I'm Walkin' Here!

There are undeniably a whole wide range of issues that need to be dealt with right now in the world. They include everything from the obvious problem (and thank goodness relatively short lived residency) of the current occupant of the White House, his adventuresome debacle in Iraq, the complete lack of affordable health care in the U.S., hunger, homelessness, the ongoing and seemingly never-ending struggle of New Orleans to return from disaster, worldwide abuse of human rights... and more and more and more.

It's a damned depressing scenario and it colors almost every aspect of contemporary living whether your a big time mover and shaker or a small town nobody.

Three weeks ago (and I've been meaning to write about it ever since) I had the delightful opportunity to participate with a whole collection of people, some of whom I knew and most of whom were new to my acquaintance, in a three mile walk around the east side of Petaluma, led by our mayor, Pam Torliatt. There was no overtly political agenda in this, though it was possible (and people were encouraged)to chat with the mayor about their personal civic concerns as we padded along the walking and bike paths of this little town.

Over many years of my life, I've been in a lot of places with a lot of the basic problems of contemporary urban society, and the reality is that not only do I feel a responsibility to personally deal (as best I can) with those issues, but I actually thrive on the process involved in dealing with issues that demand our attention. I have regularly lived in a sort of confrontational mode with regard to such things, and that goes all the way back to my attendance at Viet Nam protests in Tucson from the time I was 16, to my joining the first Witness For Peace trip to Nicaragua in 1983, less than two years after my daughter was born (when every kid in Nicaragua seemed to be her age), spending many years in tax resistance against US war policy, going to jail in Livermore California to protest American nuclear policy, and serving as one of the founding board members of Dolores Street Community Services, an extension of our little liberal Baptist Church (no... that's NOT an oxymoron!) at the edge of San Francisco's Mission District... and, of course, well known to anyone who reads this blog regularly, working in New Orleans with Churches Supporting Churches and others to hopefully see the city come back to life sometime within the foreseeable future.

The thing is... this little three mile walk three weeks ago was a moving experience that I will not soon get over. There was no big agenda, there were no major speeches, no angry protests, and no substantial agenda. In fact, the only real agenda at all was the mayor's desire to get people out and moving through space with the idea that such activity would make them feel better, think better, most likely act better, and undeniably live longer; a pretty damn good agenda, it seems to me.

I still believe in the big important causes, and I still want to work, really work, for a change in the way we humans exist on this planet, but on that Saturday three weeks ago all those issues seemed to come down to the simple reality of walking. And walking can do a lot (last weekend, ECKS's daughter, Lia, raised $2200 and walked 60 miles for breast cancer concerns in the Breast Cancer Three Day) and maybe, in the sense of Gandhi's remark that "you must become the change you want to see in the world," the simple act of walking can, indeed, actually change the world.

It's a good start wherever it takes us and I'm quite grateful to Petalulma's mayor, and all the folks that walked, for introducing me to the idea. Someday soon... maybe tomorrow... maybe even today... I'll be active, political, intense, and challenging once again, but...

In the meantime... I'm walkin' here!

If you read one book...

In the front window of the Hotel Monteleone on Royal Street in New Orleans there is a quote from Truman Capote that expresses the sentiment that the real beauty of writing is not in the stories themselves but in the sound and feel of the words. There are times when I have that feeling, but they tend to be very few and far between. This morning, however, I finished reading one of those kind of books; a book so rich in language, so bathed in linguistic beauty, that the near horror of the storyline is completely eclipsed by the exquisite luxury of words pouring over you like a summer waterfall in a mountain stream.

The plot line of Cormac McCarthy's The Road follows a man and a boy on a never ending cross-country trek through a post-apocalyptic world of hunger, danger, and pain. There are no chapters to break the flow of the inexorable journey as the reader is taken along as a third companion through this world that seems at once too familiar and terribly strange.

Along the way, there are moral questions that are raised and sometimes answered. We are never told the source of the devastation, it just is. It is a story that you want to turn away from, but find that you can't. The reader must wrestle with the difficulties of this world, and these lives, like Jacob with the angel. On some level, by the end of The Road there is no turning back. The reader is forced, by taking the journey, to in some sense take a stand. This may be to seek a way to secure the future from such devastation, or it may be to hold the ones you love especially close.

Above all... the gift of The Road is the gift of language. The story is hard, but the language, and the spell it weaves, is lovely.

Read this book.