Journal
of Quaker Workcamps International, Wichita Falls, TX
Fred Allebach PO Box 31931, Tucson, AZ 85751 520-722-2814 fca25@yahoo.com
3/30/98
I signed a Letter of Understanding, the Quaker term
for a contract, with Quaker Workcamps International, committing myself to a
year or more of being the on-site Project Director of QWI’s effort to help
rebuild the Full Gospel Powerhouse Church of God in Christ in Wichita Falls,
TX.
4/14
The Powerhouse Church was told by the architect, Wayne
Lambdin, that the plans were done and would be sent by mail.
5/15
I left Tucson and drove Interstate 10 over through
Lordsburg, Las Cruces, stopped in White Sands National Monument for a drive
among dunes made of gypsum and then on through Ruidoso, where I could not find
a room because of a big motorcycle rally and finally to some mountain road
outside of town where I parked, set up my tent and spent the night.
5/16
Roswell NM was close and I spent some time poking
around there. The residential neighborhoods were very nice. The houses were
well kept and interesting architecturally. The Hispanic Chamber of Commerce had
some nice gals who spoke with me for a while about Roswell. I found out that
they go to Mexico via El Paso/ Ciudad Juarez, which is a couple of hundred miles
away, that Roswell has the largest cheese factory in the US and that in
Roswell, Volvo makes super sleek city buses for all over the US. Of course Roswell is also famous for
attracting aliens and judging from the bleak nothingness which surrounds town,
I can see why. With little to work with visually, the mind steps in to create
landscapes to interact with.
It gets progressively flatter heading east into the
Permian Basin, with lots of oil pumps, some derricks and cattle. The first
things you notice upon leaving the southwest in this direction is the
increasing prevalence of a twangy, annoying southern accent and a general lack
of vegetation. Seeing a tree is a big deal. The ground is all plowed up or
filled with cows. Out in the desolate flatness there is no cover even to take a
piss, you see a tree, and stop and marvel at it. This flat area is known as the staked plains
or in Spanish, the llano estacado, because little trees stand out so
prominently like I observed right away.
Then, around a place called Caprock, about 60 miles
east of Guthrie, on 114 out of Lubbock (which is a pit), just when I started to
question if there was any nature at all left in this region, the flatness broke
and there was no more agriculture, just long rolling hills with interesting
rock formations here and there. And there were more trees.
It was a relief to see that I would not be living in
flats where the wind blows incessantly, sucking the soul right off you. I
brought it on in to Levelland TX and watched some basketball
and ordered a terrible pizza which I couldn’t finish
and then in the morning it was covered with roaches. I started to feel like a
real oddity amongst the cowboy hatted, twanging, truck driving rural Texans.
When they heard me talk, they could instantly tell I wasn’t from these parts. I
ate at a lunch buffet and when I went to pay the cashier she mumbled something
which turned out to be “buffet?” and I said “Excuse me?”. She got all snooty
because she knew she was a hick and couldn’t talk straight. I felt like I was
in foreign country.
Some of the little towns along the road were just
blown out, boarded up, hardly anything left, probably relicts of oil boom
times. They had sure seen better days.
(Architect drives up to WF from Dallas to drop off
plans. He had been saying all along that he mailed them.)
5/17
Wichita Falls seemed not too far on the map but it
took four or more hours to get there. I got a motel and watched the Bulls beat
Indiana, one last night of freedom. On the radio an ad for a paint store had a
woman say “If I want to paint my wallpaper, I don’t want someone telling me not
to.” Here at Johnny Hicks, we give you what you want. Doesn’t that just say it
all? If I want to eat deep fat fried catfish that live in water drenched with
pesticides, I don’t want no doctor telling me it ain’t good for me. Here at
Johnny Hicks, you get what you want. Some old guy was mailing five roosters
down at the Post Office. The PO is a neat old building, a style not too often
appreciated these days, reminds me of Grand Central Station, with big high
ceilings and a lot of marble and ornate metalwork.
It’s all too familiar what with the hicks and dealing
with different twists on being human. Everyone has to travel their own path and
sometimes one of the hardest things in life is to allow your friends, children,
parents, significant others, to sidle up to life in their own peculiar way. No
one knows best, only what works for them.
5/18
I went over to the office of the Full Gospel
Powerhouse Church of God in Christ and met Darlene Jefferies, the church
secretary and Emmett McCracken, an 80 something Quaker from Missouri who had
volunteered to come and work on camp set up. We all hung out for a bit and then
I started to unload my car and set up my computer, which was a good show. Work
was supposed to start on breaking up the old foundation but the contractor,
Mike Corbett, didn’t show up. The day generally was spent unpacking, food
shopping, working on setting up the credit union account.
5/19
Mike and his crew showed up and started work and Mike
spent a bit of time orienting me to his interpretation of the project. Mike is
from Georgia; a real southern redneck. He is not schooled past fifth grade. We
got to talking about Vietnam and that got him going, he killed forty some
people and is a fighter, he in his life has beaten people and put them in the
hospital with broken faces. “I’m the kind of guy that will whip you but then
I’ll carry you to the hospital.” Now that is a man of honor! He said he’d bet
he could whip Mike Tyson right now. He mentioned how he didn’t believe in that
turning the other cheek stuff, that God wants people to defend themselves. He
said that blacks don’t have the aptitude to be good construction workers and
that they generally are not as smart as whites. “My best friend is black but
he’s just not as smart as an average white guy, even though he tries to make up
for it by trying harder...” But, Mike and I also agreed that the white people
around here are a different breed too. More on that later. Mike gets going
talking and doesn’t really hear what you are saying, only what he is thinking
of saying next. I just have to take a guy like this and kind of wonder how I am
going to deal with him for a year, almost everyday. We get along OK. I think it
will be alright, just a challenge to bridge such a vast gulf in understandings
of the world.
Mike said no other contractors in town wanted to build
the church and that the high and mighty white people in town did not want the
church built so near the main drag, so visible and lined up with all the white
churches. Mike wants to build this church. I can’t second guess his motivations
and will have to take him at his word, even though I have a feeling he’s not
working solely from charitable motivations.
The architect has held the project up and things are
about month behind. The slab should be done by now, but we have just broken
ground. Apparently the architect is a real flake and gave the church a set of
drawings which had no specifications on them and the city turned that down. The
architect did not have the proper stamps on the blueprints from engineers etc
and those parts had to be re-done.
5/23
I have been here almost a week and have my scene set
up in the Pastor’s former office. I met the Pastor last night and his wife
Dorothy. Dorothy was supposed to have died from cancer this past February,
months ago and I guess she has it pretty bad in her ovaries, stomach,
intestines and part of a lung. She was amazing! I felt like I was in the
presence of someone very special. She was vibrant, open, talkative, dignified,
friendly, appreciative and we talked for a long while the Reverend walked
around the newly broken ground in obvious emotion about the beginning of
rebuilding his church. I could alternately see in Dorothy’s eyes a deep,
haunted look of despair and also a person full of spirit, deep pools of life
reflecting back at me. I cannot help but be genuinely touched by witnessing
this woman and how precious is her person, there with me almost as a spirit, an
angel. She is right on the line of mortality, looking into the abyss, even
though she has strong faith, it is still heavy duty. What is life? What is
life? When you look into the eyes of a person who is supposed to be dead, that
is special and powerful.
Dorothy said “I did need to lose some weight.”
Apparently she is unable to eat as her stomach is collapsed on itself as well
as her intestines. She can’t take or pass anything. All her nutrition comes
from bags and IVs. The doctors gave her 17 days to live, they were just going
to give her morphine and let her waste away, starve to death, but Dorothy
copped to that and said to Ted, the Pastor, that she didn’t want to starve to
death and then the MDs told Ted it would be $800 a day to feed her and he said
OK and after a lot of insurance rigamarole, the upshot is that all her medical
care is pro bono now. She has achieved medical miracle status.
Pastor Thompson has in the last week, had his father
die, his favorite uncle go into the intensive care unit with a massive heart
attack, had another uncle die, his wife needs constant care and his church was
burned by arson. His son is a heretic and unsaved. This afternoon he came over
with another Pastor and they started talking in parables from the Bible, illustrating
how this current situation is like what happened to Isaiah and various other
characters who I have heard of but don’t really know much about. This was
fascinating to listen to as the Reverend laid out his troubles and travails and
tried to make sense of it. “How can God be working all things for the good and
have all this happen to me? I just don’t understand why?” The other Pastor
tried to comfort him with interpretations of parables and how it would all work
out. Pastor Thompson has put it in God’s hands now. In order for him to be a
decent Pastor, he can’t succumb to being down and out for months on end, yet he
is only human. To lead his flock, he must be strong and upbeat, inspiring, yet
life is tough and deals some heavy blows. Faith then is what he must turn to,
that this will all work out and that God has sent me, and QWI, to do good works
and turn this bad situation around and transform it into good again.
I have been a little emotional at the thought of being
gone from Tucson for maybe more than a year, leaving; it all just seems farther
away. Maybe I’m just a little homesick and having Dad going in for an operation
this coming Wednesday, I just feel like I want to be there but I’m not. My
folks are getting up in years and I am appreciating them more and more. I have
reflected on my life, all the years, my parents raising me up, all my memories,
all the experience, and then cast it against a backdrop of mortality. I am
reaching deep to try and understand what there really can be no answer to. I
can see why religion is so compelling and why we have a need for something like
that. The finality and irreversibility of death is such a stark contrast to
being in the presence of dear and precious people. This is beginning and an
ending for me and I feel at once exhilarated and sad.
Well, onto a lighter topic. You don’t see any out of
state plates around here because nobody wants to come and vacation in Wichita
Falls. I’m sorry. The white folks here are generally ugly and weird looking,
like you would expect to see in West Virginia. They look different. It feels
different here too. When you are out on the street in Tucson, there is an
unspoken sense of being in on a really cool place, the mountains, the cactus,
the history. Tucson has a unique and special quality to it that many places do
not have. Now that I cannot walk up Finger Rock Canyon, I miss it. Before I
took it for granted. That’s the way it always is.
Wichita Falls reminds me of Richmond, Indiana. There
is a lot of green, a lot of trees, a lot of space. I have the feeling that I
have stepped back 30 or 40 years into rural America. The old downtown is great,
really interesting buildings and ruins and vignettes of old run down plumber’s
yards full of old sinks and peeling paint set off against railroad tracks and
lush trees. As I drove around town today for three or more hours, I saw many
good photo opportunities and lament the loss of my familiar cameras as the new
one Mom bought me, while functional and well appreciated, just doesn’t let me feel
like I have anything to do with how the picture turns out. I will take shots of
my vignettes nevertheless and send cool copies out to share with my non-Texan
friends. I checked out the Wichita River today and it was pretty disappointing,
all brown and full of trash and junk. At one time the city had fixed up the
riverside park but it was totally deserted and eerily abandoned today, kind of
like On the Beach.
The border with Oklahoma up north, east of the
panhandle all the way to Arkansas is defined by the Red River. It is red
because of all that red Oklahoma dirt and the Wichita River is in all
likelihood, the same way. In some ways it is like King Road in Indiana back in
1977 and that feeling of lazy river, agriculture, rural, slow, easy life. Can catfish
live in that red water?
Another interesting thing I saw was a large funeral
procession, fifty cars at least, coming down one of the freeways and all other
traffic stopped and pulled over to the side in honor of the deceased as the
procession passed by. I had never seen that anywhere. That is cool. In Tucson
you see funeral processions and people continue to speed about oblivious to
honoring the dead. Honoring the dead is something everyone should have the time
for. We are all heading that way. We all got it coming. I have been reminded of
my cemetery experience in Mexico and seeing the grave of Indolfo’s father this
last winter, along with one other fresh grave and then the graves become
progressively less tended until at the back of the cemetery, the stones are all
scattered and the wood crosses strewn and disintegrated, nature has finally
taken them back, beyond all memory. Those lives, no one knows. I was there
cleaning weeds from those graves. I will be heading that way one day and all
the significance, importance and musings that now seem so immediate will fall
away into an eternal silence. I have lately been looking at pictures in the
obituaries and feeling a sense of unspeakable wonder, that there goes a life,
just like me, friends and family, now gone for good. I have now gotten myself a
copy of Mozart’s Requiem and I like it. I believe the story goes that Mozart
ended up writing it for his own death, even though it was commissioned by a
mysterious stranger.
It has been hot and humid, oppressive, 102 with 80%
humidity. I drove out to WalMart one evening and the hot wind felt like a
microwave boiling my brain. It was insufferably uncomfortable. I can’t do any
work without becoming drenched with sweat. I sweat a lot anyway and the
humidity is something I will have to adapt to. Apparently the weather will also
turn beastly cold in winter, with wind chills getting it below zero. This is
“tornado alley” and for whatever reason, tornadoes rip through this area more
than most others although apparently they are not known to want to come to this
side of Wichita Falls, except for the one in 1979. I have had some good tornado
dreams. If one is going to get you, that’s it, game over. When the horns and
sirens go off, everyone has a legal right to head into the basement of any
public building. The Credit Union across the street is a big building and looks
safe, or at least down in the basement if everything doesn’t cave in on you.
They are only open during the week, so hopefully tornadoes will keep that in mind.
I have been massively busy and the real action has not
even started but I have the feeling that I will like the whole scene and time
will slip by quickly because there will be not much slowness in which to notice
the passage of time.
The specifics of the job are too many to describe but
one is interesting. Some Quakers in Dallas (130 miles away) who have a PR firm,
are going to do a press release and with the coming of the Tanzanian scouts,
they say that will be national news. I am going to be dealing with Good Morning
America and CNN film crews!
5/24
Fred Holland and Deborah McAlister of Holland
McAlister Public Relations came up from Dallas today and our meeting was very
educational for me. They know a lot I don’t know, about PR and computers. So I
was all ears. They had one cool piece of info after another, websites, ideas,
contacts, get the Cowboys over here. The Cowboys are BIG. I made a jokingly,
half serious disparaging remark about football and the Cowboys and Fred said
“what planet are you from?”
We discussed the history of Quakerism and a little
about the Protestant Reformation. I mentioned to them that Mike Corbett thought
Quakers were kind of like Mormons and Fred H said how we will need to be able
to explain to people who Quakers are. (He fixed me up with some nice brochures
from the Ft. Worth Meeting.) I told Deborah I was interested in learning about
all the different sects here, as I had never seen so many different Christian
denominations. She said first of all, don’t ever call a church a sect, people
around here see sects as cults, as in Waco and the Branch Davidians of David
Koresh fame. She also said that many Baptists here won’t admit to being
Protestants, seeing the Baptist tradition as superceding the Catholics, as in
John the Baptist being the founder of the Baptist church.
Deborah’s son is in jail here in Texas for forty
years, for a first time possession of less than a pound of marijuana.
Apparently in Texas you get two years in prison for possession of any amount of
weed. No wonder there is a crisis in prison space, that is insane! I don’t see
any way that type of severe penalty can be justified, it is plainly a
reactionary, ill thought out policy.
Otherwise the smoke from the fires down in Mexico
continues to make things feel like Seattle, with a permanent grey cast outside
and widely varying reports in the paper as to how dangerous it all actually is.
One newspaper article said Texas’ clean air standards are set to allow fairly
dirty air to be considered OK. The author said the current standards are like
setting the speed limit at 150 mph and then saying that the smoke or going 100
mph is not so bad.
Last night there were 70 mph winds and that was
something. It was ripping something fierce. The noise of 70 mph wind is impressive
and difficult to describe, kind of like a giant’s vacuum cleaner shifting
speeds. I thought I might get my first tornado and as I looked out the front
door and the wind was sucking all the blinds flat against the screens, I
realized I had no where to run, if one popped down, I was dead meat.
You do have to water the foundations here in the
summer because there is so much clay in the soil that when it dries out, it
exudes water and everything starts moving, the house literally rocks around .
You have to keep that clay wet so it doesn’t start to shrink and move the
foundation and therefore, the house.
5/25
Not much new today, work on the bunk house, various
cleaning and setting up bunk beds, moving mattresses, organizing stuff, sitting
at the computer and consolidating and editing voluminous notes and files and
texts, taking a shower, getting an ice cream, reading the paper.
5/26
Today was insane. I couldn’t do anything for the first
eight hours without being interrupted at least every five or so minutes.
Staying on track is a question of days and weeks rather than hours. I thought
I’d better get in good with the construction workers and Tim, who came first, I
told the contractor, he should be employee of the week, he’s got hustle and
dedication. Tim got a big thrill out of that. That’s a trick I learned from the
mighty Thompson up in Sonoma. Everybody likes the idea of employee of the week.
On my quest to know the workers, I met Doodle’s brother Tom. Doodle is the son
in law of the contractor and sort of Mike’s junior partner. Doodle has a band
that plays rock music. I asked Tom if he played in the band and he said he used
to, but “Doodle plays the Devil’s music and you have to praise the Lord in
everything you do.” Doodle said “I praise the Lord every morning when I wake up
and breath the fresh air.” and he went on to blow Tom off with a statement to
the effect of “everybody has a hard time with me and you a’int nothin’ new”.
This was followed by an awkward silence by me and the crew standing there, but
Doodle out ranked Tom and so we all knew that the Lord might be all powerful,
but in this instance, Doodle held sway.
Mike weighed in with some few choice statements about
Yankees and how they were all snobs and cowards and aggressive only in their cars
and I just had to laugh when he was saying all that because I’m a Yankee! Mike said I sounded more like I was from
Oregon or Washington. Mike also editorialized that while he could whip
anybody’s ass, now picture big forearm going through the motions of an uppercut
and I would not want to get hit by that arm! He is polite in his car while
Yankees, who couldn’t kick anyone’s ass, were all aggressive and full of road
rage. Mike has a cherry 1969 GTO that sounds awesome. It is a classic muscle
car. Mike can deal though. He hears me. I am buttering him up. I do him right
and show him respect and he will do the same for me. He is our man and he wants
to build the church. If Mike is different, that is OK with me. Just don’t jack
my jaw if you please!
As Deacon Russell and I tried to cover some logistics
up drove CBS channel six and wham, I was on TV being interviewed by a babe with
make-up smeared all over her face. All the guys were standing there watching me
as young Maybelline stuck a microphone in my face and I had to a couple of
times just out right say, you can’t put that part on (or Mike will be knockin’
you out baby)!
The logistics are mundane. I hired Rufus Jenkins to be
the cook today. He is around the same age as Emmett McCracken, who clearly has
a touch of Alzheimers and is our tool inventory man. Rufus was a nice guy, a
little stove up and old but Darlene is his daughter and she is a big shaker in
the church. I felt Rufus deserved a shot at it. If Harold could bring on Emmett
(as a volunteer), I could hire Rufus. Harold backed me up 100% as we are
committed to not discriminating on the basis of anything. Only flat out
incompetence will get you fired from the Quakers here at QWI, although in my
case I suspect I am being expected to perform to a higher standard than that. I
think in the future I will suggest to Harold that hiring younger, sharper, more
competent people will be a good move towards reducing stress and unnecessary
complications. McCracken and I were talking about something and he came out
with something about “the niggers” and I could tell he was an old time white
boy even though he was a Quaker.
5/27
Well it is 9:PM and I finally have the space to breath
a sigh of relief and do something pleasurable for myself only, like record some
of the day’s memorable events. The Reverend was over this morning and he has a
great smile and demeanor. He is a really nice guy. He is a leader and a
spiritual advisor but he is also humble and unassuming. He began to expound on
how he didn’t know the Lord’s purposes for when He would take Dorothy and Mike
jumped right in and said “I got a personal relationship with God too and I know
when God takes her, it will be because.....” And after a few go-arounds on this
where Mike in his own way tried to comfort the Pastor, they started talking
about fishing and which ones they throw back and where they are catching them
and how the Reverend would go as far away on the water as he could, floating,
his mind wandering and questioning Fate and how life can take such a beautiful
woman and companion from him and he would have a fish tugging on the line and
sort of wake up to it, not even notice. Dorothy went into the hospital
yesterday morning and is in more serious condition than in the last 8 years. If
she comes through it will be a miracle.
I had my first Newspaper interview today and the
reporter was sharp, had a lot of back-up information and was clearly digging
for dirt about the arson, suspects, why the insurance company hadn’t paid yet,
when the church was going to sue the insurance company and why the people who
were members of the church, who held the title at the time of the burning were
no longer members and were also the main suspects? What about them? She also
asked all kind of questions about QWI, to Mike and Russell and when she left,
everyone was amazed and offended and awestruck at her chutzpah. She put us all
in the same boat of being against her scrappy ass.
I got in touch with our PR guys in Dallas and got a
boatload of advice, most of it good, on how to handle the media and steer them
towards what you want to be made public. This is known as spin. I have three
spin doctors volunteering behind me and it takes a lot of attention on my part
to follow through on all they are asking me to do and know. At the same time it
is novel and kind of crazy to find myself in these situations.
I went out to Office Depot today to buy a FAXphone and
was able to successfully apply for non-profit status and therefore, pay no tax.
The store manager said “hey, I saw you on TV last night and you looked good!” I
met him yesterday and he was very friendly and helpful, along with his staff.
The over-all impression I get from WF is that people are quite friendly and
people realize that you get mileage out of small town courtesy. The place is
small enough that jerks will become progressively isolated.
So I am going around town feeling like the TV Guy. Did
everybody see me on TV? The project is gaining momentum and visibility. I look
at all the stuff I have to master and be on top of and sometimes think that
there is no way one person can track so many things simultaneously however I
have not panicked and am using training from my Wilderness First Responder and
SCA to remain calm in the face of adversity. Larry Bird is an inspiration. My
spin doctors are probably working now on how to package my responses.
My credit union officer, Nancy Law, has enough clout
to do me favors a regular Joe wouldn’t get, like laundering my personal checks
though the QWI account and voiding fees for screw-ups on my part. People want
to help out on a good cause. A local internet service provider gave me a free
e-mail account and offered to make me a web page too.
5/28
The big news today, other than that the newspaper
article turned out good was that the city building inspector’s office said the
plans needed to be returned to the architect because there were some glaring
omissions, there were no specs for fire walls, the steel beams had no specs and
a structural engineer had not stamped the prints, the kitchen needs to have
specs for commercial fittings, the stairways are not right. So what this all
means is that no more work can proceed until the plans are sent back to the
city and then approved. How long this will take is anyone’s guess. This is a major
X-factor. We will have over 30 people here in 10 days to work. Work on the slab
can only proceed to the level of compacting sand and no forms can be built.
Also, there is a mystery bill for $770.00 from the
electrician that was not authorized by QWI or the church and it turns out
Doodle told the electrician to do it. I have to tell Doodle now that he has to
pay the electrician because he authorized the work. Isn’t it great that I have
to do the shit work to rectify and clean up situations that I had nothing to do
with. Now I have the potential to be made out as an asshole by someone I have
to work with all year. I guess being a hack is part of my job too.
Here is a copy of the newspaper article:
Thursday, May 28, 1998
<Picture><Picture>
Volunteers lending power
to rebuild church at full speed
Monica Wolfson
Times Record News
The Full Gospel Power House Church of God in Christ
will be rebuilt, despite having limited financial resources because the fire
insurance claim has not been settled, church leaders said. Volunteers from
across the country and around the world are coming to Wichita Falls this summer
to lend a hand.
In coordination with Quaker Workcamps International,
the church will begin housing and feeding 20 volunteers per week starting in
June. The rebuilding process is expected to take a year, church deacon Russell
Johnson said.
The Full Gospel Power House Church at 15th and Broad
was set ablaze Nov. 20, 1996. Investigators determined the fire was arson, but
still have not caught the arsonist, Assistant Fire Marshal David Collins said.
Investigators have new leads, but are no further along in the case than they
were last year, Collins said.
Johnson said Preferred Risk Insurance has not settled
the $270,000 insurance claim, but the church is still forging ahead in
rebuilding the place of worship.
"We just got to the point where we had to do
something," Johnson said. The church had about 100 members before the
fire. "We lost some members after the fire. They got discouraged, but I
think that once they see we are going through with this, then we will get some
back."
Construction started last week with the removal of the
old foundation, and work on leveling the lot began this week, local contractor
Mike Corbett said. The architectural drawings have been submitted to the city
and are awaiting final approval.
"A lot of the church people came by last Sunday,
and were so happy to see we were serious about rebuilding the church,"
Corbett said. "Several people from the congregation that I've met are real
dedicated - it has pumped me up."
Many local companies have donated construction
materials, but the church will need a constant flow of cash and material
donations to complete the project, Corbett said.
Corbett and three paid construction foremen train the
volunteers.
Quaker Workcamps International first contacted the
church in 1996 after the widely publicized fire. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms was called in to investigate the fire because a task force had
been formed to look into the unprecedented number of black churches that were
burning in the South.
The church arsons prompted the Quakers to form
Workcamps International, which began in 1997 as a ministry to rebuild burned
black churches, said Fred Allebach, project leader with Quaker Workcamps
International.
Twenty-one people from Tanzania will arrive in the
city June 8, although they still have not secured visas, Allebach said. A
family from Russia will arrive in July. All the volunteers are paying their own
travel expenses to Wichita Falls, Allebach said.
All the visitors will stay in renovated barracks on
the church property. The Quakers will have four staff members on site,
including a cook. Allebach said the Quakers will coordinate the volunteers,
including people who are coming from all over the United States. A contingent
from New Mexico is expected to arrive June 6.
"We don't foresee any problems in getting people
to volunteer," Allebach said. "We are pushing hard now for building
materials."
The National Guard has said it will donate a 20-person
tent, which will be used for overflow sleeping, Allebach said
"Everything that can go wrong, does go
wrong," Allebach said. "You have to be flexible and go with the
flow."
The church expects to break ground next week.
"Mike (Corbett) has told the young people of the
church that he is going to put them to work," Johnson said. Volunteers can
contact the Quakers at 766-6316 for a volunteer application, and any business
interested in donating materials can call the church at 766-2927.
Staff Writer Monica Wolfson can be reached at (940)
767-8341, Ext. 532, or at mwolfson@wf.scripps.co m
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More information on Quakers.
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Construction is set to begin in the next week or so on
the Full Gospel Powerhouse Church Of God In Christ, which burned to the ground
Nov. 20, 1996. The church will be rebuilt on the corner of 15th & Broad,
where the original building was located.
5/29
Well, well, well.
Things sure have reached a state of being incredibly
tangled and unclear and uncertain. Mike came by this morning and I approached
him about the question of whether the $770.00 electric bill was included in the
$3000.00 bath house price, and since Mike has just held forth for about two
hours of non-stop talking, including an exact reprise of his tornado story
which went on and on and on and covered every single detail that he had
previously told me just days ago, I feel like a lot has been said about
nothing. Mike is difficult to converse with because he has the uncanny ability
to start talking right as you begin your response, so he is always drowning you
out and changing the subject and you never get a chance to follow through on
any clear response to anything he said.
OK, as Mike told me, Russell has already paid Mike
about $3000.00 for the carpentry for the bath house and the plumbing will be at
around another $3000.00 on top of that, plus the $770.00 electric on top of
that, plus I believe that Russell has paid for the hot water heater in addition
too. Mike donated all the materials which he said were worth a couple of
thousand dollars. This is a flea bitten looking bath house for 6 or 7 thousand
dollars! There was no one here to direct the labor and Mike said Doodle told the
electrician to go ahead and do the electric because it needed to get done and
you can’t have thirty people taking showers without lights and if the electric
wasn’t water proof people would be getting electrocuted. Bla bla bla bla The
foxes got into the hen house and are now trying to explain why those chickens
cost so much!
