Georgia On My Mind Tour 2007

•  I gave talks to two Journalism classes at Berry College in Rome, Georgia.  [Opinions Editor Leslie Houck would write for Berry’s Campus Carrier newspaper:  “He (Schriner) tries to run the campaign and his life like Jesus lived His in the Gospels.  While he recognizes that the phrase has been trivialized, “What Would Jesus Do?” really is his motto.” ]

• At Berry College, I also interviewed Professor Brian Carroll who is the author of When to Stop the Cheering, which is, in part, about the Negro (Baseball) League.  Eventually, the National Baseball League was integrated and the Negro League dissolved.  My wife Liz had a question:  “Why wasn’t the Negro League integrated as well – so it, too, could continue in some form?”  Good question.

• We stopped at the “Open Door Community” in downtown Atlanta to do research for our position paper on poverty.  The Open Door houses some homeless and provides food, clothing, medicine, and other help for the desperately poor in this area.  Open Door volunteer Calvin Kimbrough told us the evolving “gentrification” (new condos, refurbished homes…) of downtown Atlanta, is diminishing affordable housing in kind – with more and more people are ending up on the streets.  (What sometimes looks like “progress,” is not, and more: a social justice travesty.)

• I gave a talk to the volunteers at the Open Door Community, commending them for their work -- and their ethos.  That is, these people realize their work is not only about helping the poor, but is intrinsically tied to their salvation as well.  A plaque on the wall here quotes a poor woman working on her Third World farm as a humanitarian aid worker approaches.  She says:  “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time.  But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

• I interviewed the Open Door’s Lauren Cogswell who had just applied for membership with the NAACP.  She wrote in her application letter:  “I am asking to join the NAACP today because I am a 32-year-old white woman who has benefited and continues to benefit from the privilege of my whiteness.  That privilege has been secured for hundreds of years by oppressing people of color… Today I commit myself to ending white racism and dismantling the structures that continue to perpetuate violence on people of color.”

• In Americus, Georgia, I interviewed Jorge Echeve.  He was here with his family from Sarasota, Florida.  He said he moved his family to America from Columbia several years ago because of the extreme oppression in his country.  He said the violence was “so common” in his country, that a majority of the populace had gotten used to the extremely high abduction and murder rates.

• At Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia, I interviewed Grant Edkins who was visiting from Cape Town, South Africa.  He said in the aftermath of the dismantling of Apartheid, the “oppressed became the rulers” and there could have been a tremendous blood bath.  Yet there wasn’t.  Edkins said he credits Nelson Mandella for coming into power “speaking reconciliation instead of revenge.”

•  Before leaving Americus, I stopped at Habitat for Humanity International’s Global Village.  It includes a replica of a Third World slum.  Minus the groans of the dying from disease, hunger… or the children playing in open sewage in the streets, the slum is still tremendously impacting.  And it should give most of us Americans pause to reassess how we are living in the face of this profound, and far reaching, poverty.

• In Albany, Georgia, I was interviewed by a reporter from Channel 10 News.  She wondered how an “average person” would do in D.C.  I said there are currently a plethora of people in D.C. who came out of Harvard, Yale, and so on, and we’re in a ill-begotten war, the debt is almost at nine trillion dollars, there are 46 million people without healthcare, children sleep on inner city streets and scores of others starve every day throughout the Third World, we are on the brink of a global warming disaster… I said that maybe it’s time to reassess our definition of:  “well educated.”

• In Brunswick, Georgia, I interviewed Tom Dennard who teaches a Backpacking Class at Coastal Georgia Community College.  He is also the founder of the Hostel in the Forrest in Brunswick.  The Hostel specializes in promoting “environmental sustainability.”  They recycle practically everything here, use solar panels to pump irrigation water from a pond to their organic gardens, don’t use heating or air conditioning… They take the type of “environmental footprint” they leave seriously, as should we all.  The Hostel in the Forrest motto:  “May the forest be with you.”