March Travels

March Travels

March has been a very hectic month for me, beginning with the Capitol Coal Plant protest which I talked about in my last entry.

On March 8th I got up in the dark & drove through snow, sleet & rain to the Bangor airport to fly to Chicago to speak at the Francis W. Parker School on the 9th. The Parker School is a private K through high school founded 105 years ago with Mr. Parker’s ethic of service and citizenship. It is still operating with the ideal of forming good citizens.
The school has 8 of my women’s portraits for National Women’s Month.

On the plane I was reading Chris Hedges book Losing Moses on the Freeway. In it Hedges examines each of the 10 Commandments with the perspective of how adherence to them builds good community. And he illustrates his points with personal experience. It’s a powerful book, and as I was reading the chapter on “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” I was thinking about Martin Luther King, Jr., having said that the United States is the “the greatest purveyor of violence” in the world. And it occurred to me that a country that is the most violent is not surprisingly the most religious, too. Why? --- because a people who are violent need to get the blessing of God for their behavior. They know at some level that what they are doing is wrong, so they need God’s support. Of course, this mostly Christian nation has a religion that abhors violence. So, there is an obvious hypocrisy that must be sustained by something more than denial. We need to have permission for the violence by people who claim to speak for God. That so many of the Christian churches support government violence is extremely sad. Religions that do not address the violence of war are similar to countries who do not address policies that show contempt for their own laws.
Both are bankrupt. I’m writing this on the 6th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Never has a war been more illegal, immoral & unjustified. And yet, this is not discussed any more (not that it ever was) in the mainstream media. Instead we are told constantly today about the rage of Americans against the corrupt & greedy behavior of bankers & corporate executives. I have two questions:
1. Where was this rage when our own government was betraying our laws and our soldiers by lying to the people about the necessity for a preemptive war in which they were not in danger of losing their homes, jobs and savings, but their sons & daughters?
2. If we don’t enforce these laws about war and presidential lying, how can we pretend to be democratic republic and a nation of laws? What , then, are we?

My flight took me to Detroit & then another plane to Chicago. But after sitting for 2 ½ hours on the ground in the Chicago plane, it was cancelled because of bad weather in Chicago. I had heard two men sitting behind me talking about renting a car to drive (about 4 hours), and I waited for them outside the plane & suggested we rent a car together. They were Chicago natives & car enthusiasts who had been in Detroit for a hot rod show. One of them drove the whole way, the other talked. I now know his life story. Because of all the current crises, some of the conversation was political. I didn’t contribute much --- I was far more interested in hearing their views. At one point the “talker” said he was glad that Obama was elected because now we (the US) could put “all that racial stuff behind us.” I thought this very positive until the same man began saying very racist things, such as, all black people destroy all the good things that are done for them, particularly material things. He said this or some variant of it many times.
The driver was silent. I don’t know if he realized how racist his friend’s remarks were.
What was most striking to me was how incredibly racist our culture is --- particularly among people who think they are not, and who have no inclination to examine their ideas or behaviors. It was also clear as we were driving through Chicago’s South Side, an area that is predominately African – American, how fearful the talker was of black people. Of course, fear is one of the primary engines of stereotyping and racism. When they let me out at my hotel in Chicago, I gave them cards of my portraits of Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Frederick Douglass.

I spent the entire next day at the Parker School --- doing a presentation every period in classes from 2nd grade to seniors. It’s an impressive school. It reminded me of St. Francis High School in Louisville where the school had a similar commitment to service and social justice. I met several students who had taken part in a Chicago demonstration against coal at the same time that I was at the demonstration in Washington.
The last meeting of the day for me was a small class in positive psychology --- a field that is discovering that people find the most happiness in service. Each student had a project in the community out side the classroom --- some were in environmental justice, working with the homeless and fighting the causes of homelessness, autism, teaching technology to poor kids, and community work around gender issues. I didn’t talk much in this class --- instead had the pleasure of hearing the passion of these kids for building a better, fairer world.

By 6:30 pm I was on a plane back to Maine. I had to turn around & leave the next day for Tampa, Florida where I was a guest of the school of Leadership and Civic Engagement at the University of South Florida. A limo met me at 10:30 pm when I arrived in Tampa & drove me to a motel. In the morning I could see that the motel was in a sort of mall/industrial park development, that, because of the economy, had half its buildings empty. I didn’t have to do anything until early afternoon so while out walking I discovered a nature park, Lettuce Lake Park, close by. Great place! With raised boardwalks through beautiful cypress swamps. Although the water level was low because of drought, I still saw some good birds --- roseate spoonbills, limpkins, little blue herons, glossy and white ibis, and barred owls hooting. I saw a male great blue heron helping his mate build a huge nest in the top of a cypress. He was bringing her beak fulls of twigs and Spanish moss. The moss was easy to come by --- it festooned every tree in the area. Nearby, the woods was on higher ground --- mostly long leaf pine & live oak. Underneath the trees, growing out of the pale gray sandy soil were endless acres of 4 to 6 foot high densely packed palmettos.
Their many pointed fronds look like the tails of turkeys --- this looked like the world’s largest convocation of green turkeys. Just the thing for St. Patrick’s day.

I spoke there to an audience from the School of Leadership and Civic Engagement. It seems to me that faculties, organizations, and clubs with names such as this are springing up all over the country. Nothing could be more encouraging. I met several students who had been part of a busload from the U. of South Florida to the PowerShift 2009 (www.powershift2009.org) conference in Washington, D.C., and part of the demonstration against coal where I had been the week before. During the question and answer a man said to me, “Well, if we can’t use coal anymore, I guess you would advocate a massive build up nuclear power?” My answer was no. That is not the answer.
Nuclear power has many environmental problems, too. Not pollution that causes climate change, but waste disposal & also massive construction cost. This is a large inconvenient truth.
I arrived back in Maine just in time to give a talk to the state wide meeting of the National Honor Society --- 450 high school students from all over Maine. It was an honor to be asked to address them. I stressed all the big issues facing them and the great need of their engaged citizenship.

A few days later I gave a talk at the Norway, Maine public library. Their theme this year is forgiveness and transformation. I spoke about the need for justice to precede forgiveness, that people who have been agents of injustice have to at a minimum acknowledge what they have done, take ownership of it, before the process of forgiveness can begin. But I ended by reciting Mary Oliver’s great poem Wild Geese, and said that the real issue of forgiveness today is for all of us to ask Nature to forgive us for the harm we have done and commit ourselves to live in harmony with nature’s laws.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
Are moving across the landscapes,
Over the prairies and deep trees,
The mountains and rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
Are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
The world offers itself to your imagination,
Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting ---
Over and over announcing your place
In the family of things.