Saturday’s events in Charlottesville, VA are still news as I write this. Most commentaries, appropriately, condemn the hate that fueled the protest over the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue. There probably also was hate fueling some folks who came to protest the parading of hate-based beliefs in public, although I heard reports that their leaders, mostly people of faith, emphasized the need to resist hate with love. Still, I admired them for standing up to the fascistic forces, knowing they were risking harm. Adolph’s day is done. There’ll be no revival of the brown shirts, not here, not on my watch.
The proposed removal of the statue, like
the lowering of the Confederate flag, is a final defeat to some, a final
victory to others 150 years later. But the
angst over the removal of these signs of the South is more a product of their
cultural evolution than attachments to bronze and cloth. The shifts in demography and political power
over that same century and a half are the result of the industrialization and
urbanization that followed the defeat of slavery as an economic institution.
In truth, rural people and places in
the South have been decimated by the same economic-political forces that left
people in Flint, Michigan drinking water from their contaminated river and too
poor to protest. They’re the same forces
that have depopulated the rural Midwest, Northeast, Pacific Northwest, and yes,
even rural California. These forces have
made laborers out of farmers around the globe and are now making welfare
families out of laborers with high-tech robots.
The erosion of work for working people is silently killing us, while the
triumphs of technology are trumpeted.
In the name of that invisible
reality, I brought a bucket of dirt into the sanctuary of Exeter United
Methodist Church a week ago. I’d hoped
to create an epiphany that dirt is not profane, but sacred, and that those who
work in dirt are people for whom we, as people of faith, should have concern. Then we sang John Pitney’s cheerful song “Get
Down and Get Dirty,” which goes:
Get
down and get dirty,
It’s
the name of the game.
Get
down and get dirty,
‘Cause
we’re made from the same.
Yahweh
sure got down and dirty
When
He made us from the prairie;
The
fact that we are not now dirt
Is
only temporary.”
Many of us have fear about speaking
up in public or putting our bodies on the line in the face of hate. Heather Heyer, the young woman killed by that
neo-Nazi’s raging car, was frightened of going to the protest and went
anyway. But there are other forms of
violence that need our attention, too. May the rest of us who temporarily are not
now dirt use our God-metered breaths in service to humanity and Creation.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes.
You can send her your dirt-working stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA
93247 or leave a
comment below.
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