I went to a ceremony in honor of Martin Luther King tonight. It's part of an area nonviolence group's initiative to raise non-violence awareness. The activities begin on Martin Luther King's birthday and end on the anniversary of his assassination.
A fellah I will call Walter invited me when I contacted him about doing an interview for an article I'm writing. Walter told me that I could find him at the ceremony running around collecting garbage, sporting a doo rag and a big white beard. Walter is a Quaker peace activist and environmentalist in the area, a congenial fellow who did a great deal to make me feel welcome and introduce me to the variety of religious peeps representing at the event.
From his description and the email we'd exchanged, I imagined that he'd be full of energy. That he was. He had nothing but huge grins for me -- he'd given me a hard time when I contacted him because I just did it out of the blue and without bothering to do the "friend of a friend" introductions. he was right to give me a hard time. I just popped of an email, with hardly a word of explanation figuring that most people wouldn't read some big long introduction anyway. I guess I've been in the corporate world too long.
Anyway, the joshing back and forth was all in good fun, really, but as he said, he gets tons of requests like mine and wondered why I hadn't done due diligence. Was I writing a school paper or what?
I baked some cookies for a dish to pass, toting them with me as I arrived at MLK plaza where I happened up Reverend Jordan Rodney making his opening remarks. I awkwardly jumbled around this basket full of goodies, glad I'd wasted so much plastic wrap for them because otherwise they would have ended up smashed against my shirt.
As I arrived Reverend Jordan, dressed in an African-style tan and brown cotton pantsuit that men often wear, Rodney led us in prayer. Reverend Jordan and his family were central to getting the MLK plaza built in the first place I learned.
A woman, Maureesa, who I got to be friends with later, gave an opening speech, a recitation of Dr. King's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. Maureesa did a fine job delivering the speech. She was dressed in a festive black and red outfit, with shell and bone jewelry that shimmered as she motioned with her hand and body throughout the speech.
I've never quite seen anything like what followed - a praise dance group: "Connecting Worshippers" from a local area Baptist church. They were all dressed in white choir gowns, white gloves, and some women wore purple sashes, while others wore gold. The sound man, who everyone calls Boon, played some gospel music that reminded me of easy listening jazz. The women all performed a swaying type of dancing, very mellow, using their hands and body to signal concepts such as "come to me lord," "I need you lord," "I'm looking for you Lord." I sat there and watched them move, listened to the easy-listening-jazz-voice of a woman singing. It occurred to me as I watched this group of extremely different women - different in age, shape, height, intensity, and bodily rhythm -- and thought the expressions and emotions they evoked in me reminded me of me talking to a former lover who I still had feelings for and was talking to him about those feelings. I've often heard people liken the words of praise to the words one might utter to one's beloved, but this was the first time I saw women actually expressing themselves in a way that truly evoked recognition in me.
....
I'm getting really tired, too tired to continue with my stream of consciousness which I'd wanted to record right after the event. I have to be up early, I'm dying from the hayfever I contracted after biking the Great Dismal Swamp yesterday, and I need some sleep. The blog is going to serve as a kind of notebook for my field notes as it were, even though I don't have time to do a proper ethnography for this article.
Oh, to explain the title: I was invited to write an article on the Obama presidency but I didn't just want to write about my perspective alone. I'm just one person. I'm hardly representative of "the left." I wanted to talk to a lot of people and get their responses -- to kind of gauge the weather as it were.
So, I'm going to continue this as soon as possible,.
In the meantime, to explain the title, I was struck by the closing remarks from a faction of the group represented by people are are deeply into issues of personal-level violence prevention. She asked that people actively do work to advance non-violent attitudes and behaviors in their daily lives. She asked us to make sure to role model for children, especially children, and to be sure not to let our children watch violent movies and television shows or play with violent toys and games.
And then she said "God Bless America."
I was pretty dumbfounded by the idea. Because it wasn't just a perfunctory thing to say. It was a joyous, heartily belted out sentiment, an attempt to rally the crowd, and people did rally to the expression even though I knew that not everyone there could possibly be in agreement with the idea: God Bless America!
It just struck me as so fucking wrong. As such a weird thing to say given the "manifest destiny" sound of the utterance at this convocation. Asking God to bless what Martin Luther King called the biggest perpetrator of violence on the planet, the U S of A.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)