At first Mike said Harold wrote a letter saying the
bath house agreement included the electric but then he later said there was no
letter and that the agreement with Harold was all on the phone. There was
nothing in writing and with other people paying, these boys just started to
jack up and add on. As Doodle told me earlier, “extras are what contractors
live for.”
Now, Mike claims that most if not all local
contractors and subcontractors do not want to work on this job for a number of
reasons. One is that the church does not have enough money, that has been
printed in the paper and also the sign with the thermometer outside shows the
funds have not raised at all ever since the sign went up about six months ago.
Since the church may not have the ability to pay, subcontractors will be/ are
hesitant to go buy thousands of dollars of materials and generate payroll costs
and then perhaps not be paid. Two, is that, purportedly and according to Mike,
the powers that be here in WF do not want a black church at this site and
contractors are threatening subcontractors that if they take the job, they will
never work in WF again. He said that the only electrical contractor that will
do the work is Willen Electric, for whom someone owes $770.00 and if Willen
doesn’t get paid, they are not going to want to work on this job as a whole.
Mike said to just have Russell pay the bill and move on because it is not worth
it to alienate the only electrical contractor who has agreed to take on this
job. Mike claims to have received death threats and threats to not build the
church. OK OK bla bla bla
What a mess, I try to say to him, well the basic issue
here is that there was a misunderstanding about exactly how much work was going
to be done for the $3000.00 and then Mike goes off on tangent after tangent and
he just doesn’t seem to want to see things from my perspective. He can’t
understand what I am saying. He goes on and on about how electric was needed in
the bath house, volunteers were coming, they needed hot water ( there is an
electric hot water heater because it would have cost $600.00 just to get a gas
line out there) and Russell and the Pastor both insisted that a hot water
heater was necessary, upon hearing the scuttlebutt that Harold was willing to
do without one, so here is an additional twist, that the perceived need for hot
water may have spurred Mike and Russell to just OK whatever was necessary to
get that hot water in, since it was told to me by the Pastor that it wouldn’t
have been right to have people working and then not be able to get clean and
take a hot shower.
Mike paints a picture of himself as being the only guy
in town who is willing to build this church and that when he signed on he
“didn’t know nothing about no volunteers but I agreed to work with ‘em”. He has
said that it would be much more cost efficient to not work with volunteers
because of the continual time needed to retrain people and that over-all we (me
and Mike) would be babysitters. At that point I had to say that of course it
would be more efficient to have all professional workers but the reason to have
QWI is to build consciousness, to educate, to create a meaningful experience
and show some compassion in a suffering world and Mike agreed but then had to
add the caveat, “but you have to admit it would be more efficient to work with
all professional workers” well sure it would be but the reason we are here is
to build more than the church, the volunteer work and human contacts will
ripple out and end up being positive in way more aspects than building the
church...”but you have to admit it would be more efficient to work with all
professionals” This is what it is like to talk with Mike Corbett. He doesn’t
hear you, he only hears what he is going to say next.
He is a nice enough guy and we get along OK but I
don’t feel that he really understands much beyond whatever is contained in his
particular view of the world. He has a very limited horizon and is quite
boorish and bullish about the confines of his own little world. He claims to
have built high rise buildings and all sorts of stuff, so why then did he not
catch the problems with the architect’s plans right off the bat? Mike is
clearly culpable for some of the delays by not red flagging the plans sooner.
I have to admit that now I am discouraged. I have
never been in any situation where as much went wrong in as short a period of
time as this and me being responsible for it. There is so much up in the air
that I can’t possibly control it all. This whole electric bill thing has put me
in a very awkward situation and then the work has been stopped, no word from
Russell, no work happening outside now at 10:30AM, 3 volunteers coming on the
6th, I have no tools for them to work with, if I stick the bill on Mike, how
can I then ask him to borrow tools, take me to look at used hot water heaters,
give us the counters he promised? It is a screwy situation. I made none of the
decisions yet I am left to handle all of the disputes and mess of it all. I
would just as soon wait and let Harold handle this when he gets here because
all the little twists and this and that is too much for me to keep mediating
and a fair amount is at stake with my political and working relationship with
Mike. In SCA I was always instructed to let the SCA higher up staff handle any
potentially sticky situations because then my working relationship would not be
compromised. I don’t know Harold well enough now to tell if he would blow up
about this or agree to wait and deal when he arrives. I have been burned in
situations like this already by deciding on the spot how to deal.
We need a tent and the National Guard contact is out
of town until the 6th, there is no clear place to put a tent now
because of back hoe work and big piles of debris and church junk in the area
where a tent might go.
I was sitting here typing and all the electric in the
house went out, boom, computer gone, zap!
I go out back and power company guys have put in a new
meter and said, “Oh we thought this was just a temporary, we didn’t know
anybody was living here.” Lucky for me Chris told me how to have a timed backup
and this entry was saved.
I stepped outside and the Reverend Thompson was
sitting with Elbert and Mike Ingram. I went out and they were talking about
cattle and bulls and the Reverend’s big bull he sold for $6000.00 and all the
cows he had to sell to get his new car. He had show cattle. It was really
uplifting to be with him because here he is with the weight of so much on his
shoulders and he is telling stories about cows. He was tired from staying up
all night with Dorothy, who is still in the hospital. He said “I hurt so bad I
can hardly stand it.”
He started telling me how many funerals he’s done in
the last eight years, aunts, uncles, mother, father and he said people think he
is good at funerals. “More lies are told at funerals than anywhere else. “I
tell it straight, if you live the life of a pig, you die a pig, right out in
the sun. I don’t tell lies, I am here to pay one last respect to the dead.”
He is 61 years old, was born in Jamaica, Theophilus
Erinozay or something, moved to Mexico and then to Oklahoma at age thirteen. We
got to talking about kids not listening to their elders and he told me a story
about how his father told him something and he took that advice. Well, when he
was fifteen he was going with a married woman. “I was a stud. Her husband must
of had a little one.” (and the Pastor showed about half the size of his pinky)
“I was a pretty good stud.” She was 28, married and white and in those days it
was full segregation and you didn’t get seen in the front seat of a car with a
white woman. One day the married gal came over to Ted’s house driving a new car
and she left it there with the keys and called a cab. She gave it to Ted. His
father said, “take that car to Tulsa and put it on the lot and tell the dealer
you will come back with the title” Ted did that and then arranged to meet his
married white girl in an all black town. There were two all black towns in the
area. She gave him the title and probably a little something else too. Ted went
back to the lot, got $1500.00 and went home. His Dad then said, I want you to
take that money and go to San Francisco. Two days later the girl’s father was
coming around with a shotgun looking for Ted.
He came back from S.F. when he was 20 after being a
prize fighter all over the country and at 21 he met Dorothy and married her
when she was 16. “She’s my only wife, but not my only woman.”
So, he and Dorothy have been in WF for 40 years, have
one son and one day about 15 years ago they were over in Oklahoma at a Café and
an old woman kept staring at Ted and staring and Dorothy said she was going
back to the motel room and the woman came over to Ted and said “You haven’t changed
a bit” and Ted thought well you sure have, I don’t even know you, and then she
said something about the car and he knew right away and they had a talk and Ted
made sure to tell her not to say anything about him because there still might
be somebody wanting to get him for what they did. The woman told Ted he was the
best thing that ever happened to her. Anyway, the moral of the story is that
you should listen to your elders.
I am preparing lunch in the kitchen and I can hear
Mike and the electrician talking out back about how Mike beat the shit out of
some black guy and the electrician said, “yeah, you got to stand up to ‘em.”
The gory details of Mike’s fight were loudly broadcast until somebody got some
sense and quieted down. Then later I’m working in here and Mike comes in and
hangs out and we start talking about music and it turns out he is very musical
and likes Jesse Colin Young, Neil Young, James Taylor and I’m looking at him
and thinking, boy, I thought I was a bag of contradictions!
I talked to Russell about the electric bill and he
said it wasn’t worth it to make a big deal about it and he would pay it if
Harold continued to refuse to pay. Phew! Russell is also going to have me sick
our spin doctor, investigative reporter attack dog on the architect. Sister
Dorothy (another Dorothy) called me up, I am now Brother Fred to her, and we
talked about how they all had an inspirational meeting at the place of worship
last night and the Reverend was blessing them all with a new anointment, a new
beginning and she said it was all really great and if there was anything she
could do, just let me know. I will do a little internet work for her on grants
from main line religions for burned churches.
Mike is going to lend me some tools for the few
volunteers coming on the sixth and we had a nice talk about music, lifestyles,
Florida, etc He has a computer game he has been playing for seven years: “I
have thirty seven galaxies and there aren’t hardly no aliens in ‘em, not enough
to knock me out.....”. Sometimes the absurd and the ridiculous coincide
directly with real life.
Yesterday in the paper there was a huge letters
section devoted to whether two books concerning same sex marriage should be
permitted in the public library. This cracked open the vast rift between
absolute and relative morals. I could hardly believe the literalist true
believer type stuff I was reading. These folks were all quoting the Bible, hate
the sin, love the sinner, homosexuality is a sin against God, no gray area, “as
Bible believing, God-fearing Christians, we will not condone what God himself,
in his word, condemns”, “this tolerance coupled with the accompanying cancerous
tool of compromise has brought our nation to our current position of moral
decay”, “the moral sinkhole that is swallowing our communities”, and here’s one
from God himself, “He who rejects me and receives not my words has one that
judges him; the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last
day.” This strikes me as a kind of advanced form of dog training.
Obviously there can be no discussion with people like
this, either you are on board or not. People cannot break through to the other
side, if a choking literalism prevents realizations of a common humanity.
5/31
I switched some screens around so I could get some
cross ventilation in the room where I’m sleeping and it indeed was a bit cooler
as the night progressed. The only problem was that with the new window open, I
could clearly hear about eight dogs which seemed to bark just about all night
long. I hate barking dogs. Why don’t dog owners have the decency to shut them
up? What kind of slob would let animals make such a racket all night long? You
know beforehand that they are oblivious to common decency and not predisposed
to changing their ways, so approaching these people will in all likelihood not
be a fruitful endeavor and formal complaints and mediation will follow and bad
blood engendered, all because of barking dogs.
This morning, after the $3000.00 plumbing work, all
the toilets are stopped up. Plungers won’t work. I have never seen anything
like this situation. How can this scene be so flaky as to have so much go
wrong. Everything is going wrong in one way or another. A woman showed up to
volunteer and I was told she was coming on the sixth. I guess I just have to
get used to the idea that nothing should be expected to work out and when it
does, then we can all praise the Lord!
Lynn Balzer, who has made up some really nice flyers
for us and who lives in Spiro, OK, came to visit yesterday and stayed over
night and she picked up on some of the organizational difficulties and
commented that “Jesus said you can’t build on a foundation of sand”. Now why
does it all have to get back to Jesus for a simple parable like that? To be a
good Christian does every single situation, no matter how mundane, have to
ultimately be reduced to what Jesus did and said? If a guy is going to build a
house, he has to be smart enough to have a good foundation, no matter what
Jesus said!
Emmett McCracken is and 83 year old Quaker guy Harold
hired as one of the QWI staff. He is a nice guy but generally pretty out of it.
He has a lot of experience and is a tough old booger. Who do you know who is 80
something and able to live in a camper on the back of an old Mazda rotary
engine truck and dig and shovel and eat 25 prunes a day? I believe he has got
some Alzheimer’s. He doesn’t quite get it that I am the director and always has
some alternative suggestion to what I have seen as the most clear and efficient
way to do something. He won’t do what I tell him without a lot of explanation
and finally I just have to either let it be or just tell him to do it. For
example, Harold ordered five dozen sheets and enough pillow cases and pillows
for 30 people. We did not know this until we found the boxes in the back of a
room here. Emmett had previously gone out and bought a whole bunch more pillows
and sheets and when I said that we now didn’t need that many and that he should
take them back, he got all kinds of ideas about why we need the 60 pillows for
an average of 24 people per week. OK Emmett, we’ll just keep moving all those
pillows and sheets around when they are in our way and then Harold can tell you
to take them back when he gets here and also tells you I am the boss. One
annoying thing, when we run the AC, Emmett keeps turning it off and onto fan
only, then I find myself all sweaty in the office and go out and turn it back
and it keeps going this way.
I can’t say Emmett is a bad guy, it’s just that to
have a good staff, we need sharp people. One of the church people said she had
someone who could be the cook, her father, Rufus Jenkins. Rufus is looking
nearly as old as Emmett. Now how can I tell him and Darlene no when McCracken
is here and they are all sitting around waiting to see if I will hire him or
not? We’ll have to see how that all goes. If Harold can hire Emmett, I can hire
Rufus.
This is all so different from SCA in that there
appears to be zero structure, no Handbook, no formal directions to look at for
guidance. I can take this and keep telling myself that it is all screwed up and
then develop a self fulfilling prophecy or I can adjust, keep my attitude
straight and modify my expectations so that flux is just the way it is, minute
to minute.
******
6/1
We went to church with the congregation yesterday and
the Pastor was preaching about Sampson and what God could do for a guy with the
jawbone of an ass if you would just have faith. He also said a lot of good
common sense stuff like “you don’t have to tell everybody you are a Christian,
let your life shine, let it shine and that is good enough, people will see
without you having to say anything”. He would be preaching and the women would
be saying “amen!”, “that’s right!”, “praise God!”, “Hallelujah!”. After an hour
or more, the Pastor asked Emmett and D. and myself to come up in front and tell
everybody why we were here. He gave Emmett the microphone and then we all got a
chance to speak and they were all saying “amen!” after stuff we said and it was
great to feel their appreciation and see their smiles. Afterwards they had a
collection and a guy was playing organ while the Pastor spoke and he caught the
rhythm and the word of God came out as kind of a spoken song. When it was all
over folks came to socialize and introduce themselves and then the Pastor took
us out to a buffet where we hogged out on fried catfish. He told us a long
story about house moving and how he had to put axle grease on the wheels to
squeeze the whole deal through an underpass. By this time it was over 100
degrees out. Emmett had been sick during lunch and had to go to the bathroom
about five times.
We got back to the house and D. and I then went
shopping at WalMart and she donated $200.00 worth of kitchen supplies. We got
back and Emmett was out back in the 108 degree sun using my good screwdriver as
a crow bar trying to fix a door jam. He had turned the AC off inside. I thought
this guy is going to kill himself and drive me fucking nuts.
As the day wore down we were all in the living room
having a nice discussion about various topics and I felt good to be involved in
something normal and fluid, just having a few laughs and people holding forth
on this and that.
The dogs are amazing to bark literally all night long
with almost no let up. I can see that is going to be a big problem, not to
mention that the neighbor, John Martinez has a party shack directly adjacent to
out bunk house. I just shut my cross ventilation window and plugged in some
thick ear plugs and had to turn the fan back on high to drown them out, but
then slept an extras hour to make up for the lost time dealing with dogs at
3:AM. I thought of making up cakes mixed with pure anti-freeze, of blowing them
all away with a pistol, of poisoning them with strychnine laced hamburger meat.
That all had to be let go of before I could drift off back to a dream about a
huge tornado comin’ to get me, really close and furious and dark, where is the
car!!!????, which way should I run!!!!????
Well, the day is done and it was another hot one,
close to 108, just like yesterday. When the hog and cattle trucks drive up from
Ft. Worth and on to Amarillo and points of unknown livestock rendevous with
fate, you can smell ‘em as they pass by. Lives being trucked around for our
eating pleasure. While I’m on the topic of animals, I made a frontal assault on
the roaches today. Last night I saw a roach on my toothbrush and that was war.
They have been crawling on my legs at night, on our plates, tables, glasses,
sink and I said “the party’s over”. I got a bunch of roach motels, some kind of
egg case destroyer, boric acid and pump spray and I hit ‘em hard. I hate seeing
roaches on any of my stuff as I have memories of way serious infestations in
Chicago. “Commander Roach, we are taking heavy losses in the kitchen, they are
dying by the thousands!” “Don’t worry soldier, there’s plenty more where they
came from.”
People from around here are big and fat and ugly. I
fit right in! Serious though, I haven’t seen people this ugly anywhere. I go
into a store and it is like the bar scene from Star Wars. People don’t care if
they have fat hanging all out the side of their shirt and big blobby arms and
legs rolling through the parking lot. Scruff rules and trailer trash is the
norm. It is really entertaining to see people who are so different from what I
am used to in AZ, CA and WA. Mike was right. This is a different breed of white
people here.
Apropos of watering the foundations, I found out also
that not only is it clay which tosses and turns houses but gas and oil bubbles
too, which expand and contract with the season’s temperatures and jerk around
the occasional house. All those derricks you see out there pumping along are
sucking up natural gas or oil. The gas and oil are in bubbles and the trick is
to locate a bubble, sink a line into it and start sucking. That sounds OK to
me. By the way, can anyone tell me definitively where the phrase OK came from?
I’m going to Dallas tomorrow for lunch and to pick up
donated goods from Fred Holland, the Quaker PR guy and also to meet with Cliff
Pearson, another Quaker fellow down there who is the editor of the Dallas Peace
Times.
6/3
I drove south out of WF on 281 to Jacksboro, where
people go when they want their jaw jacked, stopping at Arrowhead Lake State
Park to check out future camping, get-away spots. The lake was interesting for
three reasons only, it was cool with wind blowing off the water, there was a
colony of prairie dogs right next top the road and there were big oil derricks
out in the lake, by the dam which provided some vertical relief which is very
scarce in these parts. To see something tall is noteworthy around here.
I enjoyed the drive and emptied my mind of all
complications and soaked in the oaky greenery and long rolling hills. I love to
travel and I pulled that ace out of my sleeve and soaked it in, looking all
around. Free! Free to choose any route to Dallas I wanted. The country side is
actually not too bad around Jacksboro way and Jacksboro itself has a very cool,
large stone building in the old downtown. I just enjoyed every moment, until I
began to get into the outskirts of Dallas, whereupon the traffic thickened up
to big city proportions and I was stuck at light after light and in huge
freeways snaking out in all directions.
As I drove towards the Dallas skyline, I could think
only of Bobby and JR and how it must have been hellish to commute like this
from Southfork everyday. I arrived at Holland/ McAlister PR only a half hour
late and we promptly went out to Chinese buffet where we all gorged on teriyaki
chicken and all manner of tasty, meaty morsels, plate after plate after plate.
Those fellas are quite a bit bigger than me, enough so as to make me appear
rather svelte, so I didn’t feel too bad about porking it down. I guess you call
that a relative rational for hogging out. There will always be a fat ass bigger
then me! We talked turkey about the press release and I noticed the strained
relations between Cliff and Fred as Fred is the boss and is paying Cliff to
work on QWI stuff but Cliff is a volunteer from the Dallas Meeting and also on
the Peace and Justice Committee that is working for SCYM/ QWI contacts and
support, so there are blurred lines and feelings and Cliff essentially does not
feel valued and wants Fred to throw him a bone but Fred is self absorbed and
while he does value Cliff, maybe doesn’t have the skills or inclination to say
it. It is good old boss/ employee dynamics. I could see that. Been there, done
that, got the T-shirt.
Fred gave me a couple of fans and two line phones and
I got in my car and drove back to WF without stopping, the fastest way
possible, as it was 104 in Dallas and 108 in WF. My brain was broiling with hot
wind and my drinking water was hot too. I was feeling dizzy and crazed, driving
75MPH and rolling through cowtowns and being blasted by semis pushing big
tsunamis of hot air right through my open windows and practically ripping out
my ear drums. Back in WF I went straight to DQ and cooled it with a large
chocolate shake.
Today Harold e-mailed with the news that the Tanzanian
scouts were all denied visas and that he would be arriving in WF on the 10th
with 3 people instead of 26. That is just as well as there is no work to do
except fix up and remodel the premises here to get ready for volunteers. Some
church members are disheartened by the situation with the architect and I have
been trying to bolster their spirits, as I have had an awakening of my
optimistic self and I feel good. I can’t maintain seeing the glass of water as
half empty. I have to continue to do the best I can. All I can do is offer the
my best side to a tough situation.
Thompson and Dorothy stopped by, with Darlene carrying
the bucket for her to vomit in and I had a chance to hug Dorothy a few times
and shoot the breeze before they had to leave because she became ill. She just
looked tired this time, wore out. The Pastor was cheerful and we hung out for a
bit. It is another hot one, 108 again. We got a heat wave and it be humid too!
I listen to my Messiah and that just gets me going. I love it, especially this
version form the Academy of Ancient Music.
Tom, Doodle’s brother of Devil’s music fame, came by
and invited me and Emmett to church tonight. They are having a revival and they
will be speaking in tongues and stuff and I would kind of like to see it but it
might become clear that I am possessed by the Devil himself and there’s no
telling what would happen then!
Well shoot, I went, with Brother McCracken, from
7-8:30PM and I’ll tell you, it was different from what I am used to. This was a
Pentecostal Revival. For the first half hour they sang sappy songs with the
words projected up on two big screens. The music was pathetic compared to some
of the great religious music of Bach, Handel, Baroque or Renaissance styles. The words were stuff like we are in the river
of God, bla bla bla. Emmett and I were the only ones who didn’t stand up. A lot
of folks were doing the raise the hands thing, and waving them around, “praise
the lord” etc I noticed one young woman in particular who was jumping up and
down and giving her nubile flesh a good shake for the Lord. Religion wasn’t the
only thing experiencing a revival.
Then the Evangelist came out and started talking about
how some people in the church knew how to go through the motions but were
really not feeling the power of God. They were acting it out. Well, Brother
Wayne proceeded to put on an act for an hour, inspired by a number of
conversations he had with God. He went on and on like he just had a long
distance call with God and God said this and God said that and God taught him a
lesson and God did this and God said that. It was like God was living in the
next town over and Brother Wayne somehow had direct access to God, who
magically is inaccessible to the rest of us. If Brother Wayne is in such direct
contact with the creator of the universe, you’d think that God would relay a
little more significant a message, be a little more magnimonious and concerned
about things of larger import than the petty jive Wayne was getting after. It
was really a spectacle of the most crass literalism you can imagine. How people
can go for this type of stuff is really beyond me. Dad, there is no danger of
me joining up with any of this kind of stuff. I might pretend for hot pooty
tooty but not for reals.
I was particularly impressed with Wayne’s point that
Pentecostalism is not the fastest growing religion, Islam is and then he
actually said that was the Devil’s work, that Muslims were doing the work of
the Devil! I could then see myself in the pictures of the Martyr’s Mirror and
that if these people discovered who I really was and what I stood for, they
would burn me alive. If today was back then, I would be tortured and killed as
a heretic. It is really disgusting that people believe this simplistic drivel.
I am shaking my head in disbelief.
The Evangelist would stalk back and forth, repeating
everything three or four times and then say “You know what I’m saying?” He
would be yelling and screaming, “You have to ARRIVE, with the spirit of the
Holy GHOST, you have to ARRIVE with the SPIRIT of the Holy Ghost, you have
to.....” There was a lot of anointment talk and Holy Ghost talk and a lot of,
“If the rapture came today, would you go or be left behind? Do your sins stand
between you and being taken away by the Holy Ghost?” Brother Wayne went on to
prove that the signs prophesied were here now, all the people moving to Israel,
wars, pestilence, homosexuality, lesbianism, it is just like Sodom and Gomorrah
and God will strike them down and lay them waste, because he just put in a call
to Brother Wayne and told him so directly! You better believe it or you will
burn with Hellfire because it only takes Satan a few minutes, only a few basic
human weaknesses to work on and you are lost, you are fundamentally flawed and
need constant ministering by the likes of brother Wayne to save your soul. Oh,
and by the way, here is the collection bag, don’t forget your tithing.
Wayne also hit on the mind/ heart dichotomy, implying
that the mind was impure while the heart was the center of worship.
There was a distinct air of being hyped, with the easy
musical hooks that clearly got the crowd going and the preacher’s and other
ring leaders subtle changes of voice plus blatant appeals for participation
such as “Do you love Jesus?!?!” It reminded of a magic show where the wool is
being pulled over your eyes and you know it yet you suspend your critical
functions to immerse yourself in the experience. It reminded me at once also of
a Grateful Dead concert, with people jumping around and cutting loose, waving
their hands in the air, spontaneous yelling and screaming. It was a rally,
specifically designed to hype people up and steer their consciousness down a
narrow path. (With the Dead, it was all free and non-coercive.) It was also somewhat like what I would
imagine a Nazi rally to be like, with the leader up front barking out
simplistic jargon and the crowd all doing the salute. You could say well,
religion is for the good, but that comment about the Muslims really turned me
around. If these Pentecostalists believe that, then Hallelujah starts to become
equivalent to Heil Hitler.
You know, if Heaven is going to be filled up with
people like this, I would prefer Hell.
Tonight we went out to look for cool photo opportunities
of midwestern Americana and that was fun. We found exactly what we were looking
for in giant abandoned grain silos and the abandoned Holt Hotel, resplendent in
it’s squalor and grandiosity, a broken down hulk yet still in possession of a
mystique and allure.
Then it was off to a Baptist church where the
Powerhouse choir was going to sing and I was going to be interviewed, on
Christian TV, the only Christian TV station in this part of Texas. The choir
was really good, they were genuine and
all there. They sang with emotion and sincerity and covered the older song
material, one that connects with the Baroque and therefore, with my interests.
The interviewer was Sameta Brown, who had upper arms
bigger than my thighs, she was a big legged woman with a beautiful face and
smile and she praised god that I was here in WF and while I was saying my spiel
about QWI, the choir was saying Amen!, That’s right! And they were my people. I
knew them on a friendship basis. I don’t quite know how to take all this religious
stuff but it seems there is no escaping it. It will be good networking for me
to visit other churches and meet the Pastors, get the word out that we need
some help to rebuild the church for my people.
There are some really, really good looking girls in
the church and in the other churches, babes of the highest degree, with crosses
hanging around their necks and booty shaking inside tight dresses. I sense that
the black people are not overly righteous about religion and give it it’s place, honor it highly but when church
is out, then it is time for life and all the fun it can bring. The blacks
remind me somewhat of the rural Mexicans in that sitting around and talking and
shooting the breeze under a tree is entirely normal, for hours and hours. The Pastor
wants to take me fishing. I am thinking, looking at these women, would it be
worth it to get some, to marry one, to live in WF? Could I convince them to
leave? It seems the black women all have children by way more than one father
and the whole family network is extended far into the community. I am looking
around and thinking about extending something into the community. I would
really like to get it on with some of these gals. They are hot!
Some are butt ugly too and so many people in general
in WF are really obese. As I perused the meat aisle there was stuff I had never
seen, cow brains, turkey necks, nasty stuff full of fat. No animal gets wasted
around here. I actually seem slender around here. One woman at the laundromat,
a big fat white woman had on a sweat shirt with the sleeves cut out and no bra,
so you could see her nasty tits hanging there amidst the rolls of fat while she
pressed her clothes. Lord help me. I have lust in my heart. I want some hot
poon tang to take over my mind and body, I want to be bewitched by a soul
sister. I want to get my white boy lips on some of those luscious big smackers.
I am feeling more at home now. My role is becoming
clearer. With people coming I give the rap. I show them around town, I tell
them what is what. I direct them and mold their expectations and bewitch them
with my incessant talk about this and that. I can do that.
6/6
An interesting note of yesterday, D. Rogers, a woman
volunteer, put down linoleum flooring for us in the bath house. As she was working,
Pastor Thompson came in and brought us three big fat fresh catfish for dinner
and he sat down to shoot the breeze. He caught 17 and could have caught more if
a spiny fin hadn’t of punctured his inner tube and made him have to go fix it.
I was telling him that D. had done the whole interior of her own house in
Houston and Thompson looked out the door with a look of real consternation at
D., on her hands and knees spreading adhesive and sticking down her nice cuts.
