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EXCERPT

“Today is Tuesday, Juneteenth,” says Sylvia. 

Her doublewide trailer is cool and peaceful. The living room’s glittery ceiling and green shag carpet gives the sense of being inside a cave with a mossy floor. 

I have been on the road for six days, waking up in a different place almost every morning. Americus to Atlanta to Birmingham to Selma to Montgomery to Mobile to the Mississippi Delta. Memphis still to come. 

I knew this would be my last big trip, and I kept putting it off. Finding the time to plan, let alone go, seemed an impossible obstacle. When you’re traveling more than a day’s drive from home, you want to make every stop count. 

In late May, I finished a big website project and finally had some free space on my calendar. I made a few phone calls the week before and then I started driving. It was time. To be honest, I didn’t prepare very well. But even if I had scheduled more interviews in advance, I don’t know when I would have squeezed them in. Just getting from one place to the next took everything I had. 

Nor did I anticipate the regional habit of talking for two hours, three hours, five or more hours at a stretch. Makes for great conversation, great stories, but it wasn’t something I was used to. People just don’t have that kind of time in the Upper South. They are too busy setting up committees and making business deals. 

“Why would you ever want to go to Mississippi?” Blake asked me. “Nothing good comes out of there.”

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Merry Christmas 2012!

 

Something Each of Us Can Do

In the wake of the Newtown tragedy in Connecticut on Friday, I have struggled because I simply have no words. Instead I am going to share a post of a friend of mine here in Western Massachusetts who writes powerfully from personal experience:

Like many of you who I know are reading this, as people who have intimate experience with the intersection of violence, guns and mental illness and what that can precipitate, my deepest heart grieves, and much has arisen to think about.

This image is very similar to a poster my father had on the wall of his office at the MD S.P. crime lab: for the many of you who know how his life, career, and death were inherently intermingled with this issue.
 

Many folk are reposting many great and eloquent things. Many public figures are saying asinine things and, I say this out of a place of fierce compassion (in the Buddhist sense) need an intervention and/or an opportunity for empathy and perspective.

The only thing I feel I can add to the mix which hasn't been said before is a story that was shared to me by a friend who lives in a very, very rural, and very, very poor part of North Carolina:

There was a member of her community who was off, no doubt. And it was public knowledge that he had an arsenal. And he was making threats. And the community, knowing what could happen: they approached him, and talked to him, and helped him. He did end up in a prolonged shootout with police in the end, but he didn't carry out his alleged plans to take out his rage and despair on his community members.

I don't think this is anything remotely resembling the general state of our communities in this country. There are books and books and books documenting this (Bowling Alone, etc...). While it's incontrovertible that with gun control, we would not be having these massacres (the facts back me up, but you know, facts are inconvenient, so I don't expect those who disagree with me to check them out), I think the larger, deeper, problem is that we (all of us as individuals, I truly mean it) perpetuate a culture where the mentally ill, or even folks who are struggling with hard issues, are marginalized from our communities and alienated from personal relationships that would also otherwise prevent this sort of thing from happening. The social pressure release has dissolved. What happened in Connecticut was evil-- in that it's an extension of our own failure to address these problems and our own failure to care for each other, which is perhaps the hardest part to admit, and why there's blame and distancing being thrown around like confetti. It's not "them" (being the NRA, the murder, gun dealers, etc... although the blood is on their hands and money), but this is a symptom of "us."

So how are we going to fix us? How are we going to take the guns away from a culture that isn't mature enough to have them? How do we care for people who struggle whom we feel uncomfortable around? How are we, collectively, and personally, keep returning to the uncomfortable issue and being engaged as it slowly fades from our collective memory? How do we manifest and respond to our own personal share of responsibility in this? For my Christian friends: How do we be more like Christ in our actions in the world beyond just words? (it's actually written out for us)? For my fellow Buddhists: How do we manifest metta beyond a meditation techniue? For all of us: what needs to happen in our heads and hearts to grow the cojones to take care of our neighbors-- to really do it in action and not just in symbolic words and gestures?

"God of the Wild, you are different from what I expected. I cannot predict you. You are too free to be captured for the sake of my understanding. I can't find you in the sentimentalism of religion. You are everywhere I least expect to find you. You are not the force that saves me from the pain of living; you are the force that brings me life even in the midst of pain."

- Adolfo Quezada

This Is Where I Used to Go to Church.

The incidental music doesn't quite seem to match (esp. if you have ever heard the Caldwell or Seigle Ave Gospel choirs) but otherwise it's a very inspiring story:

I Wrote a Term Paper on This in College

But this infographic says it much better:

A primer on "Biblical" marriage, from Carl King of Emerald Isle, NC