Yearly Archives: 2012

What explains it?  What explains the darkness, the stark hatred inside people like Charles Worley, the so-called pastor of Providence Road Baptist Church in the town of Newton, North Carolina?  Worley says his adherents “should build a great big large fence 50 or 100 miles long.  Put all the lesbians in there.  Fly over and drop some food.  Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals.  Have that fence electrified so they can’t get out.  You know what, in a few years, they’ll die out.  You know why?  They can’t reproduce.”

The problem with people like Charles Worley is that they know their choirs, how to draw them in and how to preach to them.  Such choirs come from the uneducated, the fearful, the bitter, the prejudicial, the resentful.  Should we hold Charles Worley to account, or should we instead indict his more numerous, complicit lay supporters?

As Barack Obama said, infamously, in Pennsylvania, in 2008:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. They fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Well, that’s one explanation.  But I think it goes deeper.  People the world over do the same thing every day.  Blame the immigrant.  Blame the government.  Blame the newcomer, the different one, the one who doesn’t believe what I believe.  Blame him.  Not me.  Hate him.  Not me.

Call me naive, but I think that public school education is the key.  I had no idea, when I moved to North Carolina, that educated people could be viewed with such suspicion, and that education itself could be held in such low regard.  Frankly, it is depressing to see what amounts to willful ignorance among a significant part of the populace here.  It is not just some knee-jerk right-wing resistance to teachers’ unions.  It is against teaching, period.  Parents want to preserve their right to teach their children to hate the people they hate.

I don’t think I will live long enough to see this change.  If it does, and I do, please come visit me in the rest home, give my shoulders a shake to wake me up, and shout to me, love won.

If you had invested in Facebook on its first day of trading, thinking the stock would take off like a rocket and make you rich (along with founder Mark Zuckerberg), well, I hope you didn’t throw your life savings into it.   In just three days, you would have lost a quarter of your money.  But what about Mark Zuckerberg, you may be thinking.  You may have lost thousands but since last Friday he has lost billions.  That leaves him only $15 billion ahead of what he had last Thursday.  Poor Mark.  I bet he would feel better if you “liked” him.

Back in the 60’s, I worked for a newspaper called the “Hurricane Courier”.  Hours were good but the pay was lousy.  Not only was I never paid (it was a high-school rag, after all) but, pouring insult onto injury, I wound up getting myself fired.  I am the only high-school newspaper writer ever fired.  (If you don’t think so, find another one.)

The Hurricane Courier’s rather immodest tagline: “Something Dramatic in Journalism.”  But most of the drama surrounding the newspaper was never reported.  You see, at the same time I wrote for the newspaper, I had also been writing and passing around an “underground magazine” that made juvenile fun of high-school institutions, including the hapless Courier.  The cover title for one of the issues: “Something or Other in Journalism.”  Larry Davis, my good friend and editor of the Courier, loved it.

It was a few weeks later that the newspaper faculty advisor, Mr. Pat Panella, caught one of the issues of my magazine in circulation and kicked me off the newspaper staff.

Larry and I haven’t corresponded since our college days.  Larry, maybe someday you will google “Hurricane Courier” and discover this little essay and get in touch.  Or maybe not.