Thompson was flustered by her. Later, one of Mike’s construction workers came
by and saw me caulking in the edges by the showers and after I told him D. laid
the floor he said “a woman did this?” These guys are just blown away that a
woman can do anything handy, apparently unused to the notion and even the sight
of a talented and competent woman. I guess women around here are just expected
to make babies, fry catfish and drag the brats to church. D. is your classic
Quaker woman, unflappable, confident, easy, natural and comfortable with herself.
Sameta Brown came by yesterday afternoon and wanted
more info about QWI and after every explanation I gave she would respond by
saying something about how God was leading us and God this and God that and the
Holy Ghost was going to get so and so for their evil sins. She will be hosting
a Christian radio show this morning and call me up to go on the air. It seems
that some folks have the God bug a little stronger than others and when you
speak with them, everything is reduced to God and how he will make everything
work out. You converse and say your piece and the response is inevitably that
God is involved and God will see us through and God is good and on and on.
I am not used to having all my motivations ascribed to
God, as in God has blessed us in sending you here. I don’t recall putting in an
application with God for this job but even my boss has the God thing going and
when things get tough, he pulls out the big fella and says stuff like, well God
must have a reason for this, God has a design. Obviously I have had to scale
back my cussing to an extreme degree and only when I am in my car alone can I
cut loose with some good, satisfying profanity! All this sacred has to be
balanced with a robust God dammit and son of a bitch every now and then!
It is interesting however that all this religious
stuff has caused me to study up on and become more fluent on where I stand in
relation to the great mysteries of life. This is properly the subject for a
whole other essay and I have been working on that too. Suffice it to say that I
feel my perspective has become more sophisticated in that I am including a lot
more than I was when I was 28. I will paste in here some highlights of various
texts that I am studying so that I will have something intelligent to say when
I happen to get caught on TV again. When I am around town now, people have seen
me, they know who I am, I have to be careful because I am now a public figure.
I am representing more than just FCA.
edited from FCA texts 6/6/98
Compassionate people want to help others and correct
perceived wrongs, injustices and inequities. These motivations, whether secular
or religious, are essentially the same. I perceive certain things to be going
wrong with the world and I see service as action that seeks to right those
wrongs. I believe a core human attribute is to want to try and alleviate
suffering.
At the heart level comes the realization of being
human, more than animal and ego desires. A person can begin to see outside of
themselves and recognize and identify a common humanity. When you see another
human you are also seeing your self. You are the same. Thou art that.
I am searching for a larger meaning in life. Service
work holds the promise of a transformational experience that satisfies these
self actualization capacities. People want to be fulfilled and regardless of
the reasons they use to gain this fulfillment it seems to me to be an inborn,
innate, teleological tendency. Perhaps at the highest levels of being human is
the urge to go outside of oneself, to make and take action in areas of concern.
Service is what Quakers/ people do when they want to act on their principles.
“Witnessing” is an expression of faith. I am steering towards my highest
motivations and that is the best I can do.
The “higher” motivations are all on the same scale. It
is a question of degree. Maybe you feel strongly the suffering of others and
feel a need to walk the path of doing something about it. Where your reasons
and motivations are will be an evolving process. Throughout life, how service
is framed rests in a developmental context.
Some endeavors can be grand with a huge impact while
others are more middle of the road and still others are smaller in their
effect.
The effectiveness of a group service project can all get
down to how well it is all framed to the participants. How the stage gets set
is very important to how the play carries on. How this all plays out in the
field depends upon the honesty and forthrightness of the group and the skillful
steering of the leaders. The goals and agendas involve a process. To navigate
the waters of service work, some sensitivity needs to be maintained to the
different reasons people see for their work.
For me personally to get to a space where I am
comfortable with my motivations I really need to be working for something rather than have my
primary motivations be against
something.
Service work can have multiple goals at the same time.
Service work has the dual benefits of materially helping people in need as well
as being the vehicle for a transformational experience for all involved.
I really enjoy group building and working for a
transformational experience. For me it is just great to make a difference in
people’s lives.
Sometimes,
but not always or even most of the time, things must be done while great
distraction prowls the land. The task is
to let the True Goal become apparent as we wend our way through a set of
circumstances and view objects which masquerade as The One.
If
you know me, you know that I seldom speak in absolutes. Frequently, I will say that we exist on
shifting sand and that 'this could be that'.
But
every once in a while The One must be seen and seized. Steve Mueller
Here are some interesting historical connections for
me as I am a Mennonite ancestor and have grown up more or less as a Quaker. My
ancestry has coincided with where I am at today. I am actually a product of my
ethnic background. It is fascinating to me that my own roots would be so
congruent with where I stand today, as a firm believer in the right to
establish my own peculiar understandings of the world.
Protestant
Reformation/ Mennonites
Before and after the Reformation, the state church,
both Protestants and Catholics were persecutors of nonsubscribers. Two main
issues: 1) State-Churchism vs individual conscience and choice, 2) Pacifism and
non-resistance vs force of arms and coercion.
A small group of men in Zurich, Switzerland, Conrad
Grebel, Felix Manz and George Blaurock, erstwhile disciples of Zwingli, “came to believe that the name “Christian”
should be applied only to those who truly practice the teachings of Jesus”, not
just people who go to church.
1/21/1525 The above men baptized each other as true
disciples of Christ and Anabaptism was
born.
A core point was questioning the true function of the
church and it’s relation to the state and the individual, membership voluntary,
free from hierarchy and coercive power of old church
Christ not present in the sacraments but in the body
of the believer, religion is an individual heart experience, each individual
responsible to God alone for his spiritual standing, baptism only upon confession of faith.
“...frowned
upon “testimony meetings” and regarded them as evidence of spiritual pride.
Emphasis was placed on the deeper life with God, rather than on a noisy
emotionalism.”
1660
The Martyrs Mirror, a
monumental illustrated book including all known Christian martyrs from Christ
to 1600. My Mennonite ancestors were
persecuted, tortured and murdered for their beliefs.
1677
William Penn visited Cresheim Germany and converted Peter Schumacher to
Quakerism, Schumacher is my ancestor. Penn later preached from Schumacher’s
front steps in Germantown, where I was born 13 generations later.
The
Germantown Antislavery Protest of 1688. Quakers and Mennonites collaborated.
Quakerism (I am a universalist
Quaker rather than “Christ centered” Quaker,
so I am laying out my own twists on the common themes.)
What
people are having faith in is principles, not some immutable, literal truth.
The principles are the critical thing.
Bob
Brown, retired theology professor from Stanford, says you cannot separate the
mind and heart. A human being is a whole. Mind and heart, content and process
cannot be separated. This is in direct conflict with the preaching of Brother
Wayne and a lot of others who make the easy observation that the mind is false
and the heart is true. My project is to understand and integrate, not to divest
bone fide aspects of my self.
The
Kingdom is within. There is that of God in every man. The inner light, a
portion of truth is held by each person. In Quakerism the idea is to establish
your own relationship with the higher forces of life. This coincides with the
Mennonites to a degree.
Obviously
salvation can mean a number of different things. What I see is it being a transformation where one changes course and
atones for past wrongs done, to others and oneself, and starts over. Permission
is granted to begin a new. This is atonement, at-one-ment, with one’s deepest
aspirations. Salvation is perhaps the process of becoming congruent with one’s
deepest ideals. This can easily be put into a secular context and the notion of
being reborn, resurrected, risen again, can be seen as a metaphor for pulling
up one’s bootstraps and starting over after taking the wrong or personally
untrue path.
“But
I’ll get back, on my feet someday. The good Lord willing, if He says I may. I
know that the life, I’m living’s no good. I’ll get up and live, the life I
should.” From Wharf Rat: Hunter/ Garcia
1647
first preaching of George Fox
1644-1718
William Penn, (in Jordans England, where Penn is buried, part of the Meeting
House or the barn is constructed out of wood from the Mayflower), Penn drew up
the constitutions of the colonies of New Jersey and PA, which had clauses for
perfect religious freedom. These folks were tired of being persecuted and
hassled by the state religions in Europe.
Quakers,
the Society of Friends, have no
creed, no statement of truth, (I believe in God the father...), no liturgy,
priesthood or outward sacrament, women are equal , refuse to take an oath, are
pacifists. Similarities with Mennonites.
Fox
distilled themes that were formerly separate and which had no unity under a
central philosophy or group of people. Fox emphasized the importance of
repentance (atonement/ salvation) and personal striving for truth, insisted on
inward spiritual experience, testimony against war, recognition of women’s
ministry, no use of professional ministry.
The
operation of spirit is not limited to time, person or place and therefore
Quakers were charged with unbelief in the scriptures and Christ’s person and
work.
In
the early part of the 19th century there was an emphasis on the
Christ within. American Friend Elias Hicks pressed the Doctrine of the Inner
Light in such a way as to stress the Christ within way over the historical
Christ and his work. There was a neglect and even a disparagement of the
scriptures as “outward” and unnecessary. Today there are three main divisions,
unprogrammed (silent meeting), programmed and evangelical Friends.
Silent
meeting Quakers: the service of meeting shall depend upon spiritual guidance,
earnest striving of the individual to know God for himself, danger of
substituting the symbol for the reality, belief that same spirit that gave rise
to the scriptures is still around today. “Quakerism is an atmosphere, a manner
of life, a method of approaching questions, a habit, an attitude of mind.
Attempts to enforce truth speaking by means of an oath leads to a double
standard of truth.”
Today’s
Quakerism: You don’t have to be a
Christian to be Quaker but Quakers do acknowledge and value the historical
foundations as a religious society based on the teachings of Jesus Christ,
particularly as understood and articulated by George Fox. There is that of
God in all people, each person holds a measure of the light or truth, all can be ministers, continuing revelation,
together we may discern a fuller understanding of the truth, meetings are
unprogrammed and free of ritual, pacifism, equitable allocation and stewardship
of resources. Membership implies involvement in the larger community of Friends
Monthly, Quarterly Meeting, Yearly, FGC etc. similar to the Thing. Business and committees run by consensus
rather than majority rules. We recognize that no single individual possesses
“truth” in all it’s completeness. Disagreement and even conflict are normal to
life in any vital and dynamic community. Deal forthrightly conflict
w/spirit of openness.
6/6
Speaking
of Quakers, I went out to check on how things were going with cleaning the glue
off the new floor and Emmett had dug out a bunch of my caulking job from
yesterday. He is just in his own world and it is difficult to get through
sometimes. He doesn’t seem to recognize that I am his boss and when I tactfully
try to direct him, he has tons of hair brained ideas other than what I want to
be done and finally I just have to tell him to do it or leave it all for when
Harold gets here. Emmett clearly has Alzheimer’s and periodically experiences
states of heightened confusion. He will repeat the same things, count
incorrectly, respond inappropriately but he is still enough all there to have a
good conversation. He is a sweet guy and I have to respect him for being the
hard working, dust bowl, farmer that he is.
That’s
the problem with people in general, they all have minds of their own and
varying levels of competence in different areas and when you get a bunch of
them together to do a complex task, invariably there will be discord and better
ways suggested and silly mistakes and if you are not careful, lingering hard
feelings. That is what happened with Lloyd Steiner up in Idaho at Elk Summit.
Sometimes if you have to step in and tell somebody something, for the sake of safety
of a good job, those folks become permanently alienated. Sometimes no amount of
kid gloves can disguise the fact that you are overriding someone else’s
judgement. Hopefully Emmett is out in right field far enough to not hold a
grudge for me please asking him not to dig out my caulking job.
Here
are some quotes that I have compiled which get right into my current milieu of
religion and what life is all about. They have become more apropos of this
essay as I have found myself closer to the threshold of what is really real....
I do not know what I may appear to the world;
but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and
diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell
than ordinary; whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Sir Isaac Newton 1642-1727
The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the
earth and men do not see it. Logion 113, But the Kingdom is within you and it is
without you. If you will know yourselves, then you will be known and you will
know that you are the sons of the Living Father. But if you do not know
yourselves, then you are in poverty and you are poverty. Logion 3
Jesus, translated from the
Gnostic Gospels According to Saint Thomas
The manifestation of the sacred in a stone or a
tree is neither less mysterious nor less noble than it’s manifestation as a
“god”. The process of sacralizing reality is the same: the forms taken
by the process in man’s religious consciousness differ.
Mircea Eliade
You will say, Christ saith this and the
apostles say this, but what canst thou say?
George Fox
It is the theory that decides what we can
observe.
Albert Einstein
So many things fail to interest us, simply
because they don’t find in us enough surfaces on which to live and what we have
to do then is to increase the number of planes in our mind, so that a much
larger number of themes can find a place in it at the same time.
Jose Ortega y Gassett
The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come
from it’s meaning but from it’s certitude.
Eric Hoffer
The truth of direction must precede severity of
observation.
Sir Francis Bacon
Primary metaphysical assumption: ultimately
unexplainable primordial assumption from which the whole world is constructed,
axiomatic, unexplainable, unprovable.
Gary Witherspoon
Every language contains terms that have come to
attain a cosmic scope of reference, that crystallize in themselves the basic
postulates of an unformulated philosophy, in which is couched the thought of a
people, a culture, a civilization, even of an era.. Such are our words
“reality, substance, matter, cause, space, time, past, present future.”
Benjamin L. Whorf
In choosing to view the world through one
theoretical perspective rather than another... to adopt an exclusively
political, social, psychological, behavioral or cognitive view, one easily
forgets that one has adopted that perspective for the sake of analysis only and
begins to perceive the world and our knowledge of it as inherently
compartmentalized in those ways.
A. Bloom
...problem of separating mental process from
mental content...Is the belief...an indication of a certain process of thinking
or is it an “idea” embedded in an unremarkable logical process? Not only is
such a discrimination difficult but “content” and “process” are not really
distinct, in that “contents” profoundly influence “process.” Somebody
Levy
Experience is something man projects upon the
outside world as he gains it in it’s culturally determined form.
Edward T. Hall
When a code is familiar enough it ceases
appearing like a code, one forgets there is a decoding mechanism. The message
is identified with it’s meaning.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
In our ordinary day to day experience we think
we perceive the visual world objectively, as it really exists, in three
dimensions, with all it’s properties of color, form and texture. According to
this attitude of naive realism we regard our conscious experiences as
subjective, private and derivative. However...the reverse is the case. The
primary things are our own conscious experiences.
Sir John Eccles
How unjustified it is to always set up one’s
own mores as absolute.
Herodotus
The responsibility merely to repeat a
preexistent pattern is no longer the only possibility and man has come to
realize that his greatest and most beautiful task is to construct his life
after models of his own choosing or, without any models, according to his own
principles.
from book: Philosophical Anthropology
...that which is, is no longer anything
more than what is said...words...it is in them that what we imagine becomes
what we know and on the other hand, that what we know becomes what we represent
to ourselves everyday.
Michel Foucault
6/7
I
will go to the Powerhouse, for the first time attending church four times from
Sunday to Sunday. Maybe Thompson will take us out to the buffet again! I just
bought a bargain copy of Messiah highlights yesterday and it is interesting
that I have become so interested in Baroque and Renaissance church/ religious
music and like to sing a long....”Glory to God!....” and all those great
Messiah tunes. I am in an overtly religious environment
where folks take that stuff dead serious while I approach the music from an
aesthetic, metaphorical standpoint. It sounds great. I agree that the Messiah
is one of the greatest ever. It is inspiring, but I will wait till God pokes
his head through the window here and says “Son, why have you doubted me for so
long?” I went out to the Olympic coast years ago with the express purpose of
finding a sign and with no sign, I made a sea change in my approach to the
great mysteries, which ended up with me being agnostic.
Well,
the Pastor did take us to lunch again and after he finished eating two huge
plates full of food, one salad and the other catfish and fried chicken, he
regaled us with one long monologue about all kind of stuff. He told us how
Dorothy’s stomach and intestines are all folded together and the doctors told
her she could never eat again. Apparently she was given 17 days to live in
February. The doctors are all giving their services for free now and so is the
nurse. It is an actual miracle that she is still alive. The doctors come over
just to hang out and be around her. So,
Ted has been feeding her cookies and stuff and putting tacos in the blender and
low and behold, she took a dump and the doctors came over and got it out of the
toilet and were dumbfounded over how that could even be possible. Thompson
loves to go fishing. He said he would fish for minnows in his coffee cup if
that was all the fish around. Dorothy is a shop-a-holic and has over 300 pairs
of shoes... so he goes on and on and on. I love to fish, she loves to shop. I
got my wife a $44,000 Cadillac and mine cost $34,000. I used to get maybe $2800
a month in the pastoral offering but now with us meeting in a storefront, I get
maybe $180. He goes to other churches as a guest preacher and is expected to do
a special offering for that preacher and so Ted needs to have some cash to
start the bidding. “I got $300 for this offering, will anybody match it?”
Sometimes they can get an offering up to $5000 or more. Ted took us out to
lunch on the offering from today, even though it was only around $150 or so.
At
church he again came up with some cool stuff to say, touching heavily on the
theme of for every thing there is a season and a time and a purpose. I didn’t
know that was from the bible, I thought the Byrds made that up. Anyway the
Pastor said that when the peach tree has ripe fruit, that is the time to pick
it. You don’t go to the pecan tree in the summer and look for nuts, that is for
the Fall. If you have saved some pecans then you are wise but that’s not the
point. His point being basically to go for life and recognize when is the time
to harvest and show your fruits and when is the time to wait. When it is time
to go for it, don’t hold back, recognize the time, go for it, let it shine. And
don’t go half way. Don’t be like wearing a dead man’s suit. A dead man looks
all dressed up from the front, but in the back he don’t got nothin’ on. You
want the full suit.
He
got into the mind and heart but had a nicer take than Brother Wayne, he said go
to school, get your education but don’t forget your heart. I feel that the
Pastor Thompson has a lot of good, common sense stuff to impart to his flock,
he lays it out in biblical parables with his own personal twists and it is all
very accessible and easy to take, especially when you know him a bit. It is not
pretentious. He is real and genuine and so are the folks from the Powerhouse.
Another
parable the Pastor got into was that of Saul on his way to persecute some of
the faithful and how Jesus stopped him on the road to Damascus and said “Why
dost thou persecuteth me?” What I get out of this is that Jesus is standing in,
metaphorically for all of humanity. Jesus is really asking, “Why do you
persecute humanity for being different from yourself?” Jesus is trying to get
Saul to see that Saul himself is the same as those he wants to persecute. Thou
art that. I might be stretching this and am certainly no biblical scholar, but
I can see that this could be metaphorical for a general lesson about tolerance
and it really doesn’t matter if it is Christian or not. If people twist all
biblical meaning to suit their own purposes well I guess I can do it too.
Today
the congregation was really hitting it, they were singing spontaneously and it
sounded good, clapping hands, amen, AMEN! That’s RIGHT! Praise God. Thank you
Jesus. It is all really participatory and inclusive. If you are on board you
really belong, you are in, you have respect. Meaning is given through the
community and supported by sharing all the stuff they do. They all share in
holding Russell’s baby, everybody holds the baby. It is a community baby. The
community has strength. They had a testimony session where a lot of folks got
up and gave thanks for anything they wanted, including us Quakers sitting in
the back. “Thank you for the Quakers.” The Pastor can really sing too, when
they were singing one number and rasing their hands and clapping, Ted was
reaching up for the Lord with a mighty voice, eyes looking right through the
ceiling. It is a great production and by the time all two or more hours of it
is done, and we even come late because they start at 9:30 and we come at
11:30AM, you are hungry and then you go to the buffet and it is dam near 4:30
when you get back home. This is not just going to church. This is practically
an all day affair and the Pastor usually goes and preaches somewhere else at
night as a guest and brings his congregation with him. Today he said to bring
their robes and if everybody had theirs, he would preach in his robe. They can
sing and he is going to show off his choir. Hallelujah!
6/9
This
afternoon and evening we had a rip roaring thunderstorm come through with a
repeat of 70 mph winds, some of which tore a branch off the sycamore and dented
my fender. The winds started up and you could hear the suction outside the
windows like a giant revving motor. We all had to stand by the windows and
watch in amazement as all sorts of debris just whipped past and dust swirled
and the radio announcer came on and started talking about tornados out by
Sheppard AFB. Then the rain came and hail and wind and everything became almost
dark as night at 5:30PM. The temperature cooled off nicely after a fairly hot
day of putting siding on the bath house from hell. The storm was savage and the
equal of any Tucson monsoon, lightning would flash, an X-Ray straight to your
soul and then the thunder would rip, peeling back enormous, massive shock waves
of sound. We would all hunch up after the flash and then WHAM! The thunder.
This went on all through dinner and then there was a short respite while I
swept all the water out of the roofless bath house. You’d think for $7000.00
you could get a fucking roof. Then the rain came back for a fierce reprisal
after which we all hit DQ and witnessed a fantastic sunset of huge cumulus
clouds all pink and gold and greyish thunder beings contrasted below.
Emmett
told us a lot about his days as a CO during WW2. He was in Trenton, MT and was
the farmer for 150 people, responsible for growing the bulk of the food. He had
a few good stories of slaughtering pigs and cows all by himself and how he
tricked the horse into dragging a dead cow, “because a horse won’t go near
somethin’ dead.” “So I backed him up to it.”
Mike
came by during the day with his paintball gun and shot up the dumpster pretty
good. Way to go cowboy!
6/13
I
asked Harold today what he thought about forgiveness and he gave the parable of
the adulteress who, for her transgression, was going to be stoned and Jesus
said, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” This illustrates that
we as humans are not perfect and will be standing in the need of forgiveness
someday too, so it would behoove us to be more tolerant of people’s foibles and
misdeeds. The Quaker idea of there being some of God in every person speaks to
a realization that when you see another, you are seeing yourself too. The
unique interiority that is you is shared in similar ways by all humans. Harold
went on to talk about how the members of the churches he has rebuilt all had in
common a feeling that the church burning was a transformation point for the
larger purposes of God and that ultimately it would be for the good. I
mentioned that religious or secular, if people don’t move on from tragedy and
turn it around somehow, it will just embitter them and eat them up inside. The
folks whose churches burned were doing the only thing they could do for their
mental and emotional health.
When
I came to terms with my burglary a few years ago, what forgiveness amounted to
for me was in simply allowing myself to stop obsessing about it, the same was
true for my suspension from SCA. I didn’t end up condoning what I thought was
wrong, I just stopped letting it eat me up every day all day long. We got into
a line about how Harold’s daughter’s friend was raped and the process of her
forgiving was tough but she also wanted to see justice done. This was
interesting because forgiveness then appears to be more than a mealy mouthed,
milquetoast action, but something that you do as self preservation, with a
certain amount of compassion but yet still with a clear eye on what is just,
what is right and wrong.
Today
in the paper was a square off between an atheist philosophy professor and a
religious advocate. It was predictable and reminded me of my early college and
university years. I had a few thoughts on this myself as the main question was
“how can there be a God if there is so much evil in the world?” What I was
thinking was why do people want to rip each other off, (and also kill, rape,
ethnically cleanse, drag guys buy the head behind a truck etc) how can that be
such a consistent and prevalent activity in human history?
What
I came to was a broad realization of how all life IS on earth. All life, at the
most basic level, must take other life in order to live. Life must consume
itself. Animals are always taking from each other’s stashes and killing and
eating each other. That is a primary condition from which we as humans are not
divorced. The motivations for robbery and burglary are in many ways similar to
how a coyote would eat the winter stash of a field mouse. It is flat out
opportunism with no morals. I am not trying to justify robbery, just to point
out that there is a pretty good precedent in nature and that may be the root of
this behavior, even though the human race has the potential to behave according
to higher codes of conduct, if people are not taught, they will act more like
animals.
Additionally,
I don’t see how the organization of the universe and the world, could possibly
be set up so that humans are the only species who can be saved by a God and
that somehow animals and nature are just here for us to manipulate in any way
we want. To me that is absolutely absurd. Life is an mazing miracle, from the
smallest tadpole and protists to our own ego heavy, self important species. The
miracle of it all is no less because it is algae, corn and oak a fox or a
monkey or a fish. I can’t ever possibly buy a literalist explanation of a
paternalistic God and the Garden of Eden, original sin, etc, that won’t wash
with the Fredster.
On
another tack, lately things have been very satisfying in terms of spending
money. I have spent over $5000.00 in the last week or so and that is fun! Let’s
see, a FAX machine, an AC unit, a vacuum cleaner, various stuff for my computer
like a cpu fan, plastic covers, mouse pad, an answering machine, all kind of
food and miscellaneous stuff. I go in and buy it baby, pull out that check book
and pop another one. One outrageous glitch, the Credit Union babe, Nancy Law,
somehow got it mixed up on our checks and they read Ministry to Burn Churches
rather than Ministry to Burned Churches. I wondered why people were looking at
me kind of funny when they read the check, like I was some kind of psycho, Ku
Klux Klan, Timothy McVeigh kind of guy. We will get that rectified.
Harold
is a nice guy. He is the Director of QWI and my boss, in town until the end of
the month to make sure we get off to a good start. He fell and broke his back
in six places, broke both feet and ripped all the ribs out of his sternum. He
is recovered now but pretty stove up and diabetic too, 57 and probably weighing
in at 300. Harold can talk. He can sit around and blow for hours about all
kinds of stuff and I have had to call him on it a few times as he just gets too
far out there away from anything we were originally saying. He just likes to
hold forth and I like to as well, but hopefully I am not as ignorant of other
people squirming in their chairs. Medzio and I roll our eyes when Harold isn’t
looking.
Medzio
Kumpuni and John Swan came out with Harold. Medzio is from Tanzania and half
Polish and a very nice young man. I like him a lot. The same for John, although
he is a white guy from the eastern USA. It is a blessing to have two staff come
out who are easy, fun, intelligent and willing to take orders.
We
have had a van donated to us, with a tape deck, which is good since my
Panasonic in the Toyota finally bit it after almost ten years, starting in the
Rambler. Harold also brought his big red panel truck which is absolutely full
of tools which are one, red hot at 108 degrees again today and two, scattered
and impossible to find. Harold sits inside by the AC and orders Medzio and John
and I to go out to the tool truck and get this and that and that shit is on
fire and lost in a totally unorganized mess. You come back in and Harold then
has more orders and I was joking Medzio if he delivered pizza too? We were
laughing about being Harold’s slaves. Harold is providing the perspective that
this is all a large process.
Bob
and Carrol Pearson came this last week from Las Vegas, NM and they were great,
very Quakerly and helpful and interesting and I was sad to see them go. We laid
on our hands to them before they left and had a significant goodbye ceremony,
preceded by a morning F&W style weekday Meeting, preceded by Harold talking
for an hour, most of which I spent reading the sports page and the paper. If
Pippen hadn’t have gone 2 for 16, the Bulls would have taken it in Chicago, but
maybe he tanked it because he hates the owners so bad.
6/14
Thompson
came over this morning to sit around before church and he said WF had never had
white folks helping black people. Thompson said that something good would come
of the burning, all things being working together for the good, and that maybe
the white folks in WF and the black folks would come closer together.
Apparently there is some bad blood about certain black houses being torn down
and now the city repaying those people. I am wanting to ask the Reverend about
race relations here but haven’t had the right moment. His real last name is
Aravashanty. Theophilus Aravashanty. His daddy only changed it to Thompson
because 1) he got in trouble with the law and was deported and changed it to
Thompson to get back to the USA or 2) nobody could say Aravashanty and so they
changed it to Thompson.
