 2001.

Opponents of the death penalty advance a number of arguments supporting its abolition. Foremost among these arguments is that, contrary to the guidelines of the 1976 Gregg v. Georgia decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, the sentence continues to be handed down unfairly.

Others argue the penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, therefore violating the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Many states have offset this by resorting to painless execution procedures. In at least two states, however, executions can be carried out by a firing squad - the most recent came in 1996. Four people in Alabama and one in Virginia were put to death by the electric chair last year.

Most states, including North Carolina, use what is seen as the cleanest, most efficient method of execution: lethal injection. The injection consists of a small cocktail of chemicals released at intervals which first render a prisoner unconscious, then relax all muscle activity, including the pumping of the heart.

Questions persist on a number of fronts. Statistics have been gathered and analyzed. The plain fact persists, however, that each time it is a human strapped to the gurney.

Curious, for ours is a system not only concerned with the preservation and encouragement of life, but with providing means by which humans may realize their dreams and potential.

The death penalty flies in the face of this seeming upward movement of humans, yet we allow the inconsistency, dressing it up with words like "justice," "swiftness" and "impartiality" - though none of these has anything to do with the way the penalty is handed down.

In reality, the justification for the death penalty is not that any justice is served. Rather it is that laws made by men and women that may or may not be just are carried to their end. What may violate the most fundamental right of the human is advanced as perfectly rational, reasonable and normal.

The philosopher William Barrett writes in his book "Irrational Man" that a supposed rationality may feed psychosis rather than fight it. A killer manifests one or many of the ills of society. Society in turn physically expunges the problem rather than confronting the fact that there is more to it than its physical manifestation.

The problem emanates from society itself, not from a few of its poorest members who can be stricken from the world without fanfare.

For how long can we trick ourselves with an outmoded ideal of justice before we realize it is the ideal itself making the injustice?

Barrett continues in "Irrational Man," "The collective effort to master nature, to have power over things, requires that men have power over other men; and the movement ends by thinking of the men underneath merely as things, for its thinking has long since discarded all the categories that recognize the humanity of the person and his subjectivity."

Until humans look upon one another as more than things, recognizing the most basic qualities in themselves and in one another, injustices will continue. Barrett goes a step further: Until mankind recognizes the basic right to life of all things, it will be unable to recognize that right in itself.

The life of a spider, tiny as it is, is valuable and worth preserving - just as the life of a single human, even a killer, is valuable and worth preserving.

Who we are, who we wish to be, how we decide to go about being must be leveled with a sense of humanity as yet undiscovered, a goal to which we must constantly strive. We must learn, as Scout Finch does at the close of "To Kill a Mockingbird," gazing out from the porch stoop of her reclusive neighbor, Boo Radley, to "stand in someone else's shoes and walk around in them."

Until we do, we shall be confined to the idea that someone, somewhere is suffering a fate we in our minds can only begin to

imagine.

Paul Tharp is a first-year law student.

Reach him at ptharp@email.unc.edu.