The Lowe Down

Martin Luther King was born a "nigger" and died a man who was, by any measure, great. A man of infinite patience and restraint, a universal symbol of moral rectitude, compassion, vision and resolve. He confounded and confused the idiots while reassuring the sane. He was a genuine Christian in a part of this country where burning crosses and lynching children were considered acts of piety. His dreams, like those of Jesus, were as anathemic in Little Rock as they had been in Judea. He did more than almost any human of his time to soften the vile rictus of racism, moronic bigotry and cruelty in the name of tradition and hidebound ignorance. Like Jesus, like Buddha, like Moses' brother, like Mohammed, he was poet who knew all about words and the stories that are the midwives of hope, compassion and revolution. You bring this sort of message into the light and someone is bound to shoot you.

Dr. King spent a lot of his life in jail- the American wilderness-Joseph Campbell's Belly of the Whale and there, in the nadir of modern experience, he learned how to grow and sail beyond brick and iron. He learned, like Hamlet imagined, that he could be bounded in a nutshell and still count himself king of infinite space. I have stood where he stood on the mall in Washington and spoke to the host of hope and I have been on the balcony of the motel in Memphis where that vision was extinguished. They are both places the Greeks call omphali-navels, belly buttons where the energy of heroes have burst and continue to burst. They are holy places; the birthing rooms of heroism.

I am a 55 year old white man. It is guys like me who run the world. I was born the son of a surgeon after a great war and a great depression. I was raised in the shadow of a phony mountain (the bowels of which house a roller coaster engineered to allow me safe fear) and, to this day, know Disneyland better than I know Santa Barbara. The country into which I was ushered had the highest standard of living ever enjoyed in the history of our species. As a child I was better fed, clothed, schooled, entertained and cosseted than any pharaoh or English prince. It has been a life of preposterous privilege. If I was ever "profiled" it was as an exercise in the confirmation of my immunity. I had to go on the road to experience hate.

Let me tell you a story. I was hitchhiking to Mexico and I had to go through Texas. Now, all the rednecks in big trucks have ponytails but then it was the hippies with long hair and the good old boys had crew cuts or something. I should have got a haircut. It was the middle of the night when the truck driver pulled over and said goodbye. It was raining. I don't know the name of the place but all there was the stop and, across the highway, a Laundromat preposterously lit up with the rows of washers and dryers, I remember thinking, like huge eyeballs. I stood in a phone booth and, using John Lennon's phone card number, called everyone one I knew- waiting out the rain. When it stopped, I crossed to the Laundromat, took off all my clothes, wrapped myself in a towel and dumped my back pack into the washer, took a chair and opened a book.

I had switched everything to the dryer when I saw the four headlights in the plate glass window on the highway side wall. Four Texas type guys walked in and began and began to kick and beat me. I assumed the fetal position and waited for them to stop or for me to die.

They never said a word. They weren't laughing or drunk. That they hated me was abundantly clear. The hated me because I looked different from them and I was not from there. They broke a tooth and a rib and there was a lot of blood. But my clothes were clean. I slept in the Laundromat bathroom, punching the electric hand dryer for heat as it got colder and colder toward dawn.

Joseph Campbell in what amounts to my secular bible (The Hero With A Thousand Faces) writes: "Every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late." Racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, ageism, anti-hippie hate crimes are based on a fundamental ignorance concerning the object of hate or fear. The formula is remarkably simple-the more you know the less you hate and fear.

Less than one hundred years ago black people and women were either barred from voting altogether or were discouraged from the exercise of their rights in a host of creative ways. Today, a white woman is running against a black man for the nomination of their party in a national election. There are more women in the nation's colleges and universities than there are men. Country music singers have pony tails. There are still ghettos divided on strictly linguistic/ racial lines in every major city in this country. The current administration is thinking very seriously of erecting a wall along the southern border of the United States-medieval technology in an iPod world. I haven't heard about plans for the border with Canada.

The civil war in Iraqis between Muslim and Muslim each with a slightly different doctrinal policy and fondness for one grandson or the other of a man who died thousands of years ago. "Man is born free", wrote Lincoln," but is everywhere in chains."

The distinctions that create catastrophic rifts, suicide bombers and guerillas holed up desperately in caves can be so slight as be invisible to someone not schooled in the nature of the particular schism or ancient beef. Let me tell you a story...

I was working for the International Rescue Committee in the Eastern Region of the Sudan as an administrator/ compound director in a refugee camp of some 40 to 40,000 Ethiopian refugees-displaced by yet another ideological fracas on the Horn of Africa. I was suffering from severe color deprivation in my camp at Tawawa. Everything was the color of old sand. Only the dresses of the women offered any relief. I dreamt of Fenway Park, Puget Sound, the Upper Nile. With my interpreter/ business partner (we were smuggling Red Torch gin and pork from the north) Maru, I drove to the Ethiopian border and bought one hundred small trees. We planted them around the perimeter of the hospital compound in the middle of which was my office- a round straw and camel shit hut called a "tukal". I hired three guards for my trees. I engaged a donkey man to water them. Two weeks after the planting, I looked up from my desk to see that a tree near the entrance gate was gone. I called for Maru and asked him to tell me who last night's guard was. He pointed out into the compound where there were probably 150 refugees milling about-occupied by what were really extraordinarily complicated lives.

"Over there, Mr. Raff" Maru said

"Where ?" I said

"Him, the black one . There"

Inanely, I reminded them that all the men in our range of vision, indeed all of the men with the exception of myself in a 100 mile radius were "black".

"Oh" he said "Mr. Raff you are very funny man"

What the Buddha, Christ and all the great hero gods have in common is that they are looking for commonalities and not distinctions. The yin bleeds into yang. The serpent eats its tail

The only antidote, the vaccine for the strains of hate and suspicion that plague the world can be supplied only by the struggle against ignorance and the cultivation of compassion and tolerance. This afternoon you will have the opportunity to begin the process of understanding as you are introduced to different histories and forms of consciousness. This is serious business. It's what billions of humans have got to begin to do and right away.

Past Musings...