We
talked about revenge and anger and Ted had a clear sense of how anger and
revenge are going to eat you up. He is having somewhat of a problem with that
in that the woman who is the church’s primary suspect in the arson, started
wanting to jump Ted’s bones a number of years ago, she offered to take care of
Ted’s sex life and Ted told her that even if he was free to do that, she wasn’t
his type of woman anyway. He then made sure to say that was a big mistake,
never tell a woman she isn’t your type, tell her anything but that. Ted said
this other lady couldn’t even be a hatband on his wife’s rottweiler. “My wife
isn’t perfect, but she is 90% of what I want in a woman.” So, in addition to
this other gal having had the church title in her name, and her husband leaving
her because he felt something was really wrong, she was spurned by the preacher
and so she started to spread rumors that Ted burned the church himself and has
already collected the insurance money and paid for Dorothy’s hospital with that
plus bought the new Cadillac, but Ted sold all his cows for the Cadillac,
except three and a bull, and God knows that Ted didn’t burn that church. This
woman has now taken up with Buchanan, with whom Ted used to be friends and who
has the great junk shop and Buchanan is going to marry her. Ted and Buchanan no
longer talk.
When
we got to church today, the Reverend asked us to come and sit in the section of
honor up by the dais and that gave me a bird’s eye view of the most devout
members during the whole service.
Church
today was really good. The spirit was all there. In the testimony part where
everyone gets up and says thanks for getting their relatives across the
dangerous roads and for everything else they feel like, thanking the Lords for
all good things. One woman thanked for her dental work turning out OK, she had
all her teeth pulled, “I had somethin’ on my teeth, I don’t know what it
was...” but she thanked the Lord for what she had left. Today there were two
organs and drums. The big organ played bass lines and the big fat sustained
notes and chords while the other was actually an electric piano. During
testimony individuals would spontaneously start singing and everyone would join
in and the rhythm section would start up in earnest. They would get down and
then ease back into testimony, the drums and organ still working so while a
person was giving thanks, they had their own little rhythm to lay it on us
with.
We
were talking about Ted’s sex issues with Dorothy not being able to do it for
four years and the other woman wanting his lovin’ and Harold said he has been
impotent for ten years because of his diabetes. I asked him if Viagra did
anything for him and he said he was looking into it but hadn’t tried it yet. He
said it was a blessing to be impotent when he has to constantly deal with teen
age girls and how he is essentially free of the constant temptation of the
flesh. That will be an issue here when the Russian single woman who is 42 comes
with her two sixteen year old girls, one daughter and one cousin for the whole
month of July and I need to keep the office door shut to keep the cool air in.
So here I am in church with people giving testimony and praising the Lord and I
am lusting after hot girls and women in nice clothes shakin’ it for Jesus. It
is really a sublime to the ridiculous kind of thing, Fred in the house of the
Lord with eyes following those beautiful big black butts. God help me.
The
choir was particularly good today. They started out with Rock of Ages and I
shut my eyes and it became much more powerful. The singing and participation
just sews threads deeply through the community. It is powerful participation.
The music has SPIRIT and packs an emotional wallop and an x-chemistry that is
equal to any of the best Dead concerts. It is performed with deep feeling. It
digs down right to the core, really powerful, transformational. You shut your
eyes and listen to the lead singer belt it out and the chorus then responding,
oh man, it is special. The Pastor sang at the end and he is the best of the
lot, way better than James Brown, he let it rip big time, a very, very good
singer. He sang the words “...out of the depths of my soul, Lord I cry, Lord
have mercy...I have done wrong and you have done right, Lord fix my soul
tonight...” Dorothy had come in earlier for the first time since I’ve been
there and she got a resounding welcome by the congregation. “Here is a miracle
from God.” said the Pastor. So when he sang, he was unburdening tremendous
feeling. The feeling is what music is really all about.
I
thought before I came that I would find so much explicit religion to be
distasteful but I am seeing that there is no reason whatsoever for me to
condemn this in any way. These people are not hurting anyone and the Pastor
does not preach any hate. They are OK in my book.
Last
week Thompson did a healing and anointing (with a bottle of cheap olive oil
from the lectern) of a woman who had bad back pains and this week she up on
stage with the choir clapping, foot stomping and swaying with the beat. They
sang “how exc-ellent, is thy name” with sharp stops and then full sustains and
they got so wound up in this number that after it was over they had to
decompress with a few minutes of “thank you Jesus” etc Connie just about came
uncorked with the Holy Spirit apparently descending right into her and she was
writhing and shaking and had to be helped off the stage and go to the bathroom
to clear up her tears. She let it all hang out. The choir leader recommended to
me two Gospel groups who would sound much like this choir. John P. Kee and New
Life and Hezekiah Walker and Love Fellowship. I need to get some Gospel music!
Then,
to close things out, Pastor Wittington, a friend and guest of Pastor Thompson
got up and started singing and carrying on. “Tough times don’t last, tough
people do. This too shall pass. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize of a higher
calling in Jesus Christ.”
6/16
The
following three day trip went north out of WF to Burkburnett, TX, named after
Burk Burnett, a rancher who did very well as a result of the Comanche, Quanah
Parker’s influence towards Indian assimilation and coexistence with the white
man towards the latter part of the nineteenth century. Burk Burnett did so well
that he built Quanah Parker a big house in or near Lawton, OK, where Parker
entertained US presidents and foreign dignitaries. Out of TX I went north on 44
into Lawton, Oklahoma which is an absolute pit and then to 49 through the
Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, with a side trip to Meers for a Meersburger
of Longhorn beef. Then it was up 54 to 9E and over through Anadarko, Chickasha
to 19E to Lindsay and then south on 74 through Pooleville and then all back
roads to 35S to Ardmore, which is an absolute cancer of strip development,
terrible, for miles and miles, just as bad as Tucson and then 70W to Waurika
and then 79W to Wichita Falls.
I
stopped in Lawton to check on some museums and learned a lot. The western edge
of the great plains is lifted up, along with the Rocky Mts.. It is higher and
drier in the western plains where short grass prairie dominates, grass
6-18" high, in eastern Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, the Texas
Panhandle and western Oklahoma. Mixed grass prairie, 1 _ - 5' is generally in the Dakotas, Kansas,
Nebraska and central Oklahoma. Tall grass prairie, 3 - 8' high is in Iowa,
Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, small parts of Michigan eastern Oklahoma and
eastern Kansas. On the west, the plains run into the Rockies, on the east they
run into woodlands. These woodlands in eastern Oklahoma and north central Texas
are called the cross timbers. The cross timbers area extended south into the
Wichita Falls area and down into Dallas with another finger extending down
further west. The woods were so thick people had tremendous difficulty passing.
Now the only remnants of cross timbers are in the Wichita Mountains refugium. The southern plains end with the gulf coast
and the Edwards Plateau of Texas Hill Country fame. The north the plains run
into tundra.
The
plains are adapted to grazing, fire and a certain low level of rainfall and
there are analogous ecosystems around the world, the steppe, the veldt, the
pampas. Grasslands dominate where low rain, grazing and a short fire regime
give grasses the advantage over other plants. The matted roots hold the soil
together through grazing, fire and drouth. Grass grows from the bottom of the
stem and thus can take a fire and grow back fast. In part, the dust bowl, from
1933- 1937, was the result of almost entirely disrupting the plains ecosystem
by killing all the bison, stopping the fire and plowing up all the soil.
An
interesting rock type around the Oklahoma southwest is Permian red bed , which
may be the ultimate source of the reddish Oklahoma soils, which clearly are run
through and through with iron.
In
1492 there were over 60,000,000 buffalo. In 1889 there were only 500 left. The
slaughter was unparallel by anything in the history of mankind and went a long
way towards finally conquering the plains Indians by taking away their main
resource.
Between
1866 and 1890, 10 million Longhorn cattle, Bos taurus texanus, were driven to
railheads headed east. Longhorns were descended from Spanish stock which were
periodically abandoned and became feral in the southwest during the Apache
wars, Mexican-American war, the Civil War. The breed is tough and hardy from
having to fend for itself. As better beef cattle replaced the Longhorn, the
breed started to die out but a pure herd of 500 was chosen by ranchers and
brought to the Wichita Mountain Refuge and now they can be sen in all their
mottled glory. As the railroads expanded such long drives were no longer
needed. The cowboy legend and the railroads crossed paths as the west was tamed
and made safe for settlement. The old ways vanished as the rails brought in the
new faster than the old could adapt.
I
had the chance to learn a little bit about the Wichita Indians, the namesake
for this incredible hot, windy but not God forsaken place. In 1591, Coronado
came sliding through looking for Quivira and gold. He noted 24 different
villages, some with as many as 200 grass houses and up to 1000 people per
village. These were the Wichita and this was Kansas and western Oklahoma and
Texas. The Wichita did seasonal agriculture with corn, squash, beans, pumpkins
and mixed that with seasonal hunting of buffalo and other game in the winter.
They adapted to drought by going for more hunting and with lots of rain, they
could spend more time on agriculture and then trade dried produce for meat with
the full time hunters and nomads like the Comanche and the Apache. The
ancestors of the Apaches arrived on the southern plains by around 1400.
The
Wichita were located in the right place to get horses and firearms and get in
on the cutting edge of the dawn of the plains Indians horse culture. From an
estimated 30,000 Wichita people there were only 1400 in 1820.
The
Texas republic was established in 1836 and in 1855 Texas joined the union. The
Wichita were given a reservation on the Brazos River. Hostility with the whites
led to their removal to a reservation on the Washita River in west central
Oklahoma. In 1900 the reservation was divided into allotments of 160 acres per
person on the tribe and the rest of the land was declared “surplus” and opened
to white settlers. 160 acres equals a quarter of a section. The US government
was hoping the Indians would assimilate to farming and white mans ways but in
the end, the old culture was broken and what was offered up in it’s place was
not enough to sustain these people through the generations.
6/17
I
stopped in to visit the Kiowa tribal complex outside of Mountain View and was
perusing their exhibits when a man came out of the back and started to talk. He
was a very friendly and personable guy, a full blood. A skin. He was the
grandson of Lone Wolf, whose picture can be seen in Bury My Heart at Wounded
Knee. He was a tragic figure in a way because he was the museum curator but
there were big holes in his knowledge about his people and his traditions. The
elders are almost all gone, the language is not spoken among the majority of
people, the kids don’t seem to care and some only become interested in their
ancestry when they get to college and begin to want an identity in
general.
The
same thing happened to the Kiowa that happened to the Wichita. They had a
reservation but in 1889 and 1890 it was dissolved and everyone was deeded 160
acres and the surplus was opened up for a big land run by settlers. Three or
four generations later, the original 160 acres has been inherited by so many
ancestors that there is not much space or value on the individual level. A lot
of these type of lands are leased for agriculture. A lot was sold in the past
for very cheap by people who wanted a bottle of whiskey or didn’t know what
they were doing. The end result is that the Indians have been disinherited from
their land, even the generally crappy land they were removed to in Oklahoma.
In
Oklahoma now there are no reservations but there are lots and lots of tribes.
The tribes have complexes and headquarters and little galleries and visitor
centers but they have no land as a tribe to speak of. There are no casinos. The
tribes are sovereign in some senses but they don’t command any resources and
they squabble with the State and the Feds about taxes on cigarettes and gas.
The people generally get along with the whites because the Indians don’t have
shit that white people want, no fish, no gold, no coal. They can all coexist
because in some senses they are all in the same regional economic boat and the
economy around southwest Oklahoma is agriculture and some manufacturing and
that’s about it, some mercantile and if a guy wants to do good, he has to leave
and go to Dallas or Oklahoma City. It is amazing, sad and tragic that one, two,
three and four hundred years ago this was all so different.
The
Delaware are here, the Nez Perce, the Illinois, the Sac and Fox, all Indians
removed from ancestral lands far from Oklahoma. The Delaware signed the treaty
with William Penn in 1681 but still ended up being pushed westward into Ohio,
down into Texas and finally across the Red River and into Oklahoma. I went to
Ft. Sill and saw the stockade and jailhouse where the Chiricahua Apaches were
imprisoned. I saw Geronimo’s cell in the basement. I had read all about these
places as a youth, I couldn’t get enough information and here I was later, in
my mid-life, seeing the real thing.
Once
the whites had exterminated the buffalo and established overwhelming military
superiority in the east, it was all over for the Indians. Their former way of
life was doomed and never to be seen again. With no food, no land, no autonomy,
with settlers taking and moving in, it was just a major league raw deal. Now
the US is over in Kosovo trying to tell the Serbs not to be beating up on the
Albanians and running them out, quit that ethnic cleansing! I think the US
needs to come to Oklahoma and redress some past wrongs before pulling that
hypocrisy across the globe. There is unfinished moral work here at home that is
too easily forgotten and swept under the rug. The Indians now don’t vote and
have no political power. They are lost and forgotten until a guy goes there and
sees what type of life they have.
One
Indian woman at the Museum of the Southern Great Plains in Anadarko, she had a
very strong individual responsibility rap. She had no sympathy for people
blaming their current state of affairs on the past. She said now is your time,
if you want to be an Indian, do it, don’t cry and point fingers. Some Indian
kids had just come in and given her a bad time about them having to pay to get
in. She was hot too. She was a woman as well as an Indian. She had essentially
let go of the past and was moving on from here, from now. I can really respect
that because that is exactly what is needed to get over on problems like
genocide, gang violence, the ethnic conflicts between Arab and Israeli, Serb,
Croat and Muslim, Protestant and Catholic, Hutu and Tutsi. If people continue
to hang onto old wrongs and hatreds, it never ends, there is no resolution. The
end only comes when enough folks like this friendly Indian woman decide to choose
life over death, to choose fulfillment over bitterness.
The
wind here is totally wild, incessant, buffeting my car this way and that, hot,
unrelenting, fierce, popping tornados here and there. It goes on and on, day by
day with maybe a short respite in the morning before the heat kicks things up
again.
6/18
I
started out today with the usual search for a restaurant. On the whole, these
little and not so little Oklahoma towns have no good places to eat. There are
plenty of chains which apparently have put the little Mom and Pop places under.
I did find a little place in Mountain View yesterday, on 9 east of Anadarko.
The place was packed with homeboys and farmers and they had cleaned out the
buffet so I had to have another burger. Anadarko has zero good food, zilch and
the restaurant I did find I had to send back the biscuits and gravy because the
gravy was clearly just white paste with a little pepper in it.
Anadarko
is the self proclaimed “Indian Capital of the USA” but it is riddled with
problems and contradictions which can be found by looking just under the
surface. On my way cruising for breakfast there was a big turtle in the road
and as I passed by I could see it’s eyes. I thought I should stop and get it
out of the road. In my rear view mirror was a big truck which appeared to
intentionally veer and run over the turtle. I couldn’t believe it. As the truck
passed i could see they were Indians. I was shocked and disgusted. Why would
anyone kill a helpless animal? It is beyond my imagination.
After
my breakfast I went to the Native American Hall of Fame, which was a big green
with metal busts of famous Indians all around the edge and lots of trees and it
was very well done. The only bust made of rock had the nose broken off and all
the tile around the base had been vandalized just the night before. Big pieces
of tile had also been smashed over the heads of Sequoyah, Osceola and Black
Hawk. I had read in the morning paper how Anadarko youth crime was out of
control. The kids have no tradition and no one to teach it to them. It is
tragic and sad to see such a revered animal as the turtle wantonly slaughtered
and the great ancestors defaced and disrespected, their dignity and examples
forgotten. Can unbelieving people be civilized? With nothing to believe in, the
trucks run over terrapins. With tradition broken and nothing solid ever put in
it’s place, these types of tragedies are real and not pleasant to witness.
I
figured I should check out Indian City, as long as I was in town and it turned
out to be total schlock, a giant tourist trap with guys in costumes and a gift
shop full of crap to rival any. I left right away. On the way back to town I
stopped at the Apache tribal complex and it was in pitiful shape, all run down,
with a cheesy tobacco shop and a bingo hall. I was lucky to run into the Kiowa
museum guy and the woman at the other museum because they balanced out my
impressions. I can’t say how it all really is over there and hopefully the
folks will prevail and work things out in a good way.
The
turn of the century architecture downtown was very cool. That is the defining
characteristic of a lot of these small southwest Oklahoma towns. Anadarko had
torn down quite a bit of it but there was still a goodly amount left. I stopped
in at a few shops, one a gift shop selling T-shirts of London, pastel colored
poofy trinkets and other similar junk and I wondered how this old woman could
have stayed in business for thirty years selling this kind of stuff? Who buys
that stuff anyway? She told me a little about downtown and the building’s
vintage.
The
town of Chickasha, pronounced Chickashay, had even more old buildings and more
than twice the population of Anadarko at around 15,000. Chickasha had an
antique store on 524 Chickasha Ave. 73018 that was just way too cool. The store
was filled with stuff I just couldn’t stop looking at. I ended up getting a
painted glass rooster and jay-bird and an old print of a parrot. It was on and
on old junk that I had when I was a kid and saw at my grandparent’s homes. The
shop’s content was like the Smithsonian Museum of American History but unlike a
museum, every thing was for sale and I could touch it all and look through
drawers and cabinets full of old photos of mule teams logging and old calenders
and sheet music.
I
looked in the back room and up the stairs and it reminded me of wanting to
explore the attic at my grandparent’s house, the impulse and incredible
compelling curiosity of the unknown of a big upstairs hiding the promise of
discovery of unknown treasure. I have always enjoyed exploring stuff like that,
the beach, cloistered stream beds and shadowy spaces among trees always hold
the promise and surprise of discovery and the thrill of exploration. Here in
Wichita Falls, at Kell House, I asked the docent if i could peek up in the
attic and he wouldn’t let me. I told him he was ruining a major fantasy. Why is
it that gay guys are so into bed and breakfasts and period furniture and
styles?
Back
on Chickasha Ave. there was a huge furniture store, four story, built in 1904,
ornate metal ceilings, wrap around balcony on the second floor, big central
staircase up to the second floor at the rear and full of dusty old furniture
and paintings and various junk and a family sitting at a table in the back
reading the paper and relaxing with their poodles. The owner was very friendly
and we shot the breeze and I asked him about the local scene. He said what
everyone else did and confirmed the obvious truth of this rural area: as the
farmers go, so does everyone else. If there is no rain, the hot wind dries out
the corn in three or four days and everybody suffers. Rain means life and
abundance, fate again tied to the weather and the vagaries of the gods needing
to be placated.
The
farmers are the ones who buy the furniture and everything else for sale in town
and also who keep their earnings in the local banks. The various manufacturing
plants around pay generally lousy wages and send all their profits “back to the
northeast.” I hear all this talk about growing the economy and bullshit about
global trade being some mysterious savior and then I see the simple economic
relations in these small town and I realize that I am seeing relics and the
passing of a way of life. The world doesn’t owe these folks a living here nor
does it owe the northwest loggers trees and that lifestyle. The world is kind
of cruel in that way but in the big sweep, people are forced to accept change
and let go of the familiar and embrace the new and unknown.
Homeboy
took me upstairs, as his wife’s poodles tried to nip my heels and he said, to
my dismay, that no, i couldn’t see the third and fourth floors but that he
would sell the whole place for $70,000.00 This would be quite a big place for
$70,000., but then you would have to live in Chickasha. The building was
originally a furniture store and has been since 1904, selling couches and beds
and mirrors to generations of farmers and those who came to sell other stuff to
the farmers. I liked Chickasha, especially the name, which I kept saying over
and over to myself as I walked around the historic district soaking in the
depth and quality of this place.
The
Washita River intersects the road everywhere and to the north are the Cimarron
and Canadian Rivers, of historical note from my childhood reading and also of
the Cheyenne and the Black Kettle massacre.
Every
town still has an old movie theater with a big, ornate promenade jutting
upwards out front. In Anadarko it is The Redskin, in Wichita Falls it is the
Wichita, the Washita in Chickasha. In many ways being around here is like
stepping back in time, 20, 30, 50, 100 years ago. The pace is slower, the
attitude different, there is a touch of the south and that whole milieu. It is
new and different and therefore intriguing and exciting.
The
furniture man said he thought the ozone hole was good, because that would let
all the pollution out, kind of like a chimney. He went on to say how an old
house he had, with six chimneys, was always slamming doors shut from the
suction and how the ozone hole had to be sucking bad stuff out into space just
like that. It goes to show that people will compare what they know to the
unknown and transpose those relations onto the unknown, as if somehow what we
know will magically apply to what we don’t know. This is the old a is to b as c
is to x formula.
I
wanted to check out an all black town called Tatums but the AAA map showed it
to be on 74 just south of 7 when it is actually on 7 just east of Ratliffe
City. I missed it. I went through a place called Lindsey on the way and it had
more old buildings to marvel at but I didn’t stop. I started to become hot and
short tempered from driving too much on my precious time off, sucking hot wind
and probably dehydrated. Then I hit Ardmore and Lone Grove, the cancerous strip
development from Hell and I couldn’t even bear top stop, I had to escape, out
towards Waurika, anywhere but here. I had to stop and get gas so I got a thirst
buster and my attitude cooled. Still, why do city fathers ever think that such
nasty strips are any good. The aesthetics are so bad and you end up sitting in
traffic and waiting and waiting and people get road rage. I can see how that kind of life is just
not worth it. What kind of money and livelihood is worth having to suffer such
a poor environment? Whatever the economic needs of a person, it should never
have to get down to living in strip development Hell. The loss of architectural
character and mass production of buildings has degraded the richness of life
and created a cookie cutter world where slaves are just cogs in the wheels of
the global economy. Forget that! That is not for me.
Heading
towards Waurika was a big, big storm, which eventually dumped ten inches on
Ringling and four over near Waurika. The road had a fuzz of rain a foot high
which looked like cotton candy. It gave my dusty car a good wash. I had a
repeat of strong south wind coming straight onto the driver’s side and then
semi trucks coming and pushing more air, which would collapse my hood and roof
with big bangs. Wham! Wham! Wham! I was white knucklin’ it.
Waurika,
Oklahoma, elevation 882', has more cool buildings and thrift stores and junk
shops and lush yards with big trees full of rusted cars and old farm implements
and mechanic’s signs, it’s like my God what do people do out here? I was
improvising on a Bob Dylan lyric “it’s not the end of the world, but it’s
gettin’ there.” You go from strip Hell to trailer trash to Indian wasteland to
lonely roads amongst giant ranches and fields, and then a shot of history and
the shadow of better days reflected in the old buildings. This is a snapshot of
southwest Oklahoma.
After
the heavy rain and 100 plus degrees temperature, it was sauna city,
miserable, oppressive and thick, with
storm cells all around ready to do more of the same.
This
trip all together, is a journey in Americana at it’s most fascinating. I go
into a new area that I know nothing about, coupled with a good curiosity and a
well developed traveling style and a desire to learn. I’m having a blast. The
wind and the storms continue to rip. It is a good light show and every now and
then a loud crack of thunder disturbs my reverie.
I
went over and asked the Motel owners “why do so many people from India have
Motels?” The owner is a British educated Indian, an electrical engineer who was
working in San Francisco and his wife told him to stay with that “but I had to
get a Motel.” They have had this one since 1979 and it was a good place to
raise their kids but they have only broken even. Waurika Oklahoma, break even
and watch the storms roll by.
A
lot of Indians who had less well developed language skills and not as good an
education were making good money in the Motel business and homeboy decided to
go for it. Now he wishes he hadn’t. The kids are all gone and now it is just Mom
and Dad in Waurika, up on the hill, the A-OK Motel. They go back to India
around every five years to visit their home village. “Everyone over there is a
farmer.” One critical point to Indians getting involved in the Motel business
is that they can borrow money out of pools, like the orientals do, with no
interest, so “if they need $100,000., they can get it.” There is a communal
approach to Motel buying that allows a lot of unsophisticated people to go for
it. The guy here said hey, it’s not hard, there is not much you need to know, I
talk better English than most of them and look at me now, I’m in Waurika and it
hasn’t changed at all in twenty years.
The
thunder beings are kicking ass outside. Lightning is popping and flickering by
the second and deep rumbling blankets the horizon. I am listening to some Bach,
who was composing just around the time whitey was beginning to make his
presence felt out here on the plains, getting ready to spoil the party for the
new and dynamic horse culture. Lightning snaps momentary images of cloud layers
high in the sky. Gradually as the storm moves this way, the raw bolts of
electricity are revealed, cutting through all the veils and then wham! there is
thunder and it is close, no longer natural entertainment but real danger.
On
the short ride across the border to Texas, across the Red River I was struck by
two things: there is no escape from country music out here and the food is just
plain bad, greasy and nasty but decently priced. The food is southwest Oklahoma
sucks.
I
got back to the house here and Harold had put up a giant radio antenna and
snaked the wires all through my window next to my bed and then had this big
radio table boxing me in at the foot of the bed. I got to looking at that and
thought about last night’s storm and I said this has to be moved, I’m not
having a lightning rod right next to my bed, it will ark onto the burglar bars
and the steel bunk bed frame and fry my ass. So I had to spend about three
hours undoing all the work they put into this deal and that was a pain.
A
woman who had worked with Harold before and was here when I got back said that
one of the reasons he had a big falling out with his previous organization and
had to start over with QWI is that he would make unilateral decisions and over
ride the Project Director, who went directly to the Board to complain and
Harold was cut loose. Harold asked me if I had any problems with him to say it
to him first and I am working up to it as he has gone out and spent a bunch of
money on cabinets when we had agreed this morning that we need to stop spending
so much money and that we could build this stuff ourselves. He also is a
rambling story teller who gets off on major tangents and doesn’t seem to
realize that people are rolling their eyes and getting bored by it all. Then
when others say anything which he feels is trivial, he will make sarcastic
comments and try to cut the discussion short. I am about to bust him on that
and on spending money. He has strategically not informed me of a way to contact
the Board. Now, I don’t see Harold as a bad dude. He has a big ego and is
somewhat self important but to be a mover and a shaker, that may be somewhat
necessary. He frames the mission to rebuild burned churches is in kind an us
against them, conspiracy against us good guys kind of way, which I don’t feel
is really necessary. I guess there will always be differences of opinion about
big and little things and I can always get rid of the radio system and take out
the cabinets if later I decide they are cumbersome or in the way. I am not
letting the personal style stuff eat at me but I will address it at the right
time.
6/21
I
went to church this morning and the Pastor was not there. Dorothy was in the
emergency room. After a shorter than usual service I went to the emergency room
and after hanging out with the people in the lobby for a bit I went back to
Dorothy’s room and they were just taking her upstairs and I went along. She
gave me a little smile. She was curled up in the bed with an IV in her and her
face was gaunt, eyes closed. Up in the hall by room 454, people came by with
walkers and IVs and people were laying in bed in rooms with concerned looking
family members coming in and going out. It started to make me feel sick.
Dorothy had to throw up and when she was settled down I went in and she asked
about Emmett and his current stomach problems. (We took him to the emergency
room yesterday because he hadn’t been able to keep any food down for two days.)
Dorothy said she was concerned about Mr. McCracken but hadn’t been able to do
anything about it. I told her I would tell him she was concerned and then I
waved and she waved back.
The
doctor had told Thompson that they would just keep her pain free and let her
pass on and Thompson said why can’t keep her pain free and feed her too, “at
least let someone die tryin’ to live and not waiting to die.” He said that
doctor was about to get his nigger up, excuse the phrase he said but that is
his wife. So they are feeding her with the IV and she looks real bad, curled
into a fetal position.
6/26
Last
Sunday the Pastor couldn’t come to do the service so Deacon Toles was doing his
best to do some preaching. He got going on some parable and then proceeded to
say “...and now in the days of divorce and...” and he pulled up short,
realizing he had at least four young single mothers in the congregation before
him. I could see his mind working because he knew he had backed himself into a
corner, he was going to say “divorce and single parent families” but he caught
himself and he said “...in these days of divorce and... whatever.” That was a
moment.
The
Pastor came by today and you could see he was in bad shape, lack of sleep, torn
up inside and suffering. We talked about how the one doctor had advised Dorothy
and Ted last Sunday, to just let the doctors medicate her, stop feeding her and
let her go out with no pain. The doctor said her bowels were and stomach were
collapsed and closed down and then in the hospital she took a couple of big
ones and then another one when she got back home. I thought she was going to
die last Sunday and here she is back home. It is clear she is not going to
recover to normal health but she is hanging on way past all odds now. The drama
is going on for all involved and it is cause to wonder about a lot of things.
Harold
gently spoke about how the doctor was playing god and how that was
unacceptable. Then Harold started telling the Pastor about a recent book by a
French guy called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. This man had been
completely paralyzed by an accident, except for eye movements. Somehow he
caught the attention of one of the nurses with his eyes and from that moment,
they figured out how his blinks could be translated into the French alphabet
and then he wrote the book and the butterfly was set free.
The
Pastor’s eyes were all full of tears as he heard this story. You could see his
respect for Brother Harold. Yesterday Harold held forth for Deacon Ray and Ray
is a guy who clearly respects his elders a lot. Harold can talk and he just
went on and on and on and Ray graciously sucked it all up. Ray said he didn’t
know how to light a hot water heater, on account of him having been raised by
his Mom and Aunt, and him “not having been taught those type of things.”
The
church folks are sincerely grateful that these white folks are here to help
them. There is a distinct advantage to them having someone like Harold around.
Harold is bible studied, a weighty friend, he knows his stuff about
construction and about the history of arson burned churches. Now that he is
leaving, I am going to have to be that person for the church. I am going to
have to learn how to talk the talk and shake the religious grapevine to get
some help in donations, support and volunteers. Harold is a pain in the ass in
some ways with his incessant babble and carrying on endlessly and straying so
far from the topic that you almost hesitate to ask him a question for fear of
the length of the response. He is oblivious to the way people react to his long
monologues. But in any case, he commands the territory of interfaith church
rebuilding and he is sincere and genuine and any problems I have with him are
most certainly not at the level of premises. For me and him it is a question of
style rather than content. Harold can get up and really captivate the
congregations because he has biblical knowledge he can draw off of. Like the
Pastor, he is not dogmatic or rigid with his interpretations of Christianity.
Harold is a real Quaker, eccentric, wordy and active on his principles. Brother
McCracken is a birthright Quaker who has lost some of his marbles. He is a few
tacos short of a combination plate. He clearly has some type of dementia.
I am
a heretic, liberal, science spewing, relativistic, universalist Quaker. Where I
stand spiritually is entirely open to question. A new TV reporter from channel
6 came by the other day and she was a knock out black woman with big geri curls
and shiny red lipstick and sparkling big white teeth and a nice tight dress and
an alluringly nice software package underneath. I have been reading Tom
Kochman’s Black and White Styles in Conflict and I had just finished the
chapter about how white people don’t expect their women to be sexually
aggressive and how it is all a kind of beat around the bush kind of game, like
saying “let’s go listen to some music.” when you really mean “I want to fuck
you like a wild sow.” A community black might say “ hey baby, you sure are
looking good, I’d sure like to shake down some of your peaches.” They don’t play
around with the intention. The intention is clear.
So,
fate had it that Jon had just been up in the attic crawling over emphysema
insulation and he was heading for the shower just as Tara was there and I saw
the opportunity to make a mild sexual comment and experiment with how she would
take it. I made some comment about putting studs from the shower on TV and she
said “then all the women will come running.” It worked!
So,
she and the camera man got me back by the bath house with the camera running and
asked me a few questions about QWI and then when the camera was off, Tara asked
about Quakers. I laid out the Reformation and Anabaptists and George Fox and
oppression by state religions and emigration to Pennsylvania and religious
freedom and Tara said “well, where is Jesus Christ in all that?” So I told her
about Christ centered Friends and Evangelical Friends and universalist Friends
and she got onto the fact that I was a universalist and then the whole
discussion became more of a lecture by her about the bible and the truth and
God’s only chosen son and bla bla bla and then she would ask me more about
Quakers and I would say something and she would go off, not hearing anything I
said and I’m standing there on the one hand wishing she would just dry up and
blow away and on the other hand those shiny lips in the grips of passion. She
is going on about Ephesians :109 and how Christ this and Christ that and I am
at once disgusted and wanting to fuck her.
I
couldn’t tell what I really thought about her rap, that she was a small minded
bigot who’s same exact attitude has contributed to all of today’s and all of
history’s problems. I saw that I was fronting for QWI, I was representing QWI
and I had to stand there and be lectured by a literalist who was not about to
take any point i made seriously at all. I said, “well, you can see by all the different Christian
denominations that there is no one way...” But bla blab bla bla.
I
have a lot to learn and this religion arena is pretty much all new to me. I
never had to suck up too much Jesus stuff with the Quakers but now it is
becoming clear that I need to learn more about it, just to be able to defend
myself and speak intelligently with other religious folks. I hope some of the
old Quakers who come here will help me to see more clearly what this stuff is
all about. This will be good for my education. The interfaith context takes
some of the edge off literalism but
there will be the occasional true believer who I want answers for. I don’t want
to simply fall back on my old standard arguments, this is a chance to learn
some new material and look at life a different way. I can’t believe that a morality play as deep
and compelling as Christianity could all be reduced to a merely black and
white, simplistic level of jargon. There has to be more depth to it. Maybe some
people are educated with the material to only a certain level and they can’t go
beyond that, it is the same as with any type of knowledge. There have to be
more thoughtful, intelligent and complex thinkers who have grappled with
Christianity and come up with better than what Tara was saying.
I
had a thought about what Harold said about the Christian way being a more
compassionate, community oriented path than the Old Testament. My hottest
girlfriends were Jewish and my best friends are Jewish. I don’t have any need
to compare my beliefs against theirs, to try to make myself look good. Texts
and doctrines can be twisted any way a person wants. This harkens back to Eric
Hoffer’s quote that the truth of a doctrine has more to do with it’s certitude
than with any inherent truth it might have.
6/28
The
Pastor today was getting on about “a changed mind” and how it is within a
person to be changed by all kind of things. He said when you get a new car you
are changed, when you get a new computer you just sit there and look at it,
when you get a new wife you just admire her lying there sleeping. The women
gasped a little at that. But then he built towards his point, that your mind
can be changed within, you can get a new attitude and the whole world looks
different. You can walk over a man down on the sidewalk and you can step on him
or you can give him a hand up.
I
get a lot of the messages from the Pastor and Christianity filtered through
hundreds of years of suffering and oppression by whites over blacks. The
general message laid out by Thompson is one of absolute forgiveness of the
oppressors. That the brutal murders in Jasper, TX happened recently and the
fact that we whites are here and have established a presence at the church for
all to see, is about as heavy duty as it gets. The statement is: we are
bridging the gap here in Wichita Falls already, the solidarity seen in Jasper
is here as well. The Pastor and his flock are highly appreciative and obviously
cognizant that what is happening here is not your average, run-of-the-mill
situation, a bunch of white folks coming to help rebuild a black church. The
Pastor talks on Sunday about how the word is not owned exclusively by any
denomination, how it is OK to respect others with different twists. We are
covering some good ground.
Reverend
Thompson was getting into a little Satan action and he said Satan will always
turn up, “like a bad penny.” he gets every body laughing with his anecdotes.
6/29
An
interesting thing has come up. People are so into e-mail and getting on-line
that it has become a problem. So many folks want computer time and enough are
good enough to constantly be changing my settings and doing who knows what with
my personal material. I am going to have to come up with some big limitations
and perhaps deny the use of the computer to volunteers because it is too
distracting to have the on-line world always dangling like a carrot, always
available to punch in a few letters and numbers and listen to that strange
tooting and then see which strangers and friends have deposited a precious few
sentences or a paragraph in your in box. I like e-mail myself but it does not
seem to have the quality and thoughtfulness of a letter. E-mail is much more
frequently like a clipped conversation with little of significance exchanged.
Today
was a watershed. Charles Brickey is here and he is a very competent carpenter
who is leading the volunteers on putting roof on the bath house. I decided
today that the sleeping situation was just plain too hot for people to feel
comfortable here. There was no comfortable space for folks to look forward to
going at night. Sleep was dreaded as a tossing and turning, hellish, sweat
drenched experience that was accentuated by barking dogs, mosquitos and various
disturbing noises and fears of ants crawling into sweat soaked clothing, so I
said OK, I’m am going to lay out for two new AC units, $600.00 and now the
troops have hope, they are happier, the psychology has changed, there is a
haven from the beastly heat. Charles and I also bought a lot of the roofing
material and we carpentered the new 10,000 btu unit AC into the bunk house as
well as ripped two by fours for making trusses tomorrow.
The
cooks started in earnest today and we are getting three for the price of one.
Darlene’s daddy, Rufus Jenkins is the head cook, but he comes along with
Darlene and another daughter, Michelle. They are good and having them here adds
a nice homey atmosphere. Things are moving.
Last
but not least: I called the city building inspector and spoke with him and then
called the architect. The architect said he was going to fax the changes in 15
minutes and shoot if he didn’t and then Mr Bobby Teague approved the changes
over the phone and I went down there and paid the city $1366.23 and walked out
with the permit and the contractor’s set of plans. We have the green light and
Mr Myles will start on Monday on finishing the foundation and steel work. I had
a chance to ask the planning dept guys about some of the old buildings in
Wichita, which is how the homeboys refer to Wichita Falls and some of the
coolest ones are going to be saved and turned into apartments. Good for them.
We talked architecture and that was fun. The new architecture here is now officially
starting, after a month and a half of red flags and gray areas. It feels good.
7/1
The
following are my notes from last night’s group meeting:
Notes
from group/ staff meeting 6/30/98 Fred
Allebach
The
meeting began by addressing the issue of Erin Hull, a 19 year old volunteer,
being invited by Michelle Jenkins, the cook’s daughter, to go to a dance
club/bar on Friday night and stay out to 2:AM and then sleep over at Michelle’s
house. Erin was pouting and putting up a pretty good bad attitude because I
told her I didn’t want her to go. We were going to go to the library but her
attitude had to be addressed and I brought up the signed project discipline
form, the onus on group experience, the red flags involved in going to a bar. I
was secure in that no matter what was aid, she was not going. Erin was unable
to respond initially and was crying. I was embarrassed and disappointed by the
QWI staff reaction to my concerns. Jon, Medzio and Emmett all said they didn’t
see any problems with this plan. I was left hanging on the clothesline with
every rationale I presented being countered by Jon and Emmett, so I started to
feel that this was really untenable and I said so to the staff, that it was
unacceptable to have such a disparity among the staff as to what the proper
boundaries of this program are. What it boiled down to was that Jon, being
young, responded as a participant would, Emmett didn’t fully grasp the issues
and Medzio also took the tack of permitting Erin to go.
Lucky
for me Charles Brickey, another volunteer, jumped in to help me and reinforce
the voice of responsibility, safety, liability and of honoring the project
discipline. Charles helped me to rally and we also identified other issues that
were troubling to Erin, such as not being kept busy all day, age and gender
differences and the need to have a well defined schedule of recreational
opportunities.
Why
is the group experience so important? The group experience and group process
are important because that is the crucible of learning and sharing, where
relationships are made and begin to grow, where the sharing together becomes
important. The power of a group experience is in the togetherness and through
that and a shared task of working for something larger than ourselves that we are
transformed. We find the vigor and meaning and purpose of life right here in
these things.
So
the conversation went around and around, with Erin still saying nothing and I
finally had to say to Jon, “I feel you are trying to find a way around everything
I am saying, do you understand why I am voicing my concerns? As a staff I am
needing your support.” We had a turning point after plenty of talk and me
reframing and reexplaining the reasons why Erin going out alone, without staff,
to a bar was unacceptable and also that Erin began to speak, which allowed
Charles and I to directly address her rather than have Jon and Emmett speaking
for her by proxy.
When
Erin began to come around was when it became clear to her that going to a movie
or going bowling was a whole different animal than going to a bar and that yes,
she could go to a movie and Charles felt that was OK, group-wise, with him. The
point was not that I was singling her out but that the same issues apply to any
group of any size and the nature of the experience here.
Notes
from the meeting:
1-
Participation is as important as the goal of completing a task, the process is
as important as the outcome. Volunteers need to have meaningful work and cannot
be allowed to stand around without a clear idea of what to do, what needs to be
done and the instruction to go after those tasks and feel involved and able to
contribute. The Safety Officer/ Tool Steward staff person needs to be the one
who applies this on the ground.
2-
Medzio will identify and complete a list of recreational options. Staff will
post options and make volunteers aware of options. Volunteers need to bring
personally generated options to the group before they get their heart set on
doing something.
Interacting
with church members and age set church members for younger folks was seen as
desirable, having the church send members over and/or QWI volunteers and staff
going to weekly prayer meetings to meet and interact with the congregation.
3- A
strong orientation will frame the experience in such a way as to explain
unknowns ands establish appropriate boundaries, especially for going out
individually. Orientation needs to stress the community and group nature of the
program and that work is the core of why we are here, recreation and having fun
are definitely important but what we are all about is service and working for
the Powerhouse. Emmett suggested as part of orientation, why did you come? What
do you expect to get out of it? Orientation needs to include a history of QWI.
What is QWI? Why ministry to burned churches? What is service? Medzio suggested
obtaining a VCR and TV so we can show QWI video as a part of the orientation.
4-
It is clear that staff needs to get on the same page as to what this program is
about, what appropriate boundaries are for volunteers and what staff
responsibility is in creating a meaningful experience for the volunteers. The
disparity of understanding was striking. Particularly, the issue of volunteers
going out individually needs to be addressed and staff need to understand the
rationales and reasons for why the group experience is primary and be able to
articulate that. As in any employment situation, staff may have their own
viewpoints on a subject but when they are employed by an organization with a
particular program, staff need to represent that program. That is what they are
being paid for. It is clear that staff now have not really taken the time to
study and know their roles, in spite of previous meetings highlighting the
letters of understanding and what we supposed to be doing. This being
demonstrated by the differences between all and the Director on the subject of
appropriate boundaries and the need to be sensitive to and engage volunteers
during the work and recreational day.
5-
Erin will work on the internet to find websites about burned churches and work
up information packets to enhance our understanding of the problem and the
issues involved.
11:39PM
I
just got in from chasing Brother McCracken down out on the street. He went to
church at 7:PM and some church members came by here at 8:15PM. Emmett had been
driving around for about three hours lost. I saw him go around in a circle once
and miss the right way and then I went out to wait for him but he turned out on
Kell, the total wrong way. I saw him start to go around in circles out there
and ran over and directed him this way. He saw me and said “what are you doing
out here?” I told him where to go and then he drove right past the house. He
said, “I get turned around now more than I used to.”.......
Erin
had a terrible case of homesickness tonight and you could hear her in the
office wailing “I want to go hooooooome.” I felt bad for her and reached out to
talk and she could still smile. I tried to frame things up for her, that she is
not the only one, that it is natural that I was homesick too, that it is one of
life’s passages and that she, being a recent high school grad, is just going
through a couple of heavy passages right now but they are passages we all must
make. I arranged to have Michelle come over and get her, to sleep at Michelle’s
house, as one of Erin’s problems was in being surrounded by strange men and
then sleeping alone. Michelle is cool. She looks exactly like Aunt Jemima and
is very personable, friendly and highly educated. She is Rufus’ daughter.
Today
another of Rufus’ daughters, Darlene, had her daughter, Angie come by and Angie
had her son Ray with her. Rufus said “come over here and see your grand daddy,
your grand daddy likes to see you. I aint seen you in a long time.”
7/2
This
morning the Pastor came around and saw Emmett and said “McCracklin, how you
doin’?” We were also talking about meat and using the whole animal and he said
with a pig, “they use em’ from the rooter to the tooter.”
It
was hellishly hot today, insane, too hot to think and we are out there putting
a roof on the bath house. This was not a good day for me. I only slept 5 _
hours last night. Erin started out good but then Emmett started moving in and
taking away her jobs and Jon could not manage the situation effectively. Emmett
has a way of getting under your feet and in the way and Erin doesn’t have the
savvy to tell him to get back. I tried to explain to Jon that Erin needed to be
lined out on a task that she could focus on all day, but then I look over there
and she is obviously lost. Jon was unable to engage her and do his own work. So
I send her in to Medzio to get her on the computer to research black church
burnings and soon she is out talking with Michelle. I think Erin has an extremely
short attention span and not much initiative, which is a bad combination anyway
but then overlay that with a funky situation like this where it is tremendously
hot and she came to help build a church and there is none of that to do and it
is just fucked up. Erin seems to demand that she be led and entertained and
taken care of at every step and she is not really stepping up to meet this
experience. Erin is a sweet young girl but she has a lot of growing up to do.
She doesn’t have any skills and can barely hammer a nail but carpentry is what
we are doing now. Tonight she wanted to skip dinner with us and go with
Michelle and Rufus and I initially said yes to get her out of my hair but then
I reconsidered and came back and asked her to stay for dinner and to be part of
the group she signed up to participate with. Then Michelle gets an attitude and
she and Rufus leave without saying goodbye. I eventually end up giving Erin a
ride over there to spend the night and we get terribly lost due to Erin’s poor
writing of the directions and the folks don’t even invite me in at the door.
My
staff is so young and they are inexperienced in group work. They are more
focused on themselves and their needs than that of the job or the experience,
so I am constantly having to reel them in from one or another misjudgement or
from a lack of focus on what needs to be happening. For example, we need to be
doing some work outside and Medzio is in here making up a file about who got
baseball hats. For pity’s sake, can I be expected to anticipate all problems
and lay them all out? I was up till past midnight last night with Erin’s
teenage nervous breakdown and Emmett getting lost. I get 5 _ hours sleep and
then work all day in the hot sun with constant bullshit happening with the staff
and Erin and a pouting cook’s daughter. This is starting to suck pretty good.
Russell
from the church is not really handling his end of the job. He says he will come
by and he doesn’t. He says he will get the steel here this week but has done
nothing so far. He needs to get materials on the job and he is not. I have six
women coming this Saturday, three of the Russians at 11:45PM, that will be the
Fourth of July.
Harold
took the title and insurance papers for the van and the registration is expired
so we cannot drive it until he gets temporary tags in Washington DC and sends
them here. There is not one van available to rent in Wichita Falls, not one!
There is not even a six passenger car to be rented. We need transportation to
get out of the house and satisfy the needs for recreation but it looks like we
will have nothing for a week or more. I am feeling disillusioned now. After so
much stuff constantly going wrong, how much can a guy take? QWI has not paid me
for three weeks of work I should have been paid for. They cannot get it
together to pay on time. I am having trouble sleeping because of the constant
flux and flow of issues and problems. If something does go right, it’s effect
seems to be short lasting. What am I going to do with six idealistic people on
Monday with no work for them and no transportation. Even the local charity guy
who said he would call back has not responded to five straight calls. I need to
develop some other work for these folks but Russell is pulling away his energy.
Darlene can’t make decisions independently of Russell, so it is a combination
of chicken with no head and left hand not knowing what the right is doing.
I
don’t have my personal space because this room is the office too and people are
constantly coming in and trying to get on the computer or the phone rings or
somebody has a cut or something. SCA was an absolute cakewalk compared to this.
I don’t know how much more of this constant trouble I can take. I will be
needing some gravy soon. Hopefully Amazing Ann, who is coming this Saturday can
help me get my head screwed on straight. I need an oversight committee like she
suggested.
I
found evidence of people surfing for X rated sites on my computer today. My
staff needs to be focusing on how to present the program successfully and how
to create a positive experience for Erin and they are looking at pictures of
girls being fucked by huge wet dicks. I may have to put the computer off limits
to all except me and keep the door locked. The other day I was taking a great
nap and Medzio knocked, walked in and started typing and got on line. I am
going to have to get him straight pretty soon. I am in too bad a mood now, that
wouldn’t be right. Medzio is a good guy but he is unconscious of a lot. This
morning he felt it was OK to be reading a magazine during the morning
meditation and bristled at my telling him he couldn’t do that, that the job
demands him to participate. He doesn’t like to go to church either and that is
supposed to be mandatory. Am I supposed to force my employee to go to church? I
just don’t feel a lot of initiative from Jon or Medzio in the areas where I
want it, in the social, experiential, counseling aspects. They do good focusing
on specific tasks that they can do alone or with an adult, but i have to pull all
the strings otherwise. That leaves me to administer, recruit, and have to get
out there and tell them what to do to handle the volunteers, then I pass
through the dining room and get roped into a conversation with someone, the
phone rings, I see something I need to tell someone and I am going herky jerky
from one thing to another, unable to clearly focus and make progress in any
discreet areas. It is really quite frustrating. Maybe I am just dehydrated.
7/4
Jon
and I took the kitten to the pound yesterday and it was sad. I knew it was the
ride of death and the kitty was very cute. We got inside and immediately
smelled urine and some low-brow type asked if he could take the kitten and a
nice woman came from behind him and got the kitten and took it away. I had to
sign a receipt. It says: All animals received by the Humane Society of Wichita
County and it’s agents become at once
the property of the Humane Society....and the managers of the Animal Shelter
reserve the right to dispose of all such animals at their discretion and will
release no information thereto.
Here
I have a receipt which equals a life of a cute kitten. I feel like a Nazi.
Charles
Brickey came and did a bang up job by putting a roof on our bath house, making
the trusses himself by ripping down some old two by sixes. Brick was funny, he
went overt to Circle K in the morning to get the paper and came back saying
“man there were some good looking quail over there.” I said “quail?” and he
said “yeah, split tail quail.” Brick also told a good story about one of his
old gym teachers who had really big, long arms. They called him Chimp and all
the kids would be saying it real fast behind his back like chimp, chimp and it
really used to get him wild. One day Charles put a banana skin in his grade
book and Chimp went berserk. God we laughed at that. We had a great laugh
session last night and it felt great.
Tonight
the Russians are coming. They will be here at 11:45PM, a bit late but I must
stay up and welcome them. Today I wrote an e-mail to Harold:
Dear
Harold,
Jon
left this afternoon as he was able to get an $85.00 flight to Dulles as
compared
to hundreds more in the middle of next week. We have no safety
officer
and that may actually be OK for a while as the slab and plumbing
aspects
of the job will not demand lots of volunteers and I can step up for
working
outside and let Medzio do more office stuff. When we start to see
carpentry
on the horizon, that is when volunteers will become more useful.
There
is no steel on the site now but Russell may come through on that.
Russell
seems to have withdrawn from the process and in spite of assurances
on
his part and promises to come over, he frequently does not come through.
I
can't make Russell over into how I want him to be or how he should be for
the
church. The consequences are that the church will just have to spend
money
on materials that could be donated and they will run out of funds
sooner.
I
see Russell as being quite naive about construction and contractors and
these
guys are going to fleece him and the church for all they can get by
working
time and materials and fast talking him.
I don't have all the
knowledge
to say what is right or not with the building process. My primary
responsibilities
are elsewhere anyway.
We
have already seen the outrageous prices the electrician charges, $770.00
labor
for those wires in the bath house, $1,110.00 for one and a half day's
work
upgrading the electric outside. This is not NYC! So, the church is
probably
going to eat it big time on the costs. I offered to have Charles
Brickey
give Russell some advice on handling contractors and Russell said
he
would come by but never did. Russell is choosing to take a certain path.
I
don't understand why and I don't see anyone at the church with the time
or
sophistication to devote to really running the job and insuring that
they
don't totally get taken to the bank. I have explained to the Pastor
and
Darlene that Russell is not involved as much as he needs to be and
that
in his absence, Mr. Miles will just go ahead and order the steel
anyway,
and the concrete too and the church will just have to pay for what
was
promised as a donation. Maybe the church just has a higher crisis
threshold
and when it starts to get clear that things are going awry, they will
take
a hold of Russell and either motivate him or replace him.
Charles
Brickey successfully put up the bath house roof along with Jon. Now
we
have just the one side to finish and we will be in the land of make
work.
Hank Grieb from X-Mas in April has not returned about 8 calls in a
row.
My plan B now is to have Darlene buy us some paint and I will have the
Russians
and Erin and Ann Sieber paint the outside of the house.
Personally
I have had to let go and tell myself, hey, I am not responsible
for
the state of things now, I came to manage the volunteers to rebuild a
church
and it is going on two months now with no church to build. We have
successfully
gotten our work camp infrastructure in place, probably for a
pretty
decent price over-all. Now we are on threshold of having five or six
volunteers
and not much to do. It IS difficult
to keep people busy all day
on
tasks that are not really necessary! This situation is not of my making
and
all I can do is explain how it got this way. Psychologically I cannot
accept
responsibility for there being little work. I can do the best I can
to
keep people happy and appraised but I see trouble on the horizon if we
don't
get some work for the volunteers.
This
is not a fun position to be in and like I said, I have had to just let
go
of beating myself up about stuff that is beyond my control. If the
volunteers
complain, I will refer them to Russell or the architect. You can
let
me vent and blow a bit can't you?
I
hope you had a productive FGC.
Sincerely,
Fred
When
I let go of the pressure, which I put on myself about things that are beyond my
control, I feel much better. I am in a difficult spot and I can’t fast talk my
way out of it to the volunteers. I will just have to shoot straight and let the
cards fall where they may.
7/6
Today
we started out to do some carpentry and inventory and I simply didn’t have
enough work to keep three teens and Olga busy. The language and communication
is a problem with the Russians, especially Olga and to some extent her
daughter, Anna. The niece, Anna P. has the tendency to pout and withdraw and
ignore, which is really just what I need! The challenges come like ocean swell,
one after another with a big one every fifth wave. The tide comes in and goes
out on the emotional beach of QWI. The church awaits rebuilding and here amidst
the flotsam and jetsam are a few nice shells and shiny rocks for me, the
beachcomber, to admire. Other things washed in I can only stand and wonder how
something could get like that? How could such good intentions be so hard to
manifest?
7/8
Here
is some text from my incipient weekly report to the director of QWI:
7/7//98
Fred
Allebach
Dear
Harold,
Here
is your first weekly report, although much more than a week has gone by since I
arrived.
The
Russians and Ann Sieber arrived this past Saturday, Ann in the evening and the
Russians at around twelve midnight.
Erin
Hull was very homesick and her mother said it would be OK for her to stay with
Michelle, the cook’s daughter in the evenings during her first week here. Other
members of the congregation
came
and took Erin out and now that there are some other volunteers here of her own
gender and age set, she seems to have settled down quite a bit. It was a rocky
road to stay with her during her adjustment period as she had never been away
from home before. Erin has grown a lot.
The
Pastor has been by a lot and last week he dug up the front gardens and planted
radishes. He also brought Dorothy over and Charles Brickey and Erin got to meet
her. She stayed for around a half hour. I got to see her for a few minutes
after I came back from taking a stray kitten to the pound that Jon and Charles
had brought back the evening before. The kitten promptly went under the bath
house and meowed all night and all day. I felt bad to have to bring it in, for
an almost certain sentence of death.
With
the cooks here there is much more traffic from the congregation and Thompson
has approached me asking the best ways for the members to support QWI and I
told him the best way was for people to invite us to their houses and socialize
with us.
We
have had to become much more aware of recreational aspects of the program as it
is difficult to keep fifteen, sixteen
and nineteen year old girls focused on adult type things. So, we went to the movies
last night, will go bowling tonight and will continue to explore things like
that at the same time we are needing to draw some boundaries and put forth the
notion that this is not summer camp and we are not here just to entertain
people and that folks have to rely on their own inner resources to some extent.
The
language differences with the Russians are more pronounced with Olga, who can
only communicate in the simplest of terms. Olga is bright and cheerful despite
her communication problems. The girls are better with English. Olga’s daughter
is well adjusted. The niece, who, is fifteen, has a tendency to be pouty,
putting up blank expressions and to be impatient. We have at once with the
girls, teen issues and language issues and structural issues of having none of
the work they expected to be doing. .
Ann
has been very helpful and jumped right in at a level surpassing the daily
contributions of the staff. Generally it is an intimidating prospect to be
managing a group like we have right now and not have a clear idea of when we
will work on the church and to be floundering for work in the community and
needing to address the quality of the group’s experience. It is understandably
very difficult to be inspired and excited on a continuous basis about a project
that has so many unclear aspects.
Well,
since I wrote this, this morning, our work camp dynamic has reached the lowest
point yet. Medzio said he never had seen things reach this point in the other
camps. We just had two teenage meltdowns at once, a disagreement between Erin
and Medzio, the two Russian girls giving Erin the cold treatment, Erin giving
Medzio the cold treatment. The actual
differences are extremely petty yet the psychological fall out from who doesn’t
like what who said or miscommunications unable to be resolved, is distracting
at the least and fairly bothersome at the worst. When you layer this on to an
inability to communicate with the Russians and the fact that the project is not
started, then it is a BAD mixture.
Sometimes
the moment seems to take an eternity. The good, or bad thing (in the case of
Eros type love), is that you do come out on the other side and this evening
brought some respite as we went bowling. The Russian girls did not want to go
and Medzio stayed with them. They seem to be relaxing more. I taught one of
them a song on my guitar and Olga is having fun.
7/8
Emmett
seems to be deteriorating. I have noticed as well as Medzio and Ann has seen
how he is. He can’t stay focused on the tools and doesn’t know where most of
them are although he is “waking up early and eating in case the contractor
comes and I need to be ready with the tools.” We all know the contractor is not
coming tomorrow. This just demonstrates that he has trouble, to put it lightly,
following the gist of what is happening here or even the flow of a conversation
and will interject an entirely unrelated statement when we are talking about
something else. If I tell him the girls have been shelving books for the last
two days and we all know the steel is not here, he will just say the same thing
over and over again.
When
the young teens are lined out on a simple task, myself or Medzio or Jon, had to
get Emmett away from them because he would stand close by and try to direct
them and take the work actually right out of their hands.
Emmett
has gotten lost almost every time he goes out at night. He went to church last
Wednesday evening at 7:PM and did not return until midnight. I saw him out on
Broad and 15th driving in circles around the block and ran out and
he then went over to Holliday and started to drive circles out Kell and back to
Holliday. I ran out there and finally stopped him and he said “what are you
doing here?” I told him how to get back and he drove right past the church and
down the street. He got lost last night when we were out and came back covered
with sweat and looking terrible.
Emmett
did the dishes last night and when I went in to get a glass of water I saw the
dishwater was absolutely filthy with grease and I checked the dishes and they
were all covered with a thick film of grease. Medzio and I did them all over
again. I went outside last evening before bowling and all the same tools from
the mornings work were in the same places and the truck was open.
So,
you can tell that while Emmett is certainly willing to be involved, he takes
more than some maintenance. When I have teen crises and all kind of other
stuff, the last thing I need is to have the nightcap with re-doing greasy
dishes and Emmett getting lost and driving off without telling anyone. It is
not the end of the world but we are going to have to start limiting him. I am
telling you this for your information. If things are screwy here and I tell you
about it, then you know. I wouldn’t know how to go about easing Emmett out of
here, that would be very awkward. He has better than two months left on his
plans to be here.
So,
with two staff and teens and no real work, everyday becomes a challenge. I have
asked Medzio to concentrate on the social aspects of the camp and pay attention
to the administrative things second. I need staff behind me in addressing the
tone of the camp. Ann has been great and has fresh energy and a willingness to
be creative and involved. She has helped to smooth the differences between all
the aggrieved parties without having a big, awkward psychology meeting with
people who don’t speak English too good. She suggested to me that I make a
deadline and that if after that deadline, things were still in limbo here, that
I, and the camp, go on standby status until there is real work to do.
Yesterday
I laid out some of my feelings to Russell and Darlene, which resulted in us
going bowling with lots of church people and having FUN! They responded. I like
and respect them all and want to do right by them but you can see that this
kind of middle realm, indeterminate, no work, no purpose state, cannot go on
indefinitely. As the director, I would suggest that you make some Plan Bs as to
this project, in the event that things just keep on going the way they are.
Hopefully all will fall into place but there is the possibility that they
won’t.
Well,
here goes another day and hopefully today will be the tomorrow everyone keeps
talking about!
OK,
I went out to the breakfast table and there is total silence, no words at all.
That is pathetic! We have a group check in and no one says anything. I hate
that worse than anything, pouty looking teens who won’t say a word. We are
going to try a group process thing from Ann, let’s see about that. Erin seems
to have regressed to her former level of having everything be a problem and the
whole scene appears to be one giant soap opera.
The
cooks are having problems with Ann and also the Russian girls not eating their
food, they don’t like Medzio either. The cooks feel the tension and needed to
blow some steam to me. They are OK now. Ann is rubbing the girls and some of
the congregation members the wrong way with her style, they feel it is too
namby pamby and too in your face. Ann is bringing a California, Esalen, group encounter
style which is OK with me, anything to get people to open up. Erin said the
group work Ann tried, to get the group to even talk to each other, was “like
kindergarten.” It is a question of who will go off next and get angry and need
attention and pout. In our group meeting of this morning Erin looked at the
ground, along with the other girls and just as with breakfast, no one said a
word or would respond. I am left on the clothesline. Somebody help me now. Then
Ann jumps in and they shrink back some more.
I
really have never been in any situation like this. From the start all kinds of
things have continued to go wrong, to the point where, for my own mental
health, I had to stop expecting anything to go the right way. It is beyond my
experience to have to front for a project that is not happening, to feel
responsible for and have to deal with the consequences of things that are
beyond my control. I have no one to turn to, to give me advice. I am alone with
no oversight committee or other adults who can steer me into a space where I
can make sense of all this. The mental and emotional states of the volunteers
weigh heavily upon me and while I try to make things better, I fear I am
failing. It is starting to get to me and in many ways, I feel powerless to
effect the dynamic that is developing. No amount of talk can change that a bad
situation is a bad situation.
It
is so welcome to just sit with adults and talk, as I did this morning when all
volunteers are at the YWCA serving up a free lunch. How pleasant to be able to
converse and laugh and discuss things without having to worry about who is mad
at who.
Mr.
Myles has received the steel paperwork and apparently the steel companies will
donate $6000.00 worth of material and the church will only have to pay for
$3000.00. The delivery could be soon but
apparently Myles wants to wait for Mike Corbett to return from Georgia, which
should be today or tomorrow. Tomorrow, again.
I
guess the tone of this report is that when it rains, it pours. There have been good
moments and all is not completely in a state of confusion. This is the way it
is and hopefully things will fall into place soon so that the primary reason we
are here, to build a church, will be manifest and all else can follow from
that. When all is following from a maybe, there is no way to build a solid
foundation.
OK,
that is the downside, if I express my feelings, don’t panic. The church members
have rallied and come by frequently, they are kind and generous and concerned.
McCracken has a great smile. The girls are outside singing with my guitar. They
had a good time at the Y and we got free passes to the Y for swimming etc. We
got paid and that feels good. The tone has shifted more towards the normal
range and that is just GREAT! Maybe I am too sensitive, I don’t know. Life
touches me and I can’t pretend to be macho and unscathed by the emotional
environment. Ann is out there singing and she can’t keep a melody, it sounds
terrible but she is trying and it feels good anyway.
7/9
I
taught young Anna how to play the Star of the County Down and Here Comes The
Sun and she is into it. We played spades with the Russian girls while Olga drew
a picture of me. We had a lot of good laughs and got loose. The battery died on
the tool truck while Medzio had it out and i took Olga with me to give him a
jump. I like Olga. She actually looks quite similar to my maternal grandmother.
She is 42. She is very cute with a nice smile which is open yet shy. I see her
as kind of like an angel, beautiful and worthy of a certain respect that I may
not grant others. She asked me if I was married or had any kids. She was surprised I was single. We get along
good. She is married with a sixteen year old daughter and a younger son. We have
a month. Could it be Bridges of Wichita County?
The
daughter and niece don’t even compare to Olga. A real woman puts girls in their
place. I can’t lust after Olga like I do hot bodies and body parts, I see her
whole and that is what I appreciate. Shit, Olga can hammer and nail and measure
and those girls can’t touch that. She has a good attitude and demeanor despite
being unable to communicate. She hit two strikes in a row last night at the
bowling alley in spite of never having bowled before.
I
got a big hug a few weeks ago from Dorothy Buckner down at church and to be
enveloped by willing, soft flesh, and a lot of it too, was kind of nice. I had
never felt attracted to larger sizes but now that I have been in Texas and that
is pretty much your garden variety kind of gal, I have seen that I can get
excited. Where do I get off being a bucket ass myself and only wanting to look
at skinny girls and women?
7/12
I
took Erin and the Russian girls, Olga and Medzio and Michelle to Oklahoma for a
day trip tracing my initial journey to the museums and the mountains. This time
we added a picnic lunch at Ft. Sill, a trip to Geronimo’s grave and a stop at
The Holy City, a theme based on what a small village might have been like at
Christ’s time. The chapel was similar to a small Mexican church, intimate and
colorful. We also stopped at a trading post near Quanah Parker’s Star House but
the caretaker had gone five minutes earlier. I must go back. At the post and
mangy, blind dog came out from behind the counter and Michelle just about went
haywire trying to get away from it, a classic example of the irrational fear of
dogs sometimes displayed by black people, she nearly knocked over a couple of
displays and ran outside screaming.
I
have been reading Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent and as a result
of attending Pentecostal church for the last eight Sundays, some things are
starting to gel in my understanding. To be human is to have dilemmas far and
above what animals must deal with. Humans have the capacity to make God-like
decisions concerning the fate of, for example, the land, other animals, other
humans and with this power comes the real necessity of having a system of
ethics so that this power may be wielded humanely, i.e. not as an animal.
God-like power can get to people and lead them astray. Astray from what? Astray
from being human.
The
teachings of the Bible and other holy books and systems of morals and ethics
are at the baseline, codes of behavior that seek to model the highest forms of
human behavior, through stories and allegories, to illustrate what the pitfalls
are and what is the high ground.
I
can see through our species eyes, we have had the necessity to come to grips
with God-like power and maybe we frame this in metaphysical, transcendent terms
and then this is contrasted against our weakness as revealed in our pitiful
animal natures of wanting sex, intoxication and power. To be a true believer,
as a Catholic, Quaker, Jew, Buddhist or Pentecostalist, means having faith that
the choices made will be only the most humane, compassionate and righteous. I
don’t see this as being a bad way to go at all.
But,
people get hung up on the notion that their own particular group projection of
the highest human capacities, is somehow better than another’s and then we all
start to slip lower down into the animal in us that is so hard to escape
because that is the precise dilemma. We are ethical animals who don’t always
measure up. It is darn near impossible to purge the animal out of a guy and
that is why religion keeps being so compelling, because it offers the crazy
hope that we can be at once, animal and God. Maybe the God will last for a
week, a month or a year, but one day that animal will raise it’s head.
Jesus
gets after this idea: “You have heard that it was said ‘You shall not commit
adultery’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has
already committed adultery with her in his heart.” This sheds a little more
light on Jimmy Carter’s famous phrase as President “ I have lust in my heart.” The animal is
there and it is a constant battle to be human. Perhaps Satan is nothing more
than a representation of our animal heritage and the constant animal within us.
Show me a guy who does not commit adultery in his heart every now and then.
At
church today the Pastor had a couple of good ones, about Jason and the
Mennonites, the Canaanites and all those other “ites.” I don’t know shit about
the Bible but I do know there weren’t no Mennonites back then. He was carrying
on today and I got a bit tired of it, how all the relying on oneself and one’s
own knowledge was false compared to the heart, the way of Jesus.
Elaine
Pagels addressed the idea of interpretation and the cut on people called
“literalists.” She said that no one can read the Bible and not interpret it, it
takes an interaction and a dynamic with the material, there is no way around
the interpretation. I can see this is like me getting my first Grateful Dead
album, there is something there of enough interest for me to want to pursue it,
to find out where it will all lead. What does religion look like when you know
most of the allegories, when you know the story? I don’t know now. I am
entirely ignorant of the Bible. Although, as Elaine points out, there is no
escape from the effects of the Bible in the world today. Christianity has
imbued my white guy world with certain precepts that are largely unconscious.
The material has worked it’s way into the culture to such a depth that only
through study, can the wheat be separated from the chaff. This sort of lends an
air of credence to the notion of an unconscious, a body of material which
governs yet is unknown to the conscious mind. I have certain attitudes about
sex, work, ethics, behavior because they are woven deeply into the fabric of my
culture and shared by others who reinforce it in my daily life. I may be more
of a Christian than I ever thought.
These
Elaine Pagels books are going to be fun, especially coupled with my reality
here in helping to rebuild a burned church and having much intercourse with
religion and religious people. I like to be learning and growing, that is where
it is really at.
Dear
Harold,
I'm
sorry to appear to be sounding alarms and then back-tracking, kind of
like
the boy who cried wolf. This is not easy territory, but it is easier
than
teen age nervous breakdowns.
I
have been struggling with how to handle Brother McCracken, (the Pastor
was
corrected today about his name not being McCracklin and he said “Oh,
Cracken
as in crackin’ an egg” and we all laughed, some with embarrassment
at
the preacher’s ribald treatment of elder McCracken. Emmett has been
going
to church at every opportunity, twice on Sunday, and during the week
too.
Emmett said today in church after the
Pastor asked him to speak that
they
would not be rid of him that easy, even though is an unprogrammed
Quaker.
I
feel now like it would be cruel to cut Emmett loose, he is like the
kitten,
the lamb, he is helpless, old, senile, wanting to remain among the
living
and vital yet clearly losing it a piece at a time. I don’t know if I
could
tell him he needs to go. How do you tell a man he is losing his mind?
Independence
and volition are some of our most precious capacities and to
come
to the point of losing them, that just gets to the core of us being
humans.
I would rather put up with him and his foibles than have his exile
and
slow deterioration alone on my conscience.
When
it gets down to it, I can’t put my own ease ahead of a man’s life. It
has
taken me a while to reach this space. Up until now I have seen
McCracken
as sort of a pain in the ass, but when it comes down to me having
to
pass judgement on a man and send him away merely because he leaves the
fly
swatter on the table over and over again and he washes the toilets with
the
kitchen sponge or he can’t remember stuff right, I can’t do it. He has
become
a member of this community, especially of the church community.
Whatever
comes down, I think it should be slow and easy and the Reverend
Thompson
involved. I will have to involve Thompson. He is busy with serious
matters
but me and Ted need to talk anyway. The church folks now insure
that
Emmett is brought back safely from any service he attends and Medzio
and
I discreetly work with preventing him from going out alone at night to
the
store. Medzio has been very good at engaging Emmett in conversation.
Shoot,
I was glad to let Emmett wash the dishes tonight and he seemed glad
that
I didn't give him a bad time about it or pick at him. Maybe that all
objects
and utensils are not perfectly straight is OK and honoring a
person's
humanity is more important.
I
have to err on the side of compassion for Emmett’s good will and his
innocence.
Someone else will have to come and get him out if they want to.
He
has no family, he never married, he is alone. How can I kick a guy like
that
out of a meaningful place where he is at home?
This
is tough stuff and as you can see, when it gets down to brass tacks, I
talk
and complain and rant and rave but I would rather eat all my words and
start
over with Emmett with a new concept in my mind than to suddenly
uproot
him when he is intending to stay. It would not be right. If I have
enough
of a problem, then I will have to address Emmett with that directly,
as
it should be done.
When
I am faced with the reality of having to really confront the issues, I
see
that many of the issues are with me rather than Emmett and as the man
on
the scene here, I am willing to open my heart more and include more, for
Emmett's
sake. I may have to become more honest and forthright and this
experience
is certainly deepening me as a human being.
And
now, stay tuned for some scenes from the next episode of Texas.....
Sincerely,
Fred
7/14
The
project has hit another snag. This time it is the plans again but now it is a
problem with the contractor, Mike Corbett, having missed a fairly critical
detail. The work on the slab and foundation is contingent upon specifications
provided by the steel supplier’s engineers. These specs were not taken care of
by Mike, or by the slab man or the steel supplier and the problem arose, it
seems, because the supplier had to go through the plans to figure out exactly
how much steel would be needed. Once the plans were looked at with a critical
eye, it became apparent that there was some sort of steel prefabricated
building involved with the sanctuary and the weight of that, not having been
figured by the architect because the plans state that it will be figured by the
steel company, directly impacts how big or small the piers and the foundation
underneath need to be.
So
we cannot proceed with anything until all this is rectified by Mike and the
steel people.
Mike
blames this on the architect. I look at Mike and see his company is named MC
Drywall and wonder why he missed the engineer’s stamp and other drawing
problems previously and now he appears to have not understood this aspect of
the plans. Mike is very good at evading responsibility and fingering other
people but it is starting to become clear to me that there are some basis
competency issues going on and I wonder when the next surprise will emerge from
the plans?
Mr.
Myles, the foundation man told me that the reason that these problems are
coming up is because the job is being dome time and materials. It does seem odd
that a million dollar job would be done on that basis but that is what Mike has
talked the church into. If the job was all out to bid and various
subcontractors had been able to preview the plans and make estimates based on
the plans, all of the problems we have had so far would have been caught a long
time ago. Mike claims he is the only person in WF who would do the job because
the rest of the contractors are racist and the city doesn’t want the church
here on Broad St. WF is a small playing field but there is Lawton and other
towns around. I think Mike saw this job as a big cash cow. The church people
are unsophisticated in construction and contracting and Mike and the subs saw
all that coming as a big fat padding of their wallets.
There
is no incentive other than honor, to work fast and hard in a time and materials
basis. A guy cam stretch the work a little here and there and take it easy and
there is no pressure. You can go get lunch and take an extra half hour here and
an extra hour there. With a bid, if you don’t work hard you start to earn less
money and there is plenty of incentive to perform. I have advised Russell to
think of a plan B, where a new and different set of plans, a smaller church and
a new contractor might be brought in. I advised Harold that QWI might pull back
and go on stand-by with this project, until the contractor and church get the
construction going and there is actually something for us to do. Myles said it
would be a month and a half from the time he starts work on the slab until
there is any carpentry. We have no volunteers to speak of, just a few older
women, so I told Harold, hey, let’s call a spade a spade, this project is
sputtering and shows all signs of keeping on that way. If QWI is really low on
money, which it is, then we cannot keep on pouring money down the drain and have
no project. Here in WF we have spent $12,000.00 in the last two months to
prepare and supply the work camp. Harold has probably spent two times that on
supplies and salaries, travel etc. Mike said yesterday, “I started out thinking
I was doing something good and everything keeps going wrong.”
7/17
Olga
left this morning with her niece and daughter who were 15 and 16 respectively.
They were here just a little under two weeks. The girls were very rude and ill
mannered. I will not miss the girls at all. After me going way out of my way to
be polite to them and cater to their needs and take them traveling, the girls
got on the bus and did not even bother to say thank you or even good bye.
Medzio and Emmett have gone back to bed as it is 5:30 AM. I am here alone.
Olga
and I started to develop some simpatico and it was clear that we enjoyed each
other’s company. I started to wonder whether I should come on a bit stronger to
her or hang back. It was a dilemma
because I felt the need to respect her daughter and niece, to respect her
marriage yet I was certainly receiving signals. I didn’t want to look a gift
horse in the mouth. She said she was glad to have come here and that her
husband was gone all day and up to 9:PM working. She didn’t like only seeing
him on weekends.
She
told me she was sad to be leaving because she had met me.
We
were joking around about me crossing some double yellow lines while driving and
I drew an imaginary line in the car and said “you better not cross this line.”
She said “what if I cross line?” I said “you’ll find out.” She didn’t
understand and eventually after some explanation she got it and said “Are you
afraid of me?” I knew we were getting to the moment of truth and it was time to
put up or shut up. We had already been talking about fate and destiny and I had
managed to communicate to her that fate had her in St Petersburg and me in the
USA. So I said sometimes there are things you really want but you can’t have
them, that she was married with kids in Russia and I wanted her but she had to
leave. She said “Is dangerous if I kiss you?” (Think fast Freddy) “Oh no, I
would like that.” This is all on the way to SAM’S Club. I told her a little
about why one kiss could be
dangerous, how after one kiss it is hard to stop and she understood I wasn’t
talking about a peck on the cheek and she then said “just friendly kiss.”
We
got her film at SAM’S and drove home, had dinner and since it was their last
night and the brats wanted to go to the movies and it was the last chance to do
anything with Olga, I went along. Olga wanted me to see City of Angels and we
went in and sat together. As the movie went on we held each other’s arms and
hands and as the story unfolded I began to see the irony of this being so nice
with Olga. The angel gave up all of eternity for one kiss and one night with
the woman he loved. They quoted some Hemingway about eating oysters by the sea
and how the taste began to them feel more alive again. In the end there was a
tragedy and the woman was killed and the angel was left alone, with his free
will and humanity, left to carry on. There Olga and I are holding hands in the
movie, real life intersecting with a
Hollywood love story.
There
was some fate and tragedy here, a beautiful and sweet woman passes by. She is
friendly and charming and she likes me. She has a whole other life yet for two
weeks she is here alone, with daughter and niece. I could hear waves breaking
on an ocean of passion. I could sense the potentials of a whole other life.
What could have been but was not. Fate, destiny, tragedy. I could have slipped
and fallen a lot farther than I did. A colorful bird or butterfly is passing by
only to disappear as quickly as it came, this fleeting brush with Olga is over.
She told me I needed to visit St. Petersburg, for a $450.00 round trip ticket
from NYC in winter. Maybe.
Later
in the day I spoke with the QWI treasurer and he pretty much laid it out, we
have no money, the party is over. Harold has been trying to hang on at all
costs but faith is only going to get a nigger so far. This is a reality check
and there is no money to pay for staff to keep the operation going.
I am
at a crossroads. I notified SCA that I am available. They may or may not have
anything. I have options, I could go travel. I love to travel. I could line up
work and set a schedule. I could do all sorts of things for myself but the
reason I wanted to come here in the first place was to work for things larger
than myself. I am about more than survival and just looking out for my own ass.
If I cut and run now that will say a lot about what I really represent in terms
of service. I could help a lot if I stayed on voluntarily, worked things out
with Russell and Mike and saw things through. I also see this situation is
beyond my control and I really just need to let the Powerhouse figure out these
details and I can come back when all is square and running the way it was
originally intended.
My
parents immediately saw things through only a practical lens and even now that
I am onto something of high quality, it can still be reduced to only naked self
interest. I am having to question my motivations now. Do I take the money and
run? Did I come here just to make money? Is the goal and are the relations I
have established more significant to me than my own pleasure or ability to make
another few thousand dollars?
If I
was getting some local pussy this would be easier but that is still putting my
own needs above what I see as the higher. It is interesting to be reading
Elaine Pagels now because this can be framed as derivative of early Christian
fever/ fervor to serve the higher purposes. Those things played out 2000 years
ago and they are still playing. If we were Pagans, Olga would have given it up
with no question because clearly we were simpatico enough to be doing a little
fucking. I would be bagging Darlene and Vicki and Dorothy Buckner too because
we all get along great. Why not fuck and enjoy life? The black folks seem to
have that figured out pretty good because every single family has kids by different
mothers and fathers and that is accepted. The family is what results from a
life of allowing the moment and passions to unfold as they will. The Pagels
line is that sex became to be seen as interfering with serving the purposes of
the new age, serving the higher kingdom of God. Even then people could see that
passion of the flesh was extremely powerful. If a guy is always thinking of his
next release of the flesh, is there any more to life? This is where the hidden
force of Christianity creeps into our lives, at least into my western life, in
breaking down attitudes towards sexuality. Why aren’t I getting a lot more
pussy than I am? Because I am all fucked up by submerged Christian attitudes
about sex as well as what is implicitly seen as a “higher” way.
Sure,
sex can take over and people can repeat ad nauseam the patterns of passion,
divorce, splitting up and going for yet another new affair. The moments that
lie therein are an eternity of
feelings and passion. That is why in the City of Angels, an angel could choose
one night of fleshy passion over an eternity of not ever feeling any of that.
There is a natural developmental cycle and I can see that what I am framing as
the “higher” can co-exist with getting laid all the time. It all gets down to feeding
your desires, higher, lower, who cares? There is no way to tell. A guy can
analyze this all to death and sterility. What does it take to feel alive and to
experience the mystery, majesty and power of being alive? There is no one
answer.
7/19
Today
was perhaps my last time, for a while anyway, of going to church with the
Powerhouse and it was good. We sang, the Pastor led the church in a fevered
prayer during which people were ranting and hollering and Vicki Lundy got so
far out there that the spirit possessed her, shaking and crying and she
testified that the church needed to work harder to build, people needed to step
up and be counted.
Sister
Holloburton was here today. She is a missionary from the regional Church of God
in Christ and the Pastor let her get up there and she went on and on, taking us
well past a two and a half hour service.
Afterwards,
Darlene and Vicky and Dorothy Buckner cooked us a fried catfish dinner at
Thompson’s house and we had a fine day and meal of fellowship and conversation
and good old time religion. We talked about fishing and snakes and frogs and
catching frogs for their legs and how to best plant tomatoes, and tornadoes and
I made small talk with a sweet young woman named Aretha, Thompson’s niece. She
was from Oklahoma.
Thompson’s
brother, Peter Gordon, told me about Oklahoma in the old days when people lived
way back in the woods, blacks and Indians, living in caves, tipis and how when
the Five Civilized Tribes were exiled to Oklahoma, they brought black slaves
with them. Dorothy Thompson is a mix of three different kind of Indians and
Black. Her family name was Cudjoe and she grew up in Sasakawa, Oklahoma. When
Thompson courted Dorothy, she was 16 and wild for him, he had her eating out of
his hand and running for miles to meet him in small towns. Now Dorothy is
hooked to an IV and gaunt, ill, but hanging in there. As a young and middle
aged woman she was really a ravishing beauty with a fantastic smile and a sweet
voice and personality. She still has all those qualities as now she stands
close to the abyss.
At
one point around the table, Sister Holloburton asked the Pastor if, even after
being saved, a person can waiver in their faith. Shit yeah I thought and the
Pastor said yes and then he got off on preaching around the table about Jesus
going to some garden and how some of his disciples went to sleep and he went on
and on and I started yawning and had to go over to the couch and crash out with
the rest of the folks stuffed with catfish and sweating and listening to
cartoons on the TV as we deliriously dozed to the Pastor preaching and Bugs
Bunny crashing and banging.
It
is impressive to me how the church people can be faced with what amounts to
multiple tragedies and set backs and they can sit around and laugh and be great
people. After church we can joke and lie around the couch at Thompson’s and
talk all kind of stuff and all the Jesus feeling seems about a million miles
away. They talk about affairs and extra women and you can see that all the
families are an incredible mix of different mothers and fathers and people
being related in all kind of ways. Darlene’s four girls all seem to have
different fathers. This is encouraging to a fellow like me who is attracted to
these big beautiful black women who have such an open spirit. Maybe I can
eventually leave a legacy here in WF, “Oh yeah, remember old Fred, he’s her
Daddy.” Give me five minutes with Aretha and we’ll be headin’ that way.
The
scene here at the house is going to start winding down. One last volunteer is
here until Saturday and there is not a tremendous amount of physical work to do
but pack things up and store them in the bunk house or the office. We will have
a meeting on Tuesday with the church, the contractor, me and Reggie Smith from
the Council of National Black Churches. This meeting should give me and the
other players an indication of where things will be standing in the next few
months and what the future may look like. With my schedule, I can be available
on very short notice and with the uniqueness of building bridges with the Black
community like this, I really want to do more. Even if this means that my day
to day reality may include having to hassle kids and adults about the most
trivial types of chickenshit stuff about dishwashing, fly swatting, toilet
hygiene and cleaning up after their own sorry asses. I will need my number two
to be much more social and involved so that I don’t feel responsible for every
small detail. I need staff who are competent, independent, have good judgement,
who are personable and can deal with lots of stress and be able to rebound and
not develop sullen bad attitudes.
First
we will need a project and hopefully the Powerhouse can pull it all together
and QWI can get it’s house in order and Mike will prove to be competent and
equal to all of his talk.
7/19/98
Fred
Allebach
I
have started to become under impressed by Medzio as an employee. As an
individual he is fine with me. I want to emphasize that Medzio is a well
educated, intelligent, worldly guy. I get along fine person to person with him.
As an employee I am having problems with his level of motivation and initiative
as well as ability to follow direction and meet the requirements of his job
description. I can see that he was hired mainly as a photographer and to
interpret Swahili for the Tanzanians who never came. That has left him exposed
to meet responsibilities he was perhaps not expecting and maybe not qualified
for. It really just cooks my socks that
he is getting paid as much as me for so much less work and less taking of
responsibility. In the future, with so much more real responsibility, the
Director should not be on equal pay with other staff.
Allow
me to site some examples which I see as adding up to a pattern of poor
performance.
Medzio
always seems to have an excuse for not going to church, even though it goes
with the job to participate with the experience in general. The church people are interested in him and
he is not there. He has only been to church once. Today, on the last day for
him to go, he skipped church and then dinner at Thompson’s house. Maybe he is
tired of being paraded around as an African/ Polish guy and having to handle
the same sets of predictable questions. His lack of participation has been
questioned by the church members and the volunteers.
I
was kind of taken aback by his reading a magazine during morning meditation and
said to him that was not acceptable. What I see from just these last two
indications of non-participation is a person who is not studying his job
description and is putting his individual interests ahead of the job. This is
not somebody who really wants this job and is interested in performing to be
good at this. When a person is serious about their job they are eager to
perform and pull their weight. When someone is not serious about their job
description, they are insubordinate and seek ways to avoid responsibility. I
see Medzio as being here for other reasons, probably one: roped in by Harold
for film and Swahili and two, to make good pocket change on summer break from
college.
We
have a pretty high profile in the community here and Medzio has said that he
will refuse to speak with any reporters, TV or otherwise and that is just
something he will not do. How does one get off with that when dealing with the
media and publicity is part of the job and part of the mission?
I
asked Medzio if he would pick up Eleanor at the airport and he said he couldn’t
do it because he would get lost, he has such a bad sense of direction. I find
this to be highly, highly unbelievable. Tonight he is out to a camera store
with no apparent problems. These things would be acceptable maybe as individual
aberrations, but taken collectively, they add up to a pattern. The pattern is
of someone who does not want to do their job and has excuses for why they can’t
do this or that. The excuses come on a frequent enough basis to make me wonder.
I can overlook a few things but when there are so many excuses you see through
them.
Apparently
also Medzio has an eye problem and cannot work in direct sun. I was not
appraised of this beforehand. With no Tool Man on staff, that left me to have
to keep my finger on the pulse of the all work camp aspects and work the
volunteers all day too. That type of physical problem really limits the utility
of a staff person expected to be a jack of all trades.
I
have also asked Medzio not to run the AC in his room while he is not in there
yet every time I check, the AC is on. There is no reason to keep the AC on when
one is not in a bedroom, but this has become a point of contention and I
believe, willful insubordination. If we are out of money and AC in the summer
is a major expense, why leave it on when you are not even using the room? “Oh I
forgot.” or such excuses are really lame. That kind of attention to detail is
not what you want from your number two man and demonstrates a cavalier attitude
and a kind of screw you, I will do what I want kind of feeling.
I
also am not impressed by Medzio’s level
of initiative and needing to be told just about everything I see needing to be
done and when I ask for some things to be done, like in the absence of Cooks,
cook dinner and fold some sheets I previously washed and dried. Medzio sleeps
all afternoon and I end up doing those things myself. Maybe I am disillusioned by thinking that the
Director maybe should not have to be always be covering every detail.
With
no cooks, we all have to do dishes and clean the house. With three people only
and of those Medzio and myself the only fully functional ones, we have to wash
dishes more frequently. Medzio has now claimed that he has done enough dishes
and he feels like the maid and will not do the current ones in the sink, he
refuses, even though he was here at the house by himself all afternoon and did no
QWI work at all. He could have made a bank deposit as well but he seems to have
reached a point of total lack of initiative. I also found two big knives in the
sink, obscured under the water and asked Medzio if he would please not do that.
I got a whole lot of jive about how they needed to soak because the handles
were greasy. Do you risk a nasty cut just to wash a knife handle? I am out all
afternoon taking care of Eleanor and come back to a full boat of dishes. That
is petty, prima donna kind of stuff, to refuse to work because you feel you
have done enough already. This refusing to work at particular things is not a
quality you want out of a staff.
This
brings up another issue in that I have hardly taken one nap and in the
afternoons. I am the one handling
volunteers, phones, issues, meetings, while Medzio takes a daily nap of one or
two hours. As soon as Eleanor Hammond arrived, he went to take a nap rather
than welcome her. Medzio claims to be unable to function without a nap but give
me a break, what kind of professional administrative job comes with getting a
nap everyday?
I
leave copy work on the copy machine and it is not seized, the dishes sit in the
sink all day while we are at church and at dinner at Thompson’s. The only thing
I can see being done in the last few days is entering a few numbers on the work
log and stuffing a package full of pictures. Maybe the dissolution of the work
camp and the reality that there is not a whole lot to do, creates the
atmosphere for sullen despondence and a kind of who cares mentality. The
accounting work I asked Medzio to do was half done and sloppy. I had to do it
over myself.
Some
volunteers, church people and cook staff have pointed out that they were
expecting more involvement from Medzio and he seemed to be hiding in the office
and avoiding participation. Maybe he is
moody and shy and introspective and international and not suited to a highly
social American setting and job description.
That’s OK, but I get the feeling sometimes
I have another volunteer on my hands here instead of a peer who is
pulling down the same pay as me.
One
day I asked him to handle some issues between the cooks and the Russians and he
had to come back in the office and interrupt me about how to handle what sauce
to put on the rice. This just demonstrates that Medzio has not really expected
to rise to a level of authority and has not taken the initiative to seek out
and fill needs, as the famous metaphor goes. I thought I was being fairly
explicit by getting everyone’s letter of understanding out and saying that I
expected people to study that stuff and to know it and do it. I wanted people
to step up and not wait to be told. I would prefer people to err on the side of
being decisive rather than being helpless and in need of constant guidance.
Now,
Medzio can be an engaging, interesting guy and can work as a team player but he
seems to drop the ball a lot. He has the skills but prefers to keep to himself.
I get the sense that he is selfish, maybe without seeing that clearly and puts
his own needs above that of the community and his job here. If I appear to be
ripping him now, it is because it has been frustrating to face some stone
walling and to deal with this for weeks and weeks. Like I said, he is a nice
guy, so my feelings here are and have been tempered with compassion and wanting
to see the bright side.
If
we were going to be carrying on and the scene was up and running, I would
recommend that Medzio be given the opportunity to perform on a trial basis and
if we could go beyond the conditions and the misgivings and the excuses and see
that he really wanted to be doing this work, then fine. In the future I would
hire him only with specific conditions, i.e. photography and Swahili and not in
a position of social, community responsibility. He has not demonstrated that
this type of work is really what he wants to be doing. He can become a staff
liability and so I recommend that he be used only on a conditional basis and if
he does not perform adequately, he can be sent home. That doesn’t mean I think
he is a bad guy, but if the shoe doesn’t fit, why pretend?
Certainly
this has been a difficult situation and I cannot get off as appearing to be a
perfect specimen of human behavior myself. I am not without fault and perhaps
my own inexperience in dealing with a staff like Medzio has exacerbated the
problems. It is a power struggle in a way in that he resists my direction and
seems to resent doing tasks assigned to him. With no apparent initiative, I
have to tell him everything except to go to the Post Office, which he can’t
wait to do. This ending has been difficult on people in many ways and the weeks
of Erin Hull and the Russians and Eleanor Hammond has demonstrated that QWI needs staff who
have very strong social and psychological skills as well as people who want to
be here and have enough initiative to work without having to be told
everything.
7/20
I
woke up this morning and had to piss like crazy and I didn’t feel like putting
any closes on so I just scooted out past the door to the living room and sure
enough, old Eleanor saw me and later complained. She wouldn’t stop talking
about it and how people from the south are more uptight about nudity and how
this and how that. “You know shower curtains are not to keep the water in the
shower.” I tried a few responses until I was finally became fed up of the
repetition and just ignored her. You can’t get around an occasional nude shot
in a work camp or communal living situation and if people are going to be super
sensitive about their bodies, they should stay home and hide.
There
isn’t shit to do. Tomorrow we have the summit meeting and after that it is wait
until it is time to go. I may go early and make Medzio stay here with Eleanor
since his flight is Saturday. I am ready to blow. I made tentative plans with
Mike Gray to go back to Trigo Moreno, in Sonora, Mexico for two weeks at the
end of August. That will be my third time there and I know the people, so it
will be fun.
It
all winds down and ends after such high hopes and noble expectations.
7/21
The
Dallas Cowboys football team is doing their preseason training here in WF and
the town is going wild, Cowboys stuff and posters everywhere. I could care less
about football and the Cowboys so I decided to razz all the locals here at the
house by saying I was going to go out to practice and start yelling “Cowboys
Suck!!!!!” That got these folks going like you wouldn’t believe, telling me how
bad the fans would beat me and then me telling them there wasn’t a Cowboy fan
out there I couldn’t whip. I started to do the Ali Shuffle and the Bruce Lee
kick ‘em in the chin kick and we all got some great laughs out of that. It has
become a good ongoing joke and when I see Darlene out on the street in her car
when I am driving the van, I’ll roll down the window and yell “Cowboys Suck!”
People need to have some jokes and jive going or life can get too serious and
that is just no fun.
I
went over to the bank the other day and the tellers were closed and a woman
told me i had to go to the draft room. I said what? She said the draft room. I
said I’m sorry, where is the draft room and she said no, the drive through, I
would have to stand on line at the drive through. These folks sure do talk
funny.
7/22
Reggie
Smith form the CNBC. Council of National Black Churches, came to Wichita Falls,
yesterday for the shakedown meeting with Mike, Doodle, the Pastor, Russell,
Darlene and myself. At first Reggie wasn’t there and Mike carried on about how
the latest glitch was not his fault. The church people were skeptical. Mike
wasn’t very convincing. He seemed more like a stuck pig than a good general
contractor.
Then
Reggie came and boy, he is just what this church rebuilding process really
needed, a sharp, intelligent, tactful, knowledgeable and directive person. He
pulled out his cell phone and called a steel company engineer in Denver and
straightened out this steel shit as we all sat there whopper jawed. Reggie
looked at the plans for the first time and illuminated more details in one hour
than Mike had in two months. We could all see Mike was an amateur compared to
Reggie. Here was Mike, who told me black people couldn’t work construction
being made to look the fool over the building plans by a black man. This was
something to witness. Mike ranted and raved and said “tell ‘em I did good, tell
‘em the architect had the plans all messed up....” Mike did not seem to notice
that he was appearing rather foolish as he thought he was among equals with
Reggie and explaining all this arcane stuff to us dumb onlookers. Anyone could
see Mike was over his head. Maybe he can do the job. He’s not a bad guy, just a
simpleton with a big ego and a big mouth. Mike needs to always be smelling like
a rose and does not admit to any responsibility from the negative zone.
In
the middle of the meeting, McCracken perks up and holds forth on how he is
supposed to be taking care of the tools and such and he can stay around if need
be to help out. Everybody was like wow, where is his mind at. The poor fellow
is losing his mind and doesn’t know it.
I
can’t say how impressed by Reggie Smith I am. The Powerhouse situation looked
terrible a few days goad now there is optimism. I have the sense now that we
are not the only ones. It seemed like everything in the world was happening
great except for our little corner, where everything was going wrong. Now I can
see that all church rebuilding projects encounter similar type delays,
flakiness, difficulties and so on and so forth.
QWI
was just too eager to be here. Harold had to have a project and he did not have
the administrative infrastructure and policy based experience to assess when to
come into this project. Even though there was a letter of understanding signed
with the church, contractor and QWI, that wasn’t worth shit when the plans
turned out to be no good. So, QWI needed a project, Harold needed a project,
and he overextended himself, wanting to do good. We spent $25,000 on
infrastructure and supplies for the work camp, ran out of money and need to
pull back at least three months before volunteers can do anything.
7/24
Basically
the situation here devolved for a number of reasons, the primary one being the
architect did not draw complete plans and also failed to get the proper
engineering drawings done on the plans. The second major reason for delays is
the contractor, Mike Corbett’s inability to decipher the plans properly and
notice the major things wrong right away. The third reason, combining with the
other two, is the church’s naivete, not knowing what questions to ask and failure
to keep the pressure and heat on Mike and the architect. The fourth reason,
thrown in with all of the above is QWI entering in and raising the expectations
of the church and volunteers and the whole South Central Yearly Meeting, that
we would be working and serving the greater needs of a ministry to burned
churches.
This
all came crashing down for QWI when Harold ran out of money and the Treasurer,
Tom Wolfe, told him he had to pull back and stop hemorrhaging money into a
situation where there was no work to be done. Reggie Smith asked me why we
stayed here so long when the project was dead in the water. We kept believing
that “maybe next week” or “maybe tomorrow”, that things would break and the
project would be a go. Now we are out of here, this will be among the last
entries of this diary. It was a good idea, it’s just that the timing was wrong.
I
don’t think Mike will pan out as the contractor, he has been exposed as less
than competent, even though he doesn’t realize this. Russell is pretty shy however
and not very assertive and Mike will probably last a while before Russell and
the church have to find a new general contractor. I don’t see Mike as being
good with volunteers either, he is too much of a good old boy to have the
savoir faire to handle all the diversity that is going to be thrown at him with
lots of volunteers who will in all likelihood, be unable to hammer a nail or
figure out what to do.
Harold
is plugging away in Washington DC, stunned by this latest development and
trying to raise money to keep his QWI ship afloat. He told me if I had another
job offer to take it because there are no guarantees that this particular
project or QWI will remain viable options in the future.
I
went to return the ice machine today and get my $400.00 refund from when
McCracken bought it more than two months ago. The machine broke after about a
week’s use and I spent $50.00 to find out it was worthless and another $75.00
to have it moved back to the previous owner’s yard. We spent $125.00 for a
week’s worth of ice. On the way back to the mover’s office to get my receipt, a
fellow rode with me to tell me directions. We talked a little about the church
and he said he was in a ministry to prisons, “we go to the prison and try to
save a few souls.” I’m driving down Southwest parkway and it is 105 degrees and
this guy is talking about saving souls, this life sure is something! This soul sacrifice, salvation, resurrection,
new age coming, the rapture, the Holy Spirit, this stuff is really a force out
here in the Texas Bible Belt. Maybe because there is so little culture and so
little scenery, people are left to turn inward in this way?
Here
is some side material I have been working on:
The Interpretation of
Justification: the Schism Between
Lutheran and Catholic
Justification,
for Christians, is the way sinning humanity is made acceptable to God and for
salvation. And central to Luther’s theological objection to Rome was the
definition of justification. Catholic theology held that the sinner is saved by
the free gift of God’s grace–unearned and not in principle earnable - and by
good works done after receiving that grace. In the 1500's, those works included
prayers, penance and--articularly objectionable to Luther–the payment of cash
indulgences to the church.
His
study of the New Testament led him to a belief that grace is wholly up to God,
that good works are no factor, and that faith alone is necessary and sufficient
for salvation.
Each
side condemned the other for heresy. Persecution, war and inquisition– in both
directions–further tainted the relationship.
Is
there any fundamental unity of the Christian church today? People can get
pretty hung up on interpretation and doctrine. I like the ecumenical movement.
That displays a wider range of thinking and people there have to be less
dogmatic. Dogma of any flavor is generally distasteful.
Belief
that eternal life is at the same time a result of grace and a reward from God
for good works is a paradox. You can’t have it both ways. Why do things always
have to be one or the other?
Even
if the issue of justification is settled, other major questions continue to
split the two churches: the role of the pope, Mary and the saints, baptism,
ordination of women and others. Accord on justification is necessary before
work proceeds on those other questions, theologians from both sides agree.
But
the Catholic suggestion to clarify this issue by combining grace and the reward
for good
works
is a strategy for unification that already failed, 457 years ago. That reading
is what is referred to technically as “double justification.” “It has been
tried.”
This
is why Glen has a problem with “good works”, not because being a virtuous
person is not enough to gain a nigger a measure of heaven, but because “good works”
is still being interpreted according to it’s Martin Luther era meaning of
paying the Catholic church off to get to heaven or doing penance to get there
as well.
In
the context of my searching for the
meaning of service, penance might be seen as working purely for self
advancement. The higher levels of service clearly are good works in the best
sense of the words. These motivations are not purely ego, self advancement type
stuff. That would be what you would have seen by niggers paying the church off to
get to heaven. Service gets a person outside of themself and that is a good
work at a higher level than solely for one’s own purposes. Good works here is
definitely different than what was meant by the term 500 years ago. If we
cannot learn from history and we stay stuck in the old meanings, that is really
no where. It’s stupid.
The
religion section of the Dallas paper is always interesting for the comments you
get from the conservatives regarding any “interpretation “ of the Bible. Fact
is, as my main Elaine points out, all of the Bible is “interpreted”, it was
written by men, there is no way to not interact with the material and not
interpret it through the filters of one’s culture and individual experience.
The notion that some texts are a direct pipeline to the truth and all people
are capable of unambiguously understanding that truth in the same way, is
really far fetched The following quote is interesting in this regard:
“The
greatest deception which egotism perpetrates is when a man’s imagination leads
him to think that his beliefs affect any truth.” 1925 edition of the Baptist Standard Here is
a fellow on the total opposite side of the fence from me. I am a firm believer
that truth is nothing without faith and belief.
This
illustrates how people get really stuck on believing that their own particular
holy way is the only one that is valid. It is the same old shit. I am in it
too. I won’t give up what I see as right thinking. In a search to understand
these things, I can only look at this type of statement and this situation as
indicative of true believer status. There is no discussion. True believers are
vigilant and will dispute any assertions that run contrary to their faith. In
this sense I am not quite a true believer in anything but I do have well
developed and evolving thoughts.
Here
are some of my thoughts from my sociology class last Fall:
FCA
2/13/98 SOC 103 Untitled
Essay
Having
read most of the assigned articles I am coming away feeling that many of the
essays are framed in a very aggressive us against them context. The goal and
the agenda are not to create a
tolerant
society but to tear down white men, patriarchy and the American political and
economic systems. The analyses do not seek to understand events from a larger
perspective. I see a lot of partial arguments and the incompleteness leads me
to believe the analysis is shallow.
I am
not without sympathy for people who are suffering and I am not an apologist for
an exploitive economic system but somehow I find myself getting lumped in with
what many consider to be an evil force. Our first class discussion dealt with
stereotypes and from the assigned reading, I feel stereotyped. The generalities
that people are using about white people and patriarchy are offensive to me because
they are so partial and make so little effort to recognize any common humanity.
White people and white men are not all one way and to identify some suspected
politics with skin color or gender is racism and sexism all over again. I’m
sorry but a group of people can’t be reduced by their skin color or sex. It
doesn’t work
I
can see that if any of these angry people ever found themselves in the driver’s
seat they would be just as bad as the powers they are so forcefully against
now. I look to people like Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King,
Mohandas Ghandi, Mother Teresa. These people have defined the high ground. Self
righteousness pales against what these people have accomplished. Why do some
people feel a need to tear others down to build themselves up? Why not be for
something rather than against something?
An
interesting illustration of the issues I am working over is the 2/13 Star
article about a 400-year-old conflict between Spain and the Pueblo Indians. The
Indians are bitter about the cruelty of the conquest and don’t want New Mexico
to honor it’s Spanish heritage. Don Juan de Onate went to NM with the express
purpose of subduing the natives and converting them to Catholicism. He went to
assimilate them. I can see that Indians
would not want to honor that, but 400 years is a long time to hold a grudge. A
historian in the article said, “the whole world was brutal at that time” and
that is true.
This
caused me to think. The world was very brutal then. In addition to the Spanish
Inquisition the SW Indians had a major slave trade going amongst themselves.
Athabascan invaders displaced, raided, enslaved and killed. No people are ever
going to be immune from the excesses inherent to being human. I can’t
generalize about “the Indians” because they were/are as different from each
other as from anyone else. The major part of human history reflects brash
opportunism and the audacity to invent, change and challenge the old with the
new. This has left some people in the dust while the audacious go for arrows,
boats, agriculture, domestication, metal, firepower, books, radio, TV, NASA and the internet.
This
article and situation reminds me of the erstwhile Yugoslavia and how ancient
hatreds had been cultivated from battles
long ago and with the correct series of events, those civilized people became totally savage. If people hang on to
negative feelings and cultivate the culture of the victim, what happens when
those people get some power? They turn around and victimize the former
conquerors. No one has learned anything and we are back to square one. How far are people going to go back and be
willing to contest past injustices? The Lutherans, Zwingli Reformed Church and
the Catholics absolutely savaged my ancestors. My people were drowned, burned
at the stake and tortured for their beliefs but it would do me or none of the
above people any good to act like it happened yesterday. There has to be some
cultural statute of limitations and people have to move on and deal with the
now.
To
be human is one thing. To have a particular culture is another. I think human
characteristics transcend culture. I think it is not only the culture or
society or premise that drives people but also their basic capacities as human
beings. These capacities are inventiveness, exploration, adaptiveness,
imagination, creativity, intellect, emotion etc. I am integrating psychology
with anthropology and sociology. Maybe how we act and the universality of many
human things, which cut across every society and culture, could just be a
function of the organization of the human brain.
I
had the thought today about why not look back through history and find every
group who was on top, who had succeeded in gaining dominance or who maybe were
just plain successful, and then vilify them for being the oppressors of
everyone who was not on top. This automatically penalizes anyone who is
successful for whatever reason. In this manner you could say Egyptian
civilization was corrupt. The cities which first gave rise to agriculture and political
stratification were corrupt. The Aztecs sacrificed human life for an
unsubstantiated belief and they were corrupt. Anatomically modern man was
corrupt for pushing the neanderthals to extinction. It starts to look in
history’s eye as not so much that people were corrupt but that they were just different. They were who they were. If any
people had boats, guns and horses would they just stay home? If there is the
ability there will come the desire to use that ability.
Human
societies have always been hierarchical and out of such a solid tradition it is
hard to all of a sudden eliminate all hierarchies. No one person or group could
ever unify a species so profoundly dedicated to difference. That people stand
out differently as a result of their positions in society is natural, be that
good or bad. People will always be bitter that they are not the dominant group.
That’s human nature.
I
have questioned, why is it bad to be seen as successful? It is true that no one likes the top dog and
there is constant competition to displace that dog. The irony and the paradox
are that once the old dog is gone, the new one is just the same. The self
righteous minorities of today are the oppressors of tomorrow. That some women
are so angry at men belies the fact that to create any more men or women
demands that men and women be attracted to each other. If the feminist agenda
is successful, what would come after the defeat of patriarchy and would that be
necessarily any more benevolent for people in general? I believe matriarchy
could be just as oppressive but I don’t hear the feminists proposing anything
new, just to tear down the old.
It
is without doubt that the US now is the dominant country in the world. In the
US there are dominant groups. Is this all because of ruthlessness? Is some of
this merely the luck of the draw? Could some of this be a result of the
differences between Protestant and Catholic states and their different
strategies for conquest and development? That a people are successful does not
automatically mean they are morally corrupt. The principles upon which this
country was founded were revolutionary in this world. We were and are not
perfect. No one ever can be. Our methods are not always in line with our
ideals. Whose are? A very strong case can be made that the principles of
religious freedom and freedom of speech in the US are liberating far beyond
anything ever seen before. These very freedoms are what makes possible this
intense questioning of how our society should be. We will not be burned at the
stake or be called a heretic just for exploring what is the right way to go.
Looking
back on the history of humanity, there have always been top dogs and members of
the pack. With hierarchical animals like dogs or people, there has to be a
leader. The reason that dogs are such successful domestic animals is that we
have the same type of group behavior. We are both hierarchical, group oriented
animals. Egalitarianism, although it is
a great idea, has never really panned out for people because inevitably someone
always puts their own interests first. Even Native Americans acted this way in
some groups with boss men and an underclass and women relegated to slave like
status. These people were capable of the same exact barbarity as their human
cousins all over this earth. To be savage, intolerant, dominating and in
control is not just a function of the white male of particular west European
ancestry. It is a capacity shared by all
humans. Given the chance, any group can be like this. What I notice is a
conspicuous absence of any messages of reconciliation and understanding. I
think the book is partial and biased for not presenting these views. Identity
politics or the politics of difference seems to still need a bogey man. I feel
defensive because that bogey man is stereotyped as me.
What
is becoming clearer to me is that if there is to be a solution to any of this
human strife, it will have to be at the level of the idea, and not reduced to
the level of a particular truth owned by a specific group of people for various
reasons. If some high ground is to be attained, a commonality has to be
established among all people. What possible idea could be big enough to include
all people today? I don’t know. The whole earth metaphor is available now. I’m
not the Messiah. I have mentioned my heros.
That
we and all species are all citizens of the planet is a common factor. That we
can even conceive of the planet level is a big step. This could be, as Joseph
Campbell said, the next level of mythology, the whole earth as seen from space.
It shows us how all the little differences pale against eternity and the
vastness of space. When we can see ourselves as alone in space with one planet,
our planet, all of us together, all species, all life, then that is a new look
at cooperation. That could be the link we need to all get on the same page.
Otherwise we could end up tearing at each other’s throats like the animals we
are and like we have shown we can be.
What
needs to be covered and dealt with is our differences, economically,
genetically, socially, culturally and religiously.
7/26
Well,
I escaped from the Texas heat wave. I’m now at 4000' in Tucumcari, NM. Texas is
far behind. It was so hot, for so long, I won’t miss being uncomfortable like
that.
Today
was my last service with the Powerhouse and the Pastor let it all hang out. He
can flat out sing! “Oh Lord” he sang, face twisted with emotion. The audience
answered “Ooh Lord.” “Oh Loooord.” “Ooooh Looord.” And it went on like that for a long time.
There was a very good organist today and she and the Pastor set each other off,
they were jamming.
When
I left, the Pastor said he didn’t have words to describe the way he felt.
“Fred, you are like a brother to me.” I felt a solid connection with him too.
We became tight in a relaxed way and I feel we got totally over on race. It
didn’t matter.
Deacon
Ray got up and gave us an object lesson. Someone had stolen some stuff from him
and he found out who and where it was. He was fixing to go kick some ass when
his young son and daughter, the lovely seventeen year old Keisha Newton,
prevailed upon him to cool off. And then Ray said, “I was leaning on my own
understanding rather than that of the Lord. I could have gone over there and
got in a lot of trouble, so I just put it all in the hands of the Lord.”
Now
isn’t that interesting, to not trust your own understanding in general and to
see that as ego, as the self, the debased and fallen, disgraced and unworthy
Adam. The free will we have is not to be trusted. We should only be leaning on
Jesus. I can’t go for that. I’m sorry. In the above instance however, Ray was
able to prevent a big incident, where the head Deacon of the Powerhouse would
be tossed in jail for whipping somebody’s ass. Ray could do it too. He is a big
strong guy. The Christian tenets show some real value here in preventing
violence. I see this as being right for the wrong reasons. A person can deplore and shun violence without having
to deny the self where those impulses arise. Because people are not perfect
does not mean that everything about them must be rejected. The baby can stay
just get rid of the bath water.
In
the paper yesterday were a bunch of responses to a letter about how Cowboys
fans should be going to church instead of being out there watching the summer
training camp. Big mistake. The responses let it be known in no uncertain terms
that the letter writer should get a life. What kind of prude, uptight, stuck up
folks would bash the Cowboys?!?! The Cowboys are exactly right behind Jesus,
the Holy Spirit and God in WF. The Pastor tired to get into a little
condemnation of Cowboy mania but he didn’t take it too far. He is smart enough
to make a point and then let his flock be Cowboys fans if they want to. The
Pastor has tremendous common sense. He is wise. He is down home. He can drive
his message in to the barn in any number of ways. He has been around the block
and around the country. He knows what it means to be human.
Letters
in the paper were begging any Cowboy to come visit Uncle Bob in the hospital,
give more autographs at camp, do this, do that. This Cowboy fever is really
unbelievable but I can see that in a little burg like WF, with essentially
nothing to do, having the Cowboys come would be a big deal. Everybody has
Cowboy hats and T-shirts and bumper stickers. Can you imagine a world where the
Cowboys are the most exciting and compelling thing around?
My
stay in WF was an opportunity to explore the meaning of Christianity, through
attending a Pentecostal church, working for a Ministry to Burned Churches,
reading Elaine Pagels about Adam and Eve and the Serpent , listening to
all kind of Baroque religious music and having previously attended Quaker
Meeting all Winter and Spring of this year.
So
far I have approached it in the abstract, in an academic manner, incorporating
a bit here and there from my own meditations. I have not been saved or
converted, even though it is tempting to become a true believer. As a true
believer you are relieved of the necessity of thinking and of taking
responsibility for your actions. I say to myself “ how can I possibly go for
that?” I need to be able to think!
It
is so amazingly improbable that God and Jesus are always behind the scenes,
never revealing themselves, permitting untold suffering and savagery. Why would
the revelations only happen for three years, two thousand years ago and that is
it? It is a lot to ask a person to believe, while daily we witness unimaginable
deprivation and suffering.
It
is a confidence game and Pastors, Priests and preachers are the confidence men.
Thompson’s job is to tend his flock. He needs to keep them having faith, keep
working them over. And the Deacons take up the offering and pay Ted to do the
job. They are poor but they still ante up and pay. Thank you Jesus! They belong
and participate and it all gives meaning to life. It is really real. I can see
it as a game from the perspective of an outsider, a non-believer, a heretic,
but on the inside, this is all genuine stuff.
How
could I be a church goer and still maintain what I need to feel OK and
intelligent? I feel that to a major extent, I would have to really dumb down to
be a true believer. I can admit that to know the greatest mysteries, I would
need faith. Why do I need to have faith in something I can’t know anyway? It is
all with myself to reach my highest capacities, if there is God, then God is
right here inside me and not out there somewhere. What is essentially an
individual journey gets reduced and collapsed into conforming to a group dogma.
It
is absurd to think that in the end true believers will be rewarded for their
lack of critical thought and I will be punished for being a seeker. That does
not add up. I’m sorry. I will gladly burn for that and I have heard that Hell
is actually more fun than Heaven.
The
Pastor said a number of times, if you are not against us, then you are for us.
He was grappling with how people of other faiths and races and countries could
come and help him and his congregation? How could people so wound up in owning
the truth see outside of that enough to come help another denomination? That is
the interfaith, universal, ecumenical spirit. Ecumenical efforts are more at
creating a unity among the Christian world. Interfaith universalism is going to
include all faiths and be harder for people to handle. A universalist
perspective, like mine, will be an anathema to any one even slightly rigid. The
Pastor had to deal. This was real, we were there. He and his people were just
great. We didn’t get stuck on the fine points and allowed our humanity to shine
through. We let what was inside shine and that has no boundaries. That is
human.
We
went out to dinner with some Methodists and they were cracking on the Mormons
and the Jews and my homeboy Pentecostals. Shoot, even my elderly Quaker
companion was seriously anti-Mormon, to the point of not even wanting to listen
to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. This territory is a minefield of faith and
belief. It is nice to find a person like Thompson who can be a Pastor and a
human being too.
7/28
I’m
in Show Low now at a State Park listening to Renaissance and Baroque California
Mission music. This is appropriate because I am now back in the lands of
historical Spanish influence. It feels good to be here. I don’t miss Wichita
Falls or Texas one bit. North central Texas is a pit of zero culture. There is
nothing there but to work and go to church. There isn’t even a sense of history
as with Oklahoma. I don’t see how people can stand to live there. You would
need some hot pooty tooty on a daily basis.
Although
I was not born here in the Southwest region, I have lived in Tucson for 16
years, have studied the local and regional history, lived in and studied the
desert, visited and lived in Mexico and speak OK Spanish. I feel connected to
this region more than anywhere else.
I
spent last night in Gallup, NM. Gallup is very similar to Flagstaff. There is a
railroad running through the middle of town, there is an older section, a big strip development and lots of Indians.
Just like with the Blacks in WF, there is a lot of mixture between the Anglos,
Mexicans, Spanish and Indians. Folks are
coming in all shades and degrees of color. In 400 years you would expect as
much. A lot of Indians you see are mixed.
I
stopped at Zuni Pueblo and met a fellow up at Black Rock who told me to stop at
the church in town and they would take me over to the old Mission, in the plaza
of old Zuni. I went over there and a nice woman led me to the Mission, through
the old adobe buildings and women hanging wash and into the historic plaza.
There was a cemetery in the church yard. What a sense of history and tradition!
Off in the distance the thunder beings and puffy white clouds set off the red
sandstone mesas and the dark green pine. There is big space, big history and it
goes deep, down through the strata into a mysterious space where human
traidtion intersects the history of the earth itself.
In
Philadelphia you might marvel at the old colonial buildings, William Penn, the
founding fathers but in the sedimentary plateau country you become captivated
by a deeper history in more than one way.
As
the Zuni woman unlocked the church door, I had all my attic fantasy needs taken
care of. Here I was entering a Mission built in the 1600's. Man, what a
feeling, to see the inside, at Zuni. The upper walls were being painted with
murals depicting traditional Zuni religion and life ways. Scaffolding was
erected all along one side. There were also really old pictures of Jesus and
the Virgin of Guadalupe was front and center in a big piece behind the dais and
the pulpit. The Virgin connects the whole region.
I
asked my guide how the priest felt about mixing the symbols Catholicism with
the Kachinas dancing across the sky? She said about 80% of the Zuni are
Catholic but that they still go with the old ways too. It is the same as my
Kiowa friend who told me about how most of them had taken the Jesus road but
they still respected and tried to connect with their own past and history.
It
is amazing that there is this syncretism all through the areas of New Spain,
where Catholicism put it’s pageantry strategically in place of the Indians
harvest and ceremonial cycles. There is the same stuff, from Argentina to
Chiapas to Acoma and Zuni. It is a sacred mixture of Christianity and the deep
spiritual animism of the Indians.
This
is bringing me back to my youthful search and striving to read about and
understand the Indians. The Indian way is as deep, sincere and meaningful as
any Christian way. I am breaking some new ground here for myself in seeing what
is at the core of ethnicity. Culture inevitably has religion as a major
component and in order to come to grips with being human, a person has to come
to grips with religious questions.
As
far as culture and life ways go, at a small museum in Zuni there was a booklet
made by grammar school students which was very telling. The theme was Zuni
people, then and now. Then: we didn’t have Miss Zuni Now: we have Miss Zuni and
so on and so forth about clothes, transportation, food, housing, etc. You can
see the difference between the old photos and today with trucks and crackerjack
construction, the old ways have fallen aside. You can feel the cultural shifts.
Change has come to town. What that means to the individual Zuni is not for me
to say. All I can see is the Kachinas and Jesus and the Virgin of Guadalupe all
cohabiting in a beautiful old building.
First
the Indians, then other strange Indians, then come the Spanish, the Mexicans,
La Raza, the Anglos, then the Yuppies. Change, change, change. People coming
and building new types of houses, changing the way things were. In Concha, AZ I
met an old fellow, “Porfie”. He had an inviting junk shop and he and his wife
were real friendly. We sat around and talked for an hour or so about gentrification
and how Porfie’s property taxes had gone from $90.00 a year to $900.00 because
of all the Anglos moving in and wanting a school, a library and a fire
department. Porfie and Concha did just fine with what they had before.
Porfirio
is a born and bred Hispano, of direct Spanish descent. He is not a Mexican. I
asked him about that and he said sure there is a little difference but he was
born HERE, he is from Concha. His daughters all married Anglos. He sells his
stuff to Mexicans and Indians. Sure they are different but Porfie plays the
differences down. I like that. That is my kind of guy. Both of us don’t like
yuppies in Explorers invading the countryside. We want controlled growth but we
want it to apply to everyone except us.
At
the museum in St. Johns, AZ, formerly El Vadito, where there is a crossing of
the Little Colorado River, there are local families who can trace their
ancestry to Don Juan de Onate’s exploration party, Chavez, Gallego, homeboys
who came up that way and never left. The Mormons came too and gained a
foothold.
There
is a lot of room here and for hundreds of years it has been enough. Now there
is a new invasion of yuppies and Santa Fe type movie star tourists. It is too
bad because the new stuff is like weak Kool-Aid compared to the strength and
power of the history of this area. Maybe yesterday always seems better because
it is what we know. We can look askance at things like the wheel, the bow and
arrow, the atlatl, metallurgy, the telegraph, telephone, railroad, clocks, printing
presses, TV, radio, airplanes and computers. These things have all represented
major challenges to the ways that came before and maybe it always seemed that
we would be going to hell in a handbasket as a result of the new. The world has
always been changing, only now, in many ways we are running out of space to
make mistakes.
I
have often wondered about road kill, all that life smashed, mashed and crushed
to death. What happens to the consciousness of an insect that is instantly
obliterated into a clear splat of formerly living fluids on your windshield?
What becomes of the armadillo or the hare? The squirrel is crunched and rolls
over and over to a stop while the shocked driver must ponder the very core of
existence. Are we all just random life here on earth in the midst of incredible
and amazing odds? How highly improbable that we would become conscious of being
conscious solely by random forces. Are the clouds and beauty of the sunset all
we are ever going to get? Does this tremendous mystery, all of the universe,
the infinite expanse of matter and space, time bent around pinheads crowded
with angels, does this in any way imply there is more? Is there a creator? Does
the incredible intricacy of life imply any sense of higher purpose when the
business of life at the bottom is all about killing and eating other life? Is
there a conscious creative force and if there is, how could we possibly know?
There are certainly creative forces which are entirely unconscious or which
operate at levels not able to be described in the terms of consciousness, such
as ocean currents, clouds and evolution. They are animate. Why is the moniker animal reserved for life only when
other, inorganic process are equally animate?
It
is anyone’s guess. I have seen for a long time the difference between faith and
fact. There is really no comparison. It is apples and oranges.
There
is, however, a space in the secular mind, where even though a fellow might be
trying to tow the empirical line, a guy just has to admit he can’t know certain
things. If you can’t know it, why pussy foot around with a lot of jive
pretending you really do? Faith is faith and fact is fact. Some might confuse
fact with fiction and indeed there is no universal reason we can look back to
for any answers. When you really get down to it, a fact is all a guy wants one
to be! Fact and faith are inseparable pieces of a unified human way of
understanding life through the veil of culture and religion. People have argued
and fought and killed and brutalized each other over just such material as
this. We really want to be right in the worst way.
Let
me be right for me, as long as I do no harm and I am just. I take not your
possessions or your wife or your life. I cannot help being me. I do this not to
antagonize you. Permit me to be human just like you would want for yourself.
I am
here among the dramatic storm clouds of Arizona August, among the ponderosa and
my memories of education, Mexicans, Blacks, Hispanos and all kinds of
motherfuckers, all kinds of lessons and insights. I am 41 and no closer than I
was when I was 18 or 28 touching the same material. Maybe when I was a kid I
had it the most straight, that all of this pretense and white man’s striving
paled in comparison to any kind of genuine culture. Yet where would I be if I
couldn’t indulge in the mighty abstractions made possible by being born and
living in the modern world? What it gets down to is where a person touches
life, where their baggage and wagon meet the road and how they as individuals
handle the material and situations they are dealt.
8/1/98
Hutch’s Pool
As I
was waiting for the tram a Forest Service guy came over and asked how heavy my
pack was? I said “about sixty pounds.” He said “do you walk up hill with that?”
shaking his head in disbelief. I said “yes but slowly.” He then asked if I had
“anything with me in case I got in trouble?” I didn’t know what he meant at
first. I thought maybe he was talking about weed or booze. I said “I don’t
understand what you mean.” and he said “nevermind.” Then it became clear to me
that he meant a gun.
He
asked me if I had any bug spray. I said “no.” He shook his head some more
looking at me and asked again if I didn’t have anything with me in case I got
in trouble. He then said “you are a lot braver than me.” I said to him “this is
not my first hike.” We talked some more about bugs and how I could possibly
stand it when they are crawling up my nose and in my ears and in my eyes? I
told him the first line of defense against bugs is psychological. If you start
letting them really get to you the battle is already lost regardless if there
is any bug spray involved or not. If a guy can’t take a few bugs he might as
well stay home. My protagonist agreed with that and then drifted off to finish
his work of emptying garbage cans.
A
lot of quail were walking by too in good looking skimpy outfits and darned if
one didn’t appear with the shortest of shorty shorts imaginable, a fantastic
tan and huge tits all hanging and busting out of a skampy top. I thought to
myself wow, get a load of that and coming right this way too! I had my back
pack out and she came right up to me and started asking questions. “How long
are you going to be out?” “Where are you going?” She was really friendly. As we
spoke, my eyes were taking a hike and independent excursion all of their own. I
haven’t seen a tan like that ever. Her body was toned and fit. Little hairs
stood out on firm skin that dove down into the nerve endings of her flesh. Her
name was Shoshana and she teaches high school at Santa Rita. She runs 8 - 10
miles a day and her own personal marathon once a month. She is not a triathlete
because “that is too much time to spend on yourself.” She went scuba diving in
Mexico by herself. She went to Central America by herself. She was attracted to
me because I was going out by myself.
As
we carried on I decided that her tits were fake. She had them done. She was
probably about my age and women of that vintage don’t have tits that bust out
skin tight and that have no jiggle to them at all. She said she could tell I
was in the helping professions, into service just by looking in my eyes. If she
could tell that then she surely must have known that I wanted to fuck her like
a wild sow, even though her fake tits were totally crass. She might not have
been so into herself as to devote the time to triathlete training but she did
have time for being in totally great shape and for spruced up titties.
She
was a combination of a little too much new age lingo with pushy New York Jew
with a highly fuckable body. If you ever got your hands on something like that
it would be a combination of heaven and hell all at once.
So
here I am in Sabino Canyon again. I saw all the places I was with my SCA’s. I
saw Hutch’s Pool and remembered the flash flood, remembered the ringtail’s
getting the rube’s hamburgers right off the grill. “What are those things
man?”
There
was a nice storm this afternoon and another one this evening. The creek has risen about a foot although it
has not turned brown. The vegetation within the banks shows evidence of heavy
flooding, probably snow melt floods from the record El Nino snow pack on Mt.
Lemmon.
I
had an insight on the way up here today. The same places where I had so much
immediacy and so much emotion with my SCA’s, those places don’t hold the same
punch any longer. I visited here in the Fall after that summer of 1992 and the
place seemed alive with the spirits and memories of those kids. The years have
rolled by and the same saguaros are here, silent and unmoving. As the moments
slip by they are gone forever, fading ever more remotely from significance and
immediacy. The time with those teens is gone for good. These are new moments
now.
What
does it matter to the saguaro and the oaks that we had a great time out here
eight years ago? What does it matter to the rocks that there are saguaros and
oaks? When generations and centuries, millenniums, eons and epochs have passed,
all of that will be forgotten just as the lives and times of the people who
preceded us Anglos and Spanish and Mexicans here in the Tucson valley. The
moment rules. The now is where I forever stand
8/2
As
individuals we act out the peculiar drama of our species. What else can we do?
We are bound by our nature to work within certain parameters, human parameters.
Other individuals of other species do the same. All of our individual actions
merge into a larger collective picture which can be called nature, all of life.
All the big and little processes change over time, rise and fall, come and go,
it is life, constantly changing, constantly marvelous and infinitely
mysterious.
How
is it that we assume this has all been created? By what forces has life in all
it’s astounding complexity and staggering variety of forms been created? Can we
be so arrogant as to assume our own understanding is at the same level as the
creator? Big questions :: no answers.
Elaine
Pagels talks about the early Christians challenging the Pagan beliefs of the
Romans. She talks about how the pagan gods were used to justify slavery and
prostitution and how with the Christian God all were created equal, women,
slaves, races all equal in the eyes of God. This was while the Christians were
being persecuted and before they became the state religion of the Roman empire,
before they themselves found ways to justify slavery, racism and other forms of
discrimination.
Here
in the midst of pure nature with no humanity around except me, I can see things through pagan
eyes. I can see how a tree would have a spirit and how all trees would have a
collective larger consciousness, the god of trees and how this extends into a
pagan pantheon of spirits and gods of nature and life. This is a way of
understanding the world by extension with what you already know, by using
metaphors. If I have a spirit then a tree must have a spirit and all life as
well have spirits too...
If
we take our own societies and families and use them as metaphors for how gods
and God relate to us, then we are transposing the known onto the unknown. A is
to B as C is to X. God is the Father. We are the children. This is all we can
do because in reality we cannot imagine or make metaphors with things and
processes unknown to us. How can you compare something you have no words for or
experience with? The unknown inevitably gets reduced to the known.
A
creator or creative force that deals at the level of atoms and quarks and
electrons and suns and galaxies and DNA and universes and the crystalline
structures of minerals and rocks, that creative force is so much more than an
anthropomorphic “Father”. When you look at things this way it is easy to see we
just use that metaphor to make it easy for ourselves. It is simpler, more
comforting and less messy to believe the easy stuff. The easy stuff is for mass
consumption.
I
went for a nice walk up past the confluence of Lemmon Creek and Sabino Creek,
having found a number of nice pools where I relaxed, had a luxuriant empty
mind, thought a little and got entirely too much sun. The sun of Tucson summer
snuck up on me through the cool breezes and by being wet down by refreshing stream water. While it
all felt great in the moment later I came to regret my indulgence and momentary
pleasure.
Now
back at camp the gnats have driven me into the tent. They don’t seem to bite
but they sure can hassle. My friend the garbage man stands as a spectre. An ant
bites me on the nuts. How can you take it? If you want to be out here you just
do. The sound of distant thunder rumbles long and low. The creek gurgles.
Inside this tent I have been to Mt. Olympus, La Push, the Olympic coast, North
Cascades, the Yolla Bollys, Trinity Alps, Mexico. This is my adventure shack
given as a gift by my great friend the Mighty Mountain Man. I am naked and hot
but if I don’t move at all I will not sweat.
I
went up for an after sunset swim in the big pool and it was very nice to have
it all to myself. Hutch’s Pool. 800,000
people in Tucson and I am the only one who will walk 2.5 miles in August
through the Sonoran Desert to have it. It doesn’t seem that outrageous to me
but maybe I am crazier than I thought.
I
walked down to have a look at the camp of my previous neighbors who were
shooting off fire crackers last night. Maybe they left some good gear. I am not
above scavenging what others lose. There was a big pile of spaghetti and
meatballs, gum drops scattered everywhere, toilet paper in the bushes, french
bread, ravioli, shoes, stickers, paper and all manner of other trash. What can
I say, they obviously didn’t know anything about conservation or low impact
camping. They were ignorant and cannot be blamed for not knowing but all the
same it is a shame to witness this grossly disrespectful behavior. What could
they possibly have been thinking? The Forest Service has minimal information
posted, no check in, no permits and so they must constantly be picking up trash
after folks like this.
8/3
I
reread Tom Kochman’s Black and White Styles in Conflict and have been
intrigued by a point made about who is responsible for a person’s feelings.
Community Black people see the individual as responsible for their own feelings
while White people tend to see others as responsible for respecting their
sensibilities. A White person can say to someone, “you made me feel bad.” while
a Black person would not automatically assume their mental state derived from
someone else’s actions.
I
have run across inumerable situations where people have accused me of violating
their sensibilities, where I have been made out to be insensitive and the bad
guy. What I am seeing now is that this is a cultural thing with White people
and not necessarily a universal truth of human relations. It cuts both ways too
because when I look at some situations and in my mind try to lay blame on
others for how I feel, I see that as in some ways not accepting responsibility
for my own mental state. My mental state is hypothetically able to be under my
own control at all times and it can be seen as a cop out to blame one’s own
feelings on another person. Of course we would have to account for assholes,
some people just are assholes.
8/4
Mt Bigelow 4:PM
I
woke at 5:AM this morning, dawn and put on coffee water and started to pack and
get ready to hike back. It took less than two hours to hike the 2.5 miles to
the end of the Sabino road and according to plan I was in the shade most of the
time, skating behind ridge lines, the early morning sun unable to burn me any
more. My pink skin could not take any more than absolutely necessary.
Last
night I was stripping bushes of their woody flood detritus to make a smoky fire
to fend off the gnats. After I had the fire smoking and going nicely and
touched all my dinner implements to start cooking I looked up and noticed that
the bush I had my hands all in was nothing other than a huge poison ivy plant.
Fuck! I immediately went swimming to wash off the residue as best I could but
it seems now that I have it all over my body.
Now
I am at 8000' or more and it is nice and cool. I had not had enough camping and
drove up here to Mt. Lemmon for a few more days of nature. There are signs all
around saying how this is bear country and not to leave food yet there is a
fucking pile of ravioli and a half full soda just across the way. There are
wrappers and empty cans and toilet paper is everywhere. It must suck to be the
Forest Service slugs who have to clean up after these ignorant slobs.
8/5
I
finished my first Elaine Pagels book at a picnic table down by Marshall Gulch.
It was a great read. I am copacetic with her that in my own efforts to
understand the great mystery of life I can’t go with literal interpretations of
holy books. That would be too fantastic and against all my experience and
knowledge.
What
I can see is humanity grappling heavily with it’s consciousness and ability to
discern good and evil, right and wrong, the solid path, the correct way. With a
species that is conscious of it’s own consciousness there is almost a limitless
degree of reflection possible. We are free to explore the territory of the mind
and the imagination, to meander and allow ourselves to entertain the wildest
fantasies, possibilities, postulations and theories. Inevitably, like huskies
and baboons, we seem to end up fighting a never ending battle to see who will
be the top dog. Ironically the new one ends up being just the same as the old.
All that squabbling and fighting and violence to become in the end just what
you were fighting against.
If
we were to admit that ethics, good and evil, were situational and individual,
that just blows most established religion out of the water. This is a political
arena as well as an arena of any ultimate truths and regardless of the
particular truth involved, people are invested in fighting that insuring that
their particular version remains on top. To admit that ethics are situational
is tantamount to allowing each dog to be it’s own master and that puts a lot of
lead dogs and mushers right out of business. As Pagels pointed out, the church
hierarchy and orthodoxy has a vested interest in maintaining itself. With no
flock who needs shepherds?
Can
a modern guy like me who knows science and evolution and genetics and geology
and the possibility of knowing all rational explanations for all phenomena,
pass himself off to himself as without need of any spirit or any type of
religious experience? I don’t think so. People, and all animals as well, have a
deep need to belong to and be involved in corporate endeavors where the whole
is larger than the sum of the parts. This participation gives meaning to life.
It is not rational but it feels good. We want to belong and to feel good and to
participate in what is perceived as deep endeavors. This is the impulse which
drives the religious experience. This is my hypothesis as of 8/6.
8/9
I
went to Meeting today and that felt good. I met a woman interested in service,
spoke with some Mexicans about starting projects and educational work in
Nogales and spoke with David Perkins about Hermosillo, Trigo Moreno. During
Meeting there were messages about simplicity and our consumer culture and also
about the bombings in Africa and the importance of living up to the highest
ideals of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
I
enjoyed connecting my reading of Pagels and the similar messages of
Christianity in the first two centuries, of the Gnostic Christians and of
George Fox and the Quakers. By serendipity I am a Quaker, grew up in Quaker
Meeting, Quaker camps, Quaker college and now I am finding a connection with it
on a personal level. The connection is that there is a tradition of honoring
individual searching, of respecting the paths individuals take to connect with
life’s mysteries.
Now
in 1998 there is no way I can ignore science. I cannot have a literal religious
perspective. That won’t work. In order for religion to work for me it has to
incorporate my understanding of how the universe is working. I can’t be seeing
Corvettes and have people all telling me horses are where it’s at. My
understanding of Quakerism and religion demands a big time upgrade to the late
20th century. I feel that the long tradition of tolerance and
individual exploration in Quakerism gives me that space. It is cool that this
goes back 2000 years, even though that is not so much time in the big picture
it is enough to give me the feel of a solid tradition in the human realm. Today
was a good meditation in Meeting. I could feel the power of the silence and
felt it connecting me to all of my previous Meetings and insights. Many years I
had Meeting outside at Farm and Wilderness and nature wove itself deeply into
my soul. I felt that all come back even though my main project now is to be
exploring history and connecting it to my present.
11/9/99
At
work yesterday I caught a snatch on the radio about how the Pastor of the Full
Gospel Powerhouse had been arrested for arson and conspiring to commit
insurance fraud, along with three others. At least two of the other three were
the folks who had held the lease and then left the church. This is rather
shocking. Thompson has only been accused at this point, two weeks before the
statute of limitations was up. Still, it is a terrible twist on an already sad
story.
Preacher
Charged in Church Blaze
.c
The Associated Press
WICHITA
FALLS, Texas (AP) - A minister and three other people have been charged with
burning down his church in 1996 to collect a $270,000 insurance policy.
The
fire had once been investigated by the National Church Arson Task Force, which
was formed to look into dozens of blazes at predominantly black churches,
mainly in the South.
The
Rev. Theophilus Thompson, pastor of the Full Gospel Power House Church of God
in Christ, and the other three were arrested less than two weeks before a
three-year statute of limitations ran out.
Thompson,
who formed the predominantly black church in 1960, posted a $150,000 bond and
was released Monday. He is accused of organizing criminal activity and arson
along with Wilma Monday, Dusty Dean Williams and Christopher Charles Johnson.
Ms.
Monday, the former owner of the church; Williams, 25; and Johnson, 22; were
being held in the Wichita County Jail in lieu of $150,000 bonds.
Witnesses
have quoted Williams as saying that Thompson wanted to burn the church for
insurance money, according to a statement released by the Wichita Falls Fire
Department. It was unclear what Ms. Monday's relationship was with Williams and
Johnson, but informants said Ms. Monday paid Williams to burn the church.
After
the National Church Arson Task Force investigated, an ATF agent said
authorities had ruled out race and revenge as possible motives for the fire, in
which flames reached 80 feet high.
Nobody
was hurt in the blaze. The damage was estimated at $250,000.
Thompson's
telephone number was unlisted and he could not be reached for comment Monday.
Calls to his church went unanswered.
AP-NY-11-09-99
0001EST
Copyright
1999 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may
not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the
prior written authority of The Associated Press. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by
AOL